Two things to fear above all; complacency and smugness.

Complacency – when it appears that everything is just fine, nothing is broken thats needs fixing and until something is very broken and can be shown to be broken, we should just continue on the same path. This complacent mode is normally espoused by lazy people who don’t want to look for possible issues before they become one, cannot see any reason to doubt their own skills, methods and knowledge and have worked hard enough to get where they are now and see no point in working harder. The complacent generally are not affected by what is perceived to be broken by others and steadfastly denies the reality of what others recognize, or accept the issue as part of the cost of the system as it is. Adaptability, change nor thinking about change, even to improve things for others, are not a part of the complacent. When confronted with the notion of change the complacent react with knee jerk defensiveness of their own domain followed by an aggressive attack on the possibility of change and its rational, rather than reflection on their own, as well as personal attacks on those who do see a need for change. Now you know why we have a 20-25% drop out rate from our schools.

Smugness – when someone feels that what they are doing is above and beyond reproach, criticism or evaluation. Too much success can be a bad thing when combined with a sense of certainty that what one does is the best of a long list of alternatives and hard fought sets of knowledge, skills and attitudes. The smug see nothing of use in what others say in critique of what they do, quickly pull up straw-men as a defence and generally deride any suggestion that a better alternative is out there. Their beliefs and experiences and their claims to particular knowledge supercedes anyone else’s.

Other things to fear:

The notion that the scientific method actually is something that is done and that it works is something to fear. No greater myth exists in western culture. Whenever someone tries to think outside the empirical, rationalist dogma that is the foundation of our society since the 15th century immediately the notion of the evidence, massaged data averaged with outliers eliminated, provided by the scientific method, is proudly trotted out as a defence. Too bad the ‘method’ is retrospectively relied upon after a discovery has been made in order for the scientist to explain what he did, not what s/he had initially set out to do. Logical procedural thinking plus a great deal of serendipity and just plain old luck is how science is really done and is judiciously left on the cutting room floor. Knowledge making, epistemology, is all it is, and is founded on curiousity not procedual methodology. Little kids do it all the time without any method at all and so to do their mothers and fathers in the lab or out in the field, they play and discover.

And yet another thing to fear is the notion of a liberal education when the curriculum outcomes are tightly engineered and validated and scrutinized by high stakes testing. A liberal education ceases to exist when it appears that all aspects of an issue are explored, when numerous examples are put before a student and a defined mental rigour is inculcated, a model of inquiry for example, towards finding an acceptable (to the curriculum) end solution. This is directed inquiry, a highly formalised and not at all naturally occurring form of thought for most people. It comes from the notion in rationalism that intuitive leaps of thinking are not to be entertained, only a ‘scientific methodology’, a rational logic, is acceptable. The aquisition of knowledge and its use in applied skill, epistomology and technology, is all that matters. Practical wisdom and intuition are discarded as serendipitous, unquantifiable, and therefore an unknowable personal ‘point of view’ that cannot be averaged and generalised. What happens to people who can’t think like this in this form of liberal education? They fail, of course. Many truly bright divergent thinkers end up in the dustbins of society for just that. This is far from what the intent of a liberal education was to be. Liberal education was not intended to create a vast caste of like minded people! It was meant to liberate in every way the travels of a student through their own learning, not some idealistically prescribed curriculum for the masses with the intent of creating a complacent (see my above description), docile, accepting, quasi-democratic, capitalistic, individual with very little moral training and practically no ethical notions other than to not drink and drive, carry guns and stay out of trouble with the police. Perhaps it could be argued that many topics are quite ‘liberal’ in the scope, that may be true, but they are very illiberally dealt with in most classrooms.