Trends Sep2025

"When I say ‘breaking together’ I mean allowing the breakdowns in our privileges, comforts, worldviews and identities, to allow a new openness for connection with people, nature and even the eternal. We can also allow this breaking to reconnect us with aspects of who we are that have been hidden under the social conditioning we’ve experienced since birth. We have tended to cling to the products of that conditioning, in order to feel safe, respected, capable and able to have fun in ways we already know. But we’ve got to let go and begin breaking together." — Jem Bendell, Breaking Together, 2023

In his crucially important book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn describes the way in which a particular [paradigm] changes its collective mind. These infrequent major revolutions involve an academic guild’s rejection of many of the truths of an earlier era, and the adoption of new insights that were considered taboo, or preposterous, by the masters of the guild prior to the revolution. This transformation, he says, seldom involves large numbers of the existing members who change their minds. Instead, they retire or die, and younger who have adopted the new viewpoint replace them. — Ian Hedge, Baptized Inflation, 1986

Change happens ... and dialogue beats dying

In the days when philosophy was still undistinguished from common sense, a simple fellow named Heraclitus noticed something as he was crossing a familiar river.  The water was always changing even though the river remained.
On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow. DK B12

So constancy and change are not optional. The only question is how we navigate them: together in cooperation or alone in coercion. Heraclitus also summarized these alternative methods:
Though the logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. B2
Every beast is driven to pasture with a blow. B11

The opportunity of participating in the logos — the practice of dia-logos — presents us with a valuable tool to navigate the trends which reshape the paradigms of our lives without losing our confidence that, change notwithstanding, some things persist.

Family and schools seem to persist among us even as their manifestation changes with the times. Here are some initial reflections for you to consider about possible trends that may help us distinguish the river which remains from the waters which flow around our families and schools in Wichita and elsewhere. And if some of these ideas seem like crazy "fragments" from a fractured mind, don't be too alarmed. Fragments are often all we have ... and they made both Heraclitus and Solomon famous for their wisdom.

Holding hands for a safe crossing!
Bob

2025 US Schools NAEP Report Card

TRENDS Sep2025