Educational Leaders Need to Learn Locally First, There's No Consultant and App for That

Wait! Before you spend that money on an educational consultant or “expert” consider these thoughts first.

Wendell Berry, essayist, novelist, poet, and farmer, once wrote about a problem he experienced on his property. He had wooded hillside where he wanted to pasture livestock, but there was no water source available.

He consulted an expert, then set about clearing land of trees and grading it to create a small pond on a “narrow bench.” It successfully filled with water and seemed to resolve the problem.

That fall and winter, it was extremely wet, so the hillside collapsed into the pond, completely filling it. In spite of the expert advice, he was back to square one. He says:

“The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge. The fault was mine.”

In other words, he did not know enough about the local, and just acted, and the result was his fault alone.

He said he got “expert” advice at the project’s outset, but he forgot something he already knew to be true:

“No expert knows everything about every place, not even everything about any place. If one’s knowledge of one’s whereabouts is insufficient, if one’s judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.”

Berry hits on some very important points that educators and school leaders often forget: Experts and consultants do not know everything about your school or district no matter how many “success stories” they tell or “testimonial tales of salvation” they offer. They lack complete contextual knowledge.

They do not know your schools, your classrooms, your students, your communities, your parents, and not all of these are the same. Schools are complex places, and an “expert” or consultant bearing a formulaic solution will not always provide a solution to the problems you face.

You have no choice but work hard and get know everything locally, and that takes effort and time, sometimes months and years. And you have to be willing to learn and listen instead of acting like a physician and prescribing medicine about an illness that looks like something seen elsewhere, but is really a unique, local problem.

Once you know locally, you can then make sounder judgments regarding solutions. There is no expert that is going to be able to provide instantly successful solutions so set aside the marketing and sales hype from the thunderous consultant crowd, and listen and learn locally perpetually.

This is the hard work of education; no shortcuts allowed.

Learn locally first as much as possible before calling in the experts, and once you have called them in, know your schools, your districts, your people and your community. Then you will have the knowledge to make sound judgments about solutions and their “expert” advice.