An old Jerome Bruner quote...

I was looking through a Jerome Bruner's Towards a Theory of Instruction recently and I found on page 22, a line I had highlighted some years ago...

Each generation must define afresh the the nature, direction, and aims of education to assure [that] freedom and rationality can be attained for a future generation.

Those words still ring true, but the work of refreshing education has become far more complex than Bruner could have imagined when he wrote (that book was published in the year I turned one!). Today, we have students who enter school with more experience using the dominant information technology than the teachers. Today, we have anyone and everyone able to publish with no editorial oversight. Today, we have the ability to access information in our pockets, and the ability to contact anyone in our pockets, and the ability to perform unbelievably complex math... in our pockets.

Yet, today, many teachers proceed in much the same way that previous generations did... makes me wonder how long we can expect to be relevant.