A Jehovah’s Witness comes to my door and tells me that there is only one way to find peace and salvation… through Jesus Christ the Lord. Arne Duncan comes on my TV telling me that every youth in America needs to follow one set of national standards for education, to achieve economic salvation of sorts. A noted journalism professor is interviewed by NPR saying that the decline of newspapers is robbing us of the ability to all read the same editorial at the same time so we as a country can all talk about it together.

In a world of now seven billion people, with any number of religions, languages, cultures, rich veins of varied wisdom, and exploding amounts of knowledge that can not even begin to be encompassed by any learning content standard, many of us still seem to long for the unity of the one path and the power of millions marching to the same command. When the all-powerful deity, enlightened leader or best-practice expert sounds the call, everyone should have the common grounding to understand and appreciate that it is time to march and answer that call.

From the political right it is often the wisdom of a sacred text (the Bible or the Koran perhaps) and the wisdom, love and power of the one God that we should accept for our overarching guidance. But even from a more secular-focused left there is also a call for everyone to accept and follow the wisdom of the one best-practice based on the collective wisdom of the best college of highly-educated experts. That there is one best way to do things and so everyone should do things that way.

In his insightful book examining the foundations of the American education system, “What are Schools for?”, Ron Miller calls it the “cult of professionalism”. That in our complex modern society, many of us have come to believe that only highly-trained experts, particularly in the areas of education and the social sciences, have the answers to societies problems and the appropriate wisdom for the rest of us to chart our courses.

Before I am accused of anti-intellectualism, I have to make a distinction here between taking the council of experts before making ones own decision and charting our own course, versus relying on experts to chart our course for us. Given our predilection, even on the left of the political spectrum, to long for the “one best way”, our anointed experts are under pressure from all of us “cultists” to conceive and implement massive one-size-fits-all experiments in social engineering that we are too willing to follow without sufficient personal accountability. Then if things do not work out, we have someone other than ourselves to blame.

And when experts disagree as they often do, rather than accept the fact that we have to listen to many points of view and each make possibly a different decision than our neighbor, we tend to by majority rule anoint one expert over the others and then expect everyone to follow that approved set of expertise.

A historical example is the beginning of compulsory public education for all youth in Massachusetts in the 1830s. It was a well meaning goal supported by a majority of the population. But the implementation of that goal was based on the vision of one school of experts, Horace Mann and other Unitarian thinkers, who distrusted that the “common man” could chart their own course and believed that every youth in the state needed to be trained in essential Protestant (Unitarian) values for the country to continue to grow strong. Ignored was the counter expertise of the Transcendentalists, like Bronson Alcott and others, who believed that e teacher’s job was “awakening, invigorating, directing, rather than forcing a child’s faculties upon prescribed and exclusive courses of thought.” Also ignored was the expertise of Catholic religious leaders who believed it was inappropriate to force youth from Catholic families to be trained in Protestant religious dogma.

Rather than create an education system that accounted for these three conflicting threads of expertise, allowing families educational choices consistent with how each family viewed this range of expertise, Mann and his comrades (the approved experts) consciously excluded Alcott and Catholic leaders from their committees, and created a system based on the one approved “flavor” of expertise, ignoring the others.

Today I see a similar situation emerging in California and in other states with efforts to come up with universal educational standards for pre-school. Again there are competing experts. On one side are the educational experts, who currently have a popular and governmental majority behind them, who believe that all pre-school kids need to be introduced to academic work and highly structured, teacher-directed activities. On the other side are experts in child development, who believe that focus in pre-school on highly structured activities and requiring the introduction of academics is developmentally inappropriate for kids this age. Rather than trying to accommodate and reconcile the full range of expertise and promote a wide range of pre-school programs, the push seems to be to come up with one standard that all pre-schools must follow, based on the early-academic theories currently in majority ascendance.

Schooled as most of us have been in one-size-fits-all institutions, it may feel intuitive or at least the “path of least resistance” to accept the logic of implementing just one solution picked from a variety of conflicting alternatives based on some sort of majority rule reflecting either popular will or “best practice”.

But increasingly going forward, as we rediscover more and varied forms of traditional wisdom plus geometrically increase the amount and areas of new knowledge, and we continue on a politically progressive path and embrace multi-culturalism, the democratic process and the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we need to move away with our fixation with the one best way. We need to accept that there are “many paths” and that choice of the right path cannot be just a mandate from above.