I do not have a lot of experience institutionalizing educational practices,
but I have had _some_ mouthfuls of the difficulties connected with
implementing "other people's ideas" even on the basis of more or less
"direct apostolic succession." It never stops puzzling me, what happens
when the great originators are gone... like Francoise asks:
>Is there Castro-ism without Castro?
-- is there Froebelianism without Froebel? ... and so on. Offhand, (am I in
a simplistic mood today?) I would say that "following their footsteps" can
take the convergent form of orthodoxy (following _what_ the originator has
put down in writing), or it can take the divergent path of eclecticism,
where the "what" from various originators merge into the great commonplace.
...I have been thinking of this on and off this week, in places like the
bus to work... and what I have been thinking sounds now pretty much like
something that Francoise already wrote: that since "how they do it" seems,
finally, to be more important that "what" they do -- and, I think,
especially "what" they have written if we turn to it as a "book of recipes"
-- what we might need is to get some of the "wizardly" enthusiasm,
optimism, and belief in the possibility of "doing good" to spread... of
course also to create surrounding structures that allow and support
enthusiasm renewal.
So, what I started out to write was in the vein of democratization of
origination -- let "us all" become originators: we could treat the "old
guys" more as (absent) discussion partners than as lawgivers. Or would
there be some kind of ethusiasm-inspiring necessity in having "originators"
to look up to (was that what you were saying Francoise? No?)
Eva