Wow! Going on four decades into the career, and why am I not hearing, from novice and experienced teachers, including the university sage, more about constructivism and its place in education at the beginning of the 21st Century? If educators cannot find their way into that, there is little hope they will ever go beyond.  Too many ideals at the root of progressive education are at risk of never making it inside the grid of educational thought and practice.  Too much already has fallen away like electrons in unstable orbits. And the rhetoric associated with noble thinking, no matter how intellectually or socially grounded in reason, becomes the target of ridicule.  A good corporate model, however, has a better chance of gaining traction than the lucid ideas of people like Vygotsky, Kozol, Sizer, Dewey, Gardner, Darling-Hammond, Steiner, and the rest of the educational elite, who actually knew/know what they were/are talking about.


I invite those of you interested in waging a serious dialogue about next generation education to contribute comments to "Inside the Educational Grid."