Who are our Heroes?

A colleague from Arizona, recently sent me a copy of an interview with Roland Barth. Although Barth's work is no stranger to QHST he challenges us with an interesting task in this excerpted section.

THe following is excerpted from :

In search of heroes: Give educators a place on the pedestal

Interview with Roland Barth

By Dennis Sparks

Journal of Staff Development, Winter 2002 (Vol. 23, No. 1)

Trust us as professionals

JSD: Here’s what you wrote regarding the assumptions of some school reformers: "Behind the models, the rubrics, the principles, the analyses of the problems, and the prescriptions for improving them was a very chilling assumption: Schools are not capable of improving themselves. ... Sadly, our profession seems neither to trust nor to rely on the accumulated wisdom of its own practitioners."

Barth: Educators read about the heroes and heroines in other fields — the business heroes, the military heroes, the sports heroes — but where are the Katherine Grahams, the Colin Powells, the Lance Armstrongs in our field? They’re out there, but we don’t have access to the exemplars in our field, and we don’t accord them the same place on the pedestal. Our profession enjoys neither the visibility nor the legitimacy of others. But if we want others to take us seriously, it’s time we begin to take seriously our heroes, ourselves, and the important work we do.