I can't tell you how many times I've been in a situation where a current product or philosophy in education has been castigated and an evolution of it has been proposed to replace it. There is a lot of commotion currently about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) with demonstrates this tension well, but there are others that play out on stages much small (including my own building). Scientific history isn't without its faults, but in the end it does one thing very well - acknowledge the contributions of those who have come before.
Isaac Newton is credited with saying "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Newton didn't disparage Aristotle or Galileo for their flawed versions of relativity, as Einstein didn't for Newton's flawed versions of relativity or gravity, instead they acknowledged that by contributing to the collective knowledge they have enable those that would come after to achieve even more. This is not the prevailing practice in education today.
What I see in education instead is that were are sitting at product or policy M and some people that want to move to N don't do so by looking at M and recognizing that M represents previous attempts at making things better, but by only focus on M's shortcomings. In 10 years there will probably be something in the place of CCSS that will be just as controversial. Especially since the argument over CCSS is a red herring for what is wrong with education today - namely it's commercialization. Do we really think that there exists a "perfect" set of standards and that if we just find it education in this country will be fine? Foolishness. Public education today is more the the United States Postal Service - stuck in a place with so many competing mandates that it is impossible to fulfill them all and therefore always subject to condemnation along one facet or another.
What if we instead took the approach that progress is what is truly important and that what has come before were people's best attempts to improve the condition in what that decision was made? Just as evolution keeps successful organisms around to breed and grow more complex to fill environmental niches, educational evolution should drive policy and philosophy toward more successful solutions at the small scale. If I could push the analogy further, there have been times when nature has gotten a jolt to drive evolution in ways that are meaningful at the time (after all, would there be humans without the extinction of the dinosaurs?), therefore the larger system will need jolts from time to time from research or government to make sure progress is being made in ways that are palatable and just.
So change will come, things we "know" now about teaching and learning will be shown to be wrong. Just remember that many of the people coming before who had those thoughts were really trying hard and without them we probably wouldn't be where we are today.
