The comments that people are kindly sending are very informative and instructive. If you want to post a comment please do so, critical, contentious or whatever I won't hack them unless they are vulgar, offensive or libelous!
My colleague sent the following response to an earlier post.
' We are indeed seemingly locked into use of an ‘official’ form of language which as Richard Pring (2000) argues has changed the education beast itself, including the identities professionals have established for themselves in taming it and keeping it happy and fed. These professionals, many of whom are ‘activists’ in Sachs’ (2003) teams are terribly good at this, deriving much status from unwittingly exercising a restricted form of professionalism. They serve up laudably hot meals from a baseline of work intensification, but from a menu that is anything but a la carte and which is written in a lingua that is out of step with customer needs in a post modern age. It is right that both the diet and menu needs to change in order to properly address current world complexity and the ‘bigger picture’ in social and ecological terms. It is also right, as you point out, that networked learning communities can only flourish if the given menu is held up for increased critical scrutiny. Education needs to be re-chartered as a public good, with learning re-cast in moral, cultural and human terms. The character of healthy learning communities and sustainable eco-systems will be determined as much by moral imperatives, imagination and social responsibility as by science and servings of insular school meals past their sell-by date. Professionals, jealous to protect the status of these traditional meals will however need to think anew and work alongside different disciplines and agencies, forging new alliances that will offer a more imaginative menu.'
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