I have been discussing the right to be right on this blog for a long time. Since the beginning really.

It’s come up again with a friend in the process of finishing her PhD. Genius Girl and blessed with an honest lucidity of expression.

She is hitting the wall in her study of education. How do we fix the education of young people in America? It’s broken, and we know how to fix it. But we don’t know how to start putting the fix into place.

I talked with her some about the old tropes of this aged blog. Who has the right to be right? Who get to bar the gates to the engine of power, and most importantly, the engine of change?

I think I’ve learned a couple things in the nearly ten years since I started this blog. I hope so. And I think I’ve been looking at that question all the wrong way.

Here’s the facts:”

We are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable Right to be Right.

And in America, we get to be right. We get to pick whatever we want to do, with a limited book of restrictions. Therefore, I have the right to be right.

And I have the right to be wrong.

But that wasn’t really what the Right to be Right is all about. The question implies that someone else has to grant one the right. And what would that granting consist of?

It would be an agreement. “Oh! yes! That’s right!”

If we are talking about buy-in, or agreement, or FOLLOWERS…well…that’s a whole other thing altogether.

It’s really being a leader, then.

Who gave Steve Jobs the right to be right? Nobody. He took it, and he was proved right by getting followers, getting customers.

Who gave Hitler or Ghandi the right to be right? One was far more right than the other. One was far more destructive. But their ability to enact their ideas about what was right was granted them by their followers.

So the right to be right has nothing to do with the ‘correctness’ of an idea.

Don’t we cube-dwellers know that all too well.

it has to do with whether it has popular appeal.

Now we are back to the education system. GirlGenius-PhD-to-be tells me that all the answers have long ago been discovered about how to fix what’s broken. They are safely stored in journals in libraries.

What we don’t have is a machine to get those fixes to the students that need them.

That’s the question:

one hand holds the problem, and all it’s parts

the other hand hold the fix, and all it’s details

How do they meet?

It might be called Middleware. What hardware or software or widget will get those two together?

..I dont’ think that widget is well understood. I have ideas. But I’m not so good at getting popular appeal.

We’ve hit the wall as a culture. We don’t know how to do this part. Not really well.

All the answers lie in plain view.

Across a deep chasm. Where are the bridge builders?