Earlier this week, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, struck a chord with me that resonated beyond politics. His speech laid bare the realities of the moment we are living in and articulated a shared truth many of us feel but struggle to name.

One line in particular stayed with me:

“Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

In education, this lands deeply.

We are fortunate to work in a profession built on legacy. Most of us carry powerful memories of school, inspiring teachers, friendships, athletics, performances, and moments of belonging. Education is one of the few professions we experience first as children and later as adults, which gives it a deep emotional pull. Looking back often fills us with warmth, pride, and a sense of continuity.

But while the rearview mirror is always visible, it cannot be the lens through which we lead.

In many schools, phrases like “When I was a student here,” “We have always done it this way,” or “When I started teaching here” echo through the halls. These reflections are well intended. They help ground us. But if we are not careful, they can quietly anchor us to a version of schooling that no longer really fits our shared reality.

That shift became clear to me recently in an unexpected way, when we unboxed a new Google TV at home.

There was no paper manual. Not even a QR code.

We turned it on, and the instructions simply appeared on the screen.

I immediately thought of my father, who loved nothing more than reading a manual cover to cover before touching a button. That was how things worked in his time. You learned the system first, then you used it.

My teenage son, on the other hand, did not look for instructions at all. He experimented. He pushed buttons. He figured it out. Within minutes, everything was up and running.

It struck me that this moment reflected a much bigger shift, not just in technology, but in how we learn and operate in the world.

We have quietly moved through three distinct eras:

First we had an era of certainty (the paper manual) where everything you needed to know was static and contained. Success came from following steps correctly.

Next, and even now to an extent, is an era of access (the QR Code) where the answers were not in the box, but they were available if you knew where to look.

Now we are entering an era of synthesis (search engines and AI) where there is no manual. You are expected to experiment, troubleshoot, evaluate, and synthesize information in real time.

This is the world our students are growing up in.

And yet, in schools, we sometimes long for the comfort of the first era. A time when learning felt predictable. When outcomes seemed guaranteed. When there was comfort in knowing the right steps.

That nostalgia is understandable. It feels safe. Familiar. Reassuring.

But as Carney’s speech laid bare, the way of the world continues to evolve.

This realization sits at the heart of my doctoral work on artificial intelligence and change leadership. AI does not come with instructions. It responds to intent, judgment, and iteration.

And so does the world our students are entering.

Leading in this moment means acknowledging a hard truth. We cannot lead today’s schools based on the world we wish still existed.

While our traditions ground us, leading exclusively through the rearview mirror can be limiting. To truly serve our students, we must lead for the world they are entering, not the one we remember.

This does not mean discarding our past.

When you set up a Google TV, you still need taste, judgment, and purpose to decide what to watch. In the same way, schools still need strong values, deep relationships, intellectual rigor, and a commitment to care.

But our role as leaders and educators has changed.

Our job is not to write better manuals. It is to develop better troubleshooters grounded in our investment in inquiry learning, relationship building, high expectations, the fostering of curiosity, and treating it all as our operating system, not a set of fixed instructions. We are in an era of synthesis, adaptability, and sense-making.

Nostalgia is a beautiful place to visit.
But it is not a strategy to lead from.

We honor the past not by following the old manual, but by using its values to help our students write the new one in real time.

In practice with the themes of ‘Rewiring Education,’ this post was developed in collaboration with AI to refine its structure and clarity for a digital audience. VW van photo credit: Author