It was 1912 when a certain Ernest Shackleton was looking for some men for a hazardous journey in the newspaper advertisement below. The weird guy that posted this ad made a quite unattractive offer for a seemingly not funny expedition. Yet, Shackleton managed to create tremendous interest and recruited a collection of quite eccentric gentlemen in order to sail to Antarctica and venture to new frontiers.While the story of the “Endurance Expedition” has been recapitulated in books, articles and TV dramas, I suspect there are few people that have not heard of it. In short the journey did not go as planned and turned into a disaster. Shackleton’s ship “Endurance” was trapped in drift-ice, broke under the ice-pressure and finally sank – turning the journey into a fight for life or death of all the crew men which lasted 635 days.
No question Shackleton had screwed up – big time!
While Shackleton’s inability to reach the initial objective of his expedition would have made him a loser, his extreme determination to rescue his men made him a hero.
Then, and now, his actions stand for his time – a time of heroism, a time of selfless characters, a time of achievement and a time of greatness…
Source: Over the Peak
Today, it is our time…
The time has come to organise EdCampSantiago 2013. From experience, we know that it does not require anything more but a small group of dedicated individuals who somehow do not believe what we are told by the naysayers, by the skeptics, by the media, by those who we come into contact with.
In spite of what everyone tells us, namely that we are small and insignificant, incapable of bringing about any real change, an EdCamp Santiago organiser has a deep and abiding conviction that changing the status quo not only should be done, not only can be done, but must be done.
Overcoming apathy and inertia is not everyone’s cup of tea, however.
We all have powerful reasons to invest our time, energy, and efforts in other pursuits. You and I know that, and we accept the reality of our lives, and then, like Shackleton in his day and time, make choices which define us throughout eternity.
Some of us choose to live for today, because today is a sufficiently challenging proposition. Today is a tremendous hurdle, without any doubt. Yet there is another choice we can make.
We can choose to look past today, past tomorrow, past next week, past next month, past next year, and see what we can see. What is our destiny, what is our fate?
In other words, we ask ourselves the question: “What will our future be like, if we do nothing today?”
Most educators agree (I hope), that we have moved into a time and a place, a moment in world history, when doing nothing to change the status quo is inadmissible, unacceptable and unconscionable…
History will judge us harshly if we do not join together to ensure that every child, in every country, receives an education that empowers them to be productive in the world of tomorrow, capable of meeting the as yet unnamed and unidentified challenges of the future that none of us are capable of imagining in all its dimensions…
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