The Best School Leaders Look Down

The thing that both constricts and preserves humanity is the limits of the human imagination. The human imagination cannot perceive or create that which does not exist; it’s beyond its scope and capability. We can only build upon that which we already have, and use our intelligence to react to evolutionary threats and extinction. We have to have a problem before we can fashion a solution. We cannot eradicate illness and disease not because we do not have the resources or the intelligence but because we can’t imagine that which we will need to eradicate.

In education we cannot imagine that which will happen in the future, how children will evolve, how learning will grow, what the workplace will look like. We talk about creating learners, thinkers, leaders of tomorrow, but by the time tomorrow is here those same leaders will belong to yesterday. We may have many powers but we cannot imagine a future we have not seen! However, what we can do is create the ‘now’. We can be aware of the education around us, of learning, of governmental developments, and this will place us at the forefront of tackling what others have uncovered. However, there exists in good leadership teams and good school leaders the power to innovate by being brave enough to live in the now.

There is a vast landscape of undulating rock before us, it’s incomprehensibly big and all schools and their leaders are carving through the field of rock; all taking different routes, making different decisions and laying tracks as they go. Some go back on themselves, some do the worst thing of all in standing stationary, waiting to follow another’s path. And then there are the schools that see the unchartered, uncut rock as possibility and have the bravery, belief and determination to carve through it; creating their own direction. There are some paths they have to cut, some track they have to lay, but they see the expanse of rock around them waiting to be cut and reveal new destinations. The rock will never be depleted, there is no final destination, no out, no edge, because education is eternal, but in each generation there’s the possibility of exploration.

There’s track behind us and there will be track after us but right now there’s the opportunity to cut our own path and lay our own track, knowing that we are a part of now.