Bringing ideas about implicit possibilities fully to consciousness helps combat an important drag on social action cultural lag. A common response to changing conditions, whether in education or other domains, is the passive reaction that arises with the failure to perceive the full scope of the new possibilities inherent in significant technical innovations. The classic instance of this reaction was the way in which early printers crafted books that looked exactly like illuminated manuscripts. Passive reactions attach a timeless necessity to arrangements that are actually historically contingent. Passive reactions by educators amount to an inert effort to employ new information technologies to make the existing educational system work better, without significant changes in the structures and functions of the system.
Educators thus act as if the given system is timeless and permanent.
This course is fraught with ironies. Applying new technologies to current procedures, expecting given arrangements to work better but to remain essentially unchanged, neither introduces transformative improvements intentionally nor ensures continuity and permanence. Instead, by inadvertence, conditions for radical departures are put in place and innovators at the margin of institutional practice begin to have palpable success. Over time, the pressure of their success forces fundamental change from within, without providing a vision of where that change should lead. The human costs can be great.