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Educators, awake! Unite! We have a better future to make.

Educators work in an extended present with unprecedented new tools and resources. We are in the midst of this expended present, which stretches fifty years or more back into the past and fifty years or more out into the future. Within this extended present, the spectrum of pedagogical possibility has thus changed.

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Digital libraries, multimedia educational resources, and flexible networks augmenting the intelligence and skill of every person: these are related and maturing technologies; with them, educators can make advanced media serve as powerful engines of equity. The libraries of the very richest schools currently represent minor academic resources compared to the aggregate resources of the digital library that become accessible at the desktop in any school, or home, as it connects to the fast-growing network of networks. Educational experiences, activated by multimedia projects address diverse learning styles and engross students of all backgrounds in cooperative, inquiry-based educational work. Wide-area networks suffused with sophisticated supports, enabling desktop video conferencing and group work in a responsive context rich with cultural content and intellectual tools, augment human capacities for the work of culture. With these new forms of educative communication, educators can overcome the traditional isolation of the classroom, bringing youthful minds actively into the laboratory, the archive, the field station, the theater, and the office. Long-standing pedagogical limitations now cease to have effect and educators must create and discover which potentialities they can make feasible for all.

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At all levels, educators must bring the digital technologies to bear on the social construction of a new educational system. Ultimately this effort requires mobilization of great historical energies. Such energies do not arise by relying solely on incremental adjustments to established procedures in stable institutions. Educators must raise hope, expectations, their sense of urgency and efficacy. They must build reform to an ever-more evident turning point. Educators must persevere through the extended present, so that one by one people see plainly in their daily circumstances unexpected results that evoke strong conviction – a new educational system is feasible and brings a spectrum of possibilities far more preferable than the old. Educators must tackle tough challenges. We must take ones on that people hold to be intractable, to be imperative, to be inspiring. These must be challenges from which people can generate unifying aspirations and moving commitments. Educators must address these challenges fully, stinting neither effort nor expense, in a sustained, dramatic disclosure of new possibilities. Such a path leads to the social construction of a better future.

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Rising as a new class, educators have the capacity to renew the progressive bond with posterity. Under the hegemony of production, educators were not a cohesive class and they proved unable to exert decisive, historic leadership. Circumstances have changed. In saying we have a better future to make, educators are saying that we now have the power to act on the level of historic leadership. Those, whose social roots leave them content to construct a consumer society, or an information society, encompass too few of the real powers that are now enabling construction of a global, knowledge society. Educators – as an open, inclusive class, as the sum of all those acting as educators – are the natural leaders in a knowledge society. Educators create, communicate, and apply knowledge, values, and skills in the flux of life. Educators knead ideas into experience. The emergent global habitat depends on the work of knowledge, the work of education. Bacon’s great observation, "knowledge is power," takes on new meaning. Once other social groups controlled education and harnessed its power of knowledge to purposes less than fully educational. Circumstances have changed. Knowledge – that is educators – we are power – that is the emergent class challenged to carry the standard of historic leadership forward, to make a better future, to advance enlightenment, to forge strong bonds with the posterity of all.

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With power, responsibilities come. Educators must address life in the large. We cannot confine our agenda to bounded particulars. Educators work across a spectrum of thinking, from purely disinterested reflection to systematic professional application. Educators act in the world through diverse means – through guiding theories, through controlling policies, through organized practices. Thinking and acting as educators, the work of educational innovation spreads before us sweeping challenges – challenges to which we can rise, not in word, but through deed. Educators must

• Renew the progressive bond with posterity, pushing the work of enlightenment to a new plane:
  • Achieving the fulfillment of basic human rights;
  • Securing for all both physical well-being and active participation in a culture of meaning;
  • Making a sustainable habitat for humanity in all parts of the globe;
  • Eliminating prejudice, poverty, despair, and disease.

• Advance principles of regulative justice as a standard by which people can exercise wise educational choice:
  • Shifting the central concern in cultural policy from limited access to full participation;
  • Replacing the long-standing politics of exclusion with a vibrant, many-sided politics of inclusion.

• Affirm the educator’s faith that no one knowingly does harm; that evil is ignorance; that it is despair, fear, resentment; and that these are remediable, not in eternity, but in achievements of progressive educational work:
  • Recognizing as the engine of education the capacity of students to pursue independent inquiry and to study autonomously;
  • De-emphasizing the traditional dominance of instruction;
  • Rekindling teaching as the work of putting productive questions, of modeling strategies of inquiry, of suggesting alternatives, of criticizing results;
  • Making the curriculum an unconstrained set of tools and resources to sustain each person’s self-directed, unbounded development.

• Unify the educational domains, bridging the distinction between research and teaching:
  • Redesigning the relation between elementary and secondary schooling and higher education with an integrated intellectual environment active at all levels;
  • Engaging all people as creative participants in the cultural enterprise.

• Adapt the structuring policies of educational institutions to enable educators to use digital tools to full pedagogical effect:
  • Managing time to promote sustained work on group projects and making space, physical and virtual, conducive to flexible intercommunication between diverse persons;
  • Shifting from motivation through competition, enforced through pervasive testing, to motivation through cooperation, guided by frequent feedback;
  • Deploying a comprehensive curriculum, comprising meaningful questions, tools of analysis and navigation, and complete presentation of cultural substance;
  • Recruiting a mesh of people engaged in educational support, prepared to give effective assistance to all students as they pursue inquiries that lead them through the resources of the culture, gripping each as a participant in the work of its creation;
  • Imparting a rationale for education that makes it the core, intrinsic purpose of the polity, a polity of democratic, cultural participation.

• Break the cycles of educational reproduction that have perpetuated debilitating distinctions among people, and create a new milieu of practice, encompassing digital learning communities, where people of many ages, interests, and achievements mix and work together in the effort of learning, sharing and helping each other, supported by complete digital libraries, by open wide-area networks, and by good tools for intellectual navigation, analysis, synthesis, and simulation, engaged in advancing the culture, in adding to truth, in upholding value, in applying skill to the work of the world.

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As educators rise to these challenges, we renew the progressive bond with posterity. We make a better future. Educators have much to do.