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As I was changing offices this summer, I found a fist-sized lump of light-grey concrete flecked with paint.
The concrete was still packed in the cardboard box in which it had arrived on my desk at Tofield School 21 years ago. The box bore my name and assorted German postage stamps. The chunk, wrapped in the front page of the November 13, 1989,
International Herald Tribune, was a small piece of the Berlin Wall.
Accompanying the artifact was a scrawled note from a university friend of mine, who happened to be in Berlin that November. He had heard reports that East and West Germans were breaching the Berlin Wall so he rounded up a couple of guys who were staying at the same pension off the Ku’damm and headed to the Brandenburg Gate.
The three of them saw this as a wonderful opportunity to get drunk and possibly shot at and, above all, to be there when history was made. When they arrived, a crowd of people armed with hammers, wrecking bars and chisels were already hacking away at the structure while others balanced precariously on top of the wall. My friend grabbed a chunk of the debris to pass on to me as a souvenir. He closed his note with the line, “Sorry you missed the revolution!”
I am disappointed I wasn’t in Berlin in 1989, but I can claim to have participated in a somewhat different revolution. It seems to me that revolutions come in two forms—those that are singular dramatic events that are the traditional stuff of history books, and those that are deeper, structural revolutions that take place around us. The latter sometime escape our immediate conscious attention but succeed in changing forever the way we live and perceive the world. To my mind, the best example of this is the phenomenal change that has occurred in the status of women.
Driven by economic and historical forces, and technologies and medical advancements like the birth control pill, women have achieved a degree of social equality with men that is unprecedented in western civilization and that occurred within a single lifespan. Similarly, we have seen (for the most part) the elimination of slavery and institutionalized discrimination on the basis of race and, more recently, the waning of discrimination based on gender identity.
In each case, public education has contributed to these social revolutions as both a locus and an agent of change. But education, too, has undergone revolutionary change. For example, the notion of inclusive education and the expectation that all children should eventually complete secondary school is revolutionary and unprecedented. In Alberta, the level of educational attainment has steadily increased so that now more than 90 per cent of Albertans between the ages of 25 and 34 have at least completed high school—a historical high. Our public education system is educating a larger proportion of the population to a higher standard than ever before.
So as we think about “transformative change” in education and the escalating demands made of teachers and schools, it is good for our morale, perspective and sanity to look at where we have been. Yes, we have much to do, but we and those who have gone before us have done much already. We have not missed the revolution.
I welcome your comments—contact me at dennis.theobald@ata.ab.ca.
