The real role of leadership in education ... is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility.

People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.

Transforming education is not easy but the price of failure is more than we can afford, while the benefits of success are more than we can imagine.

You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?

Somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some [education] policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.

Our task is to educate our children's whole being so they can face the future and make something of it. To achieve this we need to balance education for careers with education for twenty-first century life.

We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.