We Saved the Best for You: Letters of Hope, Wisdom, and Imagination to 21st Century Educators

The authors will explore a composite vision that implores the present and future generation of educators to see and act beyond the nightmarish present of national debt, dehumanization, perpetual war, benchmarks, racing to the top, resegregation, wholesale environmental destruction, homophobia , homogeneity, loss of privacy, the vanishing middle class, bullying, violence, the disease of cynicism, and increasing " stasis and the flatness of ordinary life (Greene, 1988, p. 123) resulting from standardization and "official knowledge" (Apple, 1993) and what the artist/scientist Bob Miller calls "hardening of the categories" (in Lake, 2010, p.15). We have subconsciously or conscientiously sent a message to the young that the collective culture of past was "better" and you “should have been there" . We owe this vision of what can be to our students, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.