As educators adapt work to empower the student, they create settings in which Students work primarily in small collaborative groups on challenging projects that take a significant period of time to complete and cut across normal disciplinary boundaries. Students have access to digital representations of nearly unlimited sources and data documents, images, recordings, videos, maps, statistics, artifacts, monuments, and so on. Students can make effective use of digital tools that enable them to conduct sophisticated analyses, syntheses, and simulations with the result that the work students can perform is much closer in scope and quality to that of advanced scholars. The transformation of education taking place is not a function of increased access to information. It is a function of increased participation in intellectual work in advancing knowledge, in applying skill, in exercising judgment.
Participants create, adopt, and maintain their standards.
They do not have their standards imposed by external authority. The faith in human nature, which educators should profess with pride and vigor, is the faith that participants in the creative work of culture open to all, all naturally adopt its empowering discipline and work through it to make a better future, further strengthening the progressive bond with posterity.