I recently read all of the posts on the Harvard Educational Review’s “Voice in Education Blog,” sat for a quiet hour and pondered. What would Curly say about this?
Curly? You remember the Jack Palance character in “City Slickers” who gave his cowboy’s advice to Billy Crystal regarding the secret of life. That was Curly. Billy and his fellow urbanites tried to use a dude ranch experience to “…take the knots out of their ropes.” Alone with Billy on the cattle drive, Curly held up one gloved-finger and said that this one finger is “the secret to life.” Billy, of course, asked what that one finger represented and Curly elucidated, “That’s what you have to figure out and when you do nothing else will…” ever make a difference.
Just in case you have forgotten Curly’s secret of life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1uOqRb0HU
A reference to Curly may cause a professional reader to stop at this point. But that would be a mistake; as much of a mistake as thinking that public education can continue to listen to its many-headed and oppositionally-opinioned commentators and from their well-intended and well-educated words find its educational secrets for a successful future. Or, that public education can find its future without establishing its “secret of life.”
It is not my purpose to propose the text of that secret, though I already know what my one finger represents. It is for states and school districts collectively to do this essential and future-altering work. Until meaning of this “one finger” approach is completed, we will remain not cattle but cats running before the city slickers. For when a local school district’s charge is to implement all of the current federal and state mandates plus all of the legislated statutes that remain “blue” in each state’s department of public education and move this broad implementation to the new fiats of accountability, it is tempting to join Curly on his next cattle drive and hum along to Ghost Riders in the Sky. In the ill-defined work today’s educational leadership, we are as inept and disoriented and ill-equipped for the successful leadership of public education as Billy Crystal was to become a cowboy.
If you have done the Curly work and know the secret to your educational work and leadership, hold up your finger when you read the next blog and attend your next workshop or listen to the next exhorting politician cum educational critic or taxpayer group wanting more for less. If their words do not comport with your #1, ride on and leave those words where they belong in the dust behind you as you carry on in the direction of your pointed finger.