BP1_Welcome to My Blog

If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift of the coming human hell.
— C. Wright Mills

I began using quotations to set the tone for my posts... searching... on July 1, 2009. At the end of that post I mentioned that we'd just logged our 80,000th page view (in three months of tracking). Not bad for a little high school blog, eh?

Since then, we've had almost 600,000 additional page views and I've become a solid believer in the power of blogs. But this one? It seems as if I have a choice; and it's the usual one: (a) Do your job, don't rock the boat, and collect your pay, degree, etc. Or (b) Follow C. Wright Mills' advice.

Education is broken. We don't need Sir Ken to tell us that. The best way to fix a broken system is to step outside of it. We need distance and perspective to see to the root of the problems. We need leaps of imagination to discover potential solutions. We need flexibility and adaptability to implement necessary changes. And as Buckminster Fuller wrote in Critical Path, we need the courage to do what we be believe is right:

The invisible tensive straws that can save us are those of individual human integrities—in daring to steer the individual’s course only by truth, strange as the realized truth may often seem—wherever and whenever the truths are evidenced to the individual—wherever they may lead, unfamiliar as the way may be.

I have no desire to embody controversy but I do intend to specify and confront real issues. A series of open letters will be posted in addition to the class assignments (see right sidebar). I believe the folks at Full Sail care about the state of education and no disrespect is intended by making my case in a public forum but I have some very serious concerns. What I would like is a response that doesn't amount to, "That's just the way it is."

Note: Links in my posts often point to Wikipedia because, as I tell my students, it's a good place to begin a search. (But a terrible place to end one.)


Credits: Photo by Christopher Canel. Apropos comic by Dan Piraro.