To educate educators! But the first ones must educate themselves! And for these I write. Nietzsche, 1875 [Note 01]

¶1

Educators, awake! Unite! We have a better future to make! We have new power and new influence, sufficient to make that future better.

¶2

Educators, we are many. We are diverse. We are everywhere. We are teachers. We are pupils and students. We are parents and professors. We are scientists, researchers, and technicians. We are writers, journalists, editors. We are physicians and lawyers. We are designers, artists, musicians. We are philanthropists, community organizers, civic leaders. We are tutors, trainers, counselors, conciliators, and shrinks. We are scholars, critics, curators, and clergy. We are everyone and anyone – anyone nurturing knowledge, values, and skills, putting them to work in the conduct of life.

¶3

Now, grasping new tools, we can make our work more progressive, more powerful. Our time to lead is here. We work in history. There, powerful forces meet to set past pedagogical limits aside. What should we do with our new possibilities?

¶4

Our work is transformational. Our reach is now global. We must renew our progressive bond with posterity. The peoples of the twenty-first century must instigate difficult, improving principles in the face of unprecedented complexities and pressures. The scale of human action becomes immense, at once ominous and luminous. Serious missteps are hard to avoid and may extinguish the humane adventure. Astute answers to deep dilemmas on a global scale can secure great, radiant hopes.

¶5

Educators must cease to tinker at the fringe of practice. Educators need to stretch their work to the horizons of the future. Universal education is an arduous aim; compulsory schooling supplies but a simulacrum of it. We have at our avail social energies sufficient to fill this shell with substance. We dispose historic forces that can advance the work of enlightenment toward further fulfillment. Educators must come to know these energies and forces; we must put them to pervasive, relentless employ. And coming to know the power of digital communications, we must discover and invent ways to use all our resources, the new with the old, to help posterity achieve more coherent, momentous measures of worth.

¶6

Educators, to make a better future, we must move humanity; we must disarm anxieties and rouse intents. For these purposes, let us join together. Let us work to lead. "The height charms us, the steps to it do not. With the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain." [Note 02] Let us climb!