No thanks. I choose to do nothing.

Here are some things I will probably never understand:

• Interpretive dance.
• Xenophobia.
• Why rhythmic gymnastics, curling, and men’s field hockey are Olympic sports but baseball is not.
• The continuing appeal of I Can Has Cheezburger.
• This.
• School administrators who continue to merely tweak the status quo and somehow think that they and their school organizations are doing just fine.

It’s not like by now principals and superintendents don’t know that the world has changed. There can’t be more than a handful of school leaders that somehow have missed every single conference where a featured speaker was a Will Richardson / David Warlick / Alan November / Ian Jukes type, right? Even those non-technology, mainstream leadership conferences like AASA, NASSP, NAESP, and ASCD are beginning to invite us techie folks to speak.


Okay, so maybe we’re not persuasive enough. That’s fine. But it’s one thing to ignore the presenter on the stage. It’s another to ignore the evidence before their own eyes. All administrators have to do is LOOK AROUND and they can see the changes in their students. In society at large. In the many institutions that are dying in the face of these transformative technologies.

There’s a concept in the law known as willful blindness. The idea is that one deliberately takes steps to avoid seeing what’s right in one’s face. To how many of our school principals and superintendents does this concept apply? What can we do to help (make) them SEE?

“Hi. I know the world has changed. There is compelling evidence staring me in the face as an administrator that business as usual just isn’t going to suffice in this new digital, global society. Not if we are to prepare students for the next half century rather than the last. But you know what? No thanks. I choose to do nothing.“

Nope. I’ll probably never understand that one…

Image credit:see no evil