I believe that you’re putting the cart before the horse (might as well stick to our VT horse metaphors).

Wilson, though, would want to know, in fact he assails in his book, that we first determine the world we want to live in–a departmentalized/compartmentalized one or one in which cooperation and collaboration work in a creative process?

We are in the age of “the business of education,” not the age of “knowledge,” or as I’ve called it recently, given our wars and our economy, The Age of Education’s Failure. But we don’t seem to be moving off this hard rock. We have to hopefully excite people about a dialog that is focused on who we want to be tomorrow. Once this happens, we can start asking the question, in education, about how we’re going to get there.

I don’t have much optimism in the Obama education initiatives, believing that in this world they’re a bit like a fish out of water. I wrote about it here: http://hectorvila.com/2009/02/03/hopeonatightrope/

Obama’s greatest challenge, I think, is to change American’s perception of themselves, which in turn will take education. But it has to be less about term papers and essays and end game products, as you say, and more about what are we doing, I think, and why. Of course, the BS is so high that everything and anything I say is totally muffled and buried. So I’m left to be increasingly pessimistic.