We have become a nation of “followers.” We follow each other on Twitter and FaceBook. We follow our “mandates” from our schools, our districts, our state, and our government. We follow what our favorite non-profits are expounding. We follow what our unions tell us is right and important. We follow our political affiliations and we follow what our real-life friends follow sometimes without even checking out what they are following. My question today to me and to you, my gentle reader is – who, what, and why are we following and should we stop following and start leading – again?

I watched an horrific news show today on Fox News about the slaughter of innocent Nigerians in the town of Doro Baga by the Islamic radical group Boko Haram. I have been hearing rumors of this slaughter since January 7th, coincidentally the same date as the murder of Charlie Hebdo and his staff in Paris. I have been looking at the news, at FaceBook posts, Twitter posts and blog posts for news about the Nigerian catastrophe. There was very little out there and some of the initial postings were later removed. It made me think the story was a hoax. But now there is what looks like photographic evidence that truly this loss of perhaps 2,000 innocent lives did happen after all. Why do I have to wait a week and a day and hear the report from Fox News? And why is there not a huge outcry from all those I “follow” against this atrocity? Are we all sitting back and waiting for our favorite FaceBook group to denounce the act, or a preferred politician to make a statement, or our chosen non-profits to issue a statement, or a twitter storm we can join to protest this event? Why are we not individually speaking out? What are we all waiting for? Why are we not leading the charge to right this terrible evil in some way? Where is the justice? There is no poetry here.

So, I ask all of you to examine just what you are following and what you are waiting for before you will take a step up and speak out against the wrongs all around us? We may not be able to stop the evil forces bent on overtaking a nation, but we can stop the forces bent on taking a free and excellent public education system away from our children and perverting it into a for-profit money making machine for the Education Monsters.

I believe we have to confront the lie that says the organizations we are following are in control of the narrative and in control of the war against the education reformers. I believe we all need to go rogue and speak out for what we believe is right. This is the kind of “mandate from our hearts” that I was speaking about in my last blog post. The huge lie is that organizations will help the children – unions – non-profits – Facebook groups – it is all a lie because organizations get corrupted by power and money and ego issues. We have to be rogues and relentless and remain unbought. This is our hardest endeavor. We need to become leaders once again and not just followers.

Revised 1/15/2015 to correct the village name.

We are being mandated to death. A mandate is an official order, a commission to do something, a law. I am tired of official orders and of commissions and of the law. I need the mandate paradigm to be shifted now.

I am sitting in front of a blank screen on this Sunday evening – almost Monday morning – just thinking about the mandates we educators are under. We have mandates from our school, our departments, our district, our state, and, yes, from the government. We have mandates to test our young children and mandates to write up goals on our own evaluations based on those tests. We have mandates to enter data every month, every week, every day, and every period of every day. We have mandates to meet in data teams to manipulate and further extrapolate more data from the data. We educators are being mandated to death.

Then I began thinking about the mandates our children are under. They are mandated to attend school and to pursue an education. They are mandated to take evaluative and standardized tests. Then they are mandated to sit in review sessions if they do not pass the tests. They are mandated to practice taking tests so that they can pass the end of the year mandated standardized test. They are mandated to be obedient and compliant and they are mandated to dress and act according to school, district, state, and federal codes. They are mandated to sit in meetings if they do not pass the tests. They are mandated to be college and career ready. And they are mandated to take tests to see if they are college and career ready before, during, and after they are in college or on a career path. Our students are being mandated to death.

I remember when the new mandate paradigm first appeared in my school. I was told in no uncertain terms that our reading/writing program could no longer exist and that we had to adopt a comprehensive school curriculum where all grades and all subjects would all be doing the same thing at the same time according to the new curriculum. This was my first mandate and it broke my heart because it destroyed years of successful creative and innovative curricular work. Each year since, the mandate paradigm has gotten more and more onerous and unmanageable. It has a life of its own and, little by little, has sucked all the joy out of teaching and learning. Both teachers and learners are being hammered into empty mandated shells that have no resemblance to what we were meant to be.

Tonight I listened to the radio show The War Report on Public Education hosted by Dr. James Avington Miller Jr., co-hosted by Anthony Cody with special guest Dr. Yong Zhao. It was a great show talking about the authoritarian management in our schools and the lack of innovation and creativity. At one point Dr. Zhao mentioned that the mandates we are under should be the “mandates of the heart.” That one phrase stuck a deep cord in my own heart and has been pulling at me all night. After the show, I posted on Twitter and FaceBook that I want my students and grand children to have mandates from their own hearts not mandates from the ed monsters. Because that is what these pushers of mandates have become – they have become educational monsters destroying the very love of learning in our children and the love of teaching in our teachers.

If I am teaching according to a mandate from my own heart, I am teaching with love and compassion, excellence and creativity. If students are learning according to a mandate from their own heart, they are learning with joy and spontaneity, comprehensiveness and inquiry. Do we still need guidelines and common goals? Yes. Do we still need rules and discipline? Yes. But those mandates must take second stage to the primary goal of education – teaching in such a way that each and every student is afforded an education that will enable that student to be a life long learner and a productive and happy member of society. And if we follow the mandates of our hearts first – both teacher and student will be filled with the joy that only comes from true teaching and true learning. As Aristotle taught almost 2400 years ago, “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” So, I think it is time that we act first and foremost by being true to the mandates of and from our hearts before the mandates of the ed monsters finally destroy us all.