In our quest to prepare our students for their future and not our past there is a great deal of discussion and concern about being college and career ready.  The latest employment figures reveal a growing chasm between those who make up the unemployed and those who are gainfully employed, with a far greater percentage of those without jobs coming from the category without a college degree.

The response coming from a chorus of elected officials, so called educational reformers, and laypeople around the country proclaims the need to raise standards, extend the school day, the school year, and eliminate the underperforming teachers and schools that fail to effectively educate our children.  Will this make students ready for the future?  Many in contemporary society sense the tumult that has accompanied our march into the 21^st century; the transformative forces that have been well underway since the new millennium began back in 2000 grow exponentially every year.

What then are the dispositions and/or habits of mind that will allow our students to be ready for the future? Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future is a great place to begin.

One of the essential questions that I find compelling in terms of educating our students now and in the future is, “how do we promote a discerning disposition towards the over abundance of choice?

Along with an exponential growth of our capacity to drill down to a microscopic level, produce all manner of stuff to levels unimaginable, to choose among a world filled with countless ideas, theories, and provocations we must convey the need to be deliberate with our intentions.  Rendering judgment and acquiring the capacity to decide what is best in a given situation is as old as the dawn of time.  What is new and novel is the speed and volume of decisions that we are asked to make.  Distortions and hyperbole abound in this climate of faster and more.

Finding peace and solitude can easily give way to a false notion where having more, doing more, and being more efficient could be seen as being better.

What is the downside of the ever-increasing universe of things to consider as educators and learners?  At what point are we doing our children a disservice by causing the schoolhouse to become a place for the oversaturation of tasks, demands, and scripts for success according the experts outside a local learning community?  As an aspiring administrator I once learned about the importance of “not growing too many tomato plants.”  The idea is a simple one; with too much to tend, your garden will be overrun with weeds.  So it is that the tending of our garden of learning may be adversely affected by the impulse to add and not subtract from the agenda for success.