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At the level of higher education, a blatant challenge was presented recently by the publication of Hacker and Dreifus' Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids and What We Can Do about it. The challenge was picked up almost immediately by the publication of Palmer and Zajonc's The Heart of Higher Education, A Call to Renewal -- Transforming the Academy through Collegial Conversations. The latter book urges the re-introduction of contemplation to the academy. The authors remind us that we evolve slowly into a new paradigm.

They suggest that "By lovingly holding the questions themselves, contemplating them well, we gradually, without noticing it, develop faculties of insight that allow us to see and to live the answers" (p. 105). A sense of connectivity will be vital to the new paradigm -- connecting with the diversity that is our world today and connecting with the great thinkers of all time and applying their musings to high-tech living. The benefaction of givers like Bill and Melinda Gates, whose latest venture (The New York Times, December 5, 2010) proposes the videotaping of teachers in their interaction with students as a means to better determine their suitability to this becoming process, will empower its realization.

One is reminded of the "French Quarter" in the early years of education -- teachers and students living together, mentoring one another, and discovering the world anew. The prospect excites this writer -- the unrelenting flux of recent years may have ushered in a resilient residue of renewed purpose.