A Pivotal Moment for U.S. and Public Schools? (Part 2)
Do individuals like you and me know for sure at the time something occurred that it was momentous, a historic turning point in the flow of events and individual lives. Probably not.
After all, it is only in retrospect–after the future becomes the present–that people look back at prior events and then can pinpoint something that occurred as pivotal. Surely, in 1859 when John Brown attacked the U.S. armory at Harper’s Ferry (VA) to get weapons to lead a slave rebellion, neither he nor most Americans knew that his actions (for which he was put to death) became instrumental in launching the Civil War over a year later.
Some other examples of not knowing when an event is a turning point:
When silversmith Paul Revere set out on his midnight ride on April 18, 1775 to alert militias in Lexington and Concord that British regulars were marching toward them to destroy stockpiled munitions, he surely did not know that the next morning’s events would be the beginning of the end of the 13 British colonies with a Declaration of Independence the following year and a war that lasted until 1783 leading to the formation of the United States of America.
The initial people infected with the coronavirus in Wuhan, China in late-2019 did not know that authorities would lockdown the city of 11 million as Covid-19 CONTINUE READING: A Pivotal Moment for U.S. and Public Schools? (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
