Over the past 25 years or so, there have been tremendous forces pushing, arguing, and pleading for change across the entire continuum of education. What has and continues to emerge at a seemingly ever-increasing pace is not an overarching model or even a singular and coherent description of what education should be. There is, however, much common ground where values and ideals are shared across historically disparate disciplines and interests. These shared values have been articulated and advocated by thinkers and practitioners such as Paulo Freire, Lev Vygotski, Maria Montessori, Carl Rogers, Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, Jerome Bruner, John Dewey, among many others. These shared values are found in initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and 21st Century Skills. What these different perspectives all share is a belief in the potential growth in performance of learners if new roles are assumed by teachers and learners with each placing emphasis on processes which differ from those commonly and traditionally used in the past.

The implication of these new roles and directions yields a much-transformed view of educational practices and attitudes. The table which follows captures the major dimensions of education and shows both current or traditional practice and attitudes as well as transformed practices and attitudes. Because transformation is more than just a simple change, and change is typically something that human beings resist, there are some common affective or emotional responses to those changes. These are likewise available in the table.

The final aspects of the table are seen in the right-most column: Uncovering Cultural Assumptions and Tendencies, and Westerns Cultural Tendencies. The first of these, "Uncovering Assumptions" is a list of thought-provoking questions, designed to poke and prod buried or unconscious assumptions. None of these have right or wrong answers; the point is that whatever your answer, when you respond, you’re doing so on the basis of a pre-conceived notion or value. Assumptions are like habits; breaking them or changing them requires first becoming aware of them. The second part of this column, "Western Cultural Tendencies" is a snapshot of some of the strongest traditions or cultural perspectives for each of the dimensions in the table. These four strains are by no means the only strains, nor even close to being universal or universally accepted in socio-cultural studies; these strains were simply selected because they 1) tend to be well-documented, 2) were major enough to be traceable across a broad sample of primary and secondary sources through to today, 3) are still in use in western culture, appearing in myriad manifestations across our daily landscape — from advertising campaigns to political speeches — and are therefore familiar to a majority of us, and 4) provide utility as a convenient and accessible lens for an examination of some of the forces in play that tend to situate us firmly in these dimensions of education. While these tendencies are strong, they are not without tension, even within a cultural strain. There is no single greek, roman, jewish, christian, islamic, or scientific perspective. But there are major tendencies that stand not only as influential but also as indicative of western (very loosely defined as European and American) approaches to and assumptions about education.

A final word: society and culture not only dictate who we are (how we see and define ourselves and our value) to a very great degree, but underlie some of our most basic assumptions about the world around us. We have learned to see and conceive of ourselves, others, the world, values, morals, practices, etc., on the basis of our society and culture. Getting to the point where we become aware of some of those assumptions and thus able to either leverage them for greater success (however you choose to define it) or begin to step beyond them to achieve that success is a tremendous challenge, and likely to prove nearly as uncomfortable as making the shift from "what is" to "what can be".