This is the address I made to a forum on the Review of Special Education. The first story is an old legend of the Sioux Nation; the continuation is my own, inspired by the first.

The Creator gathered all of Creation and said, “I want to hide something from the humans until they are ready for it. It is the realisation that they create their own reality.”

The eagle said, “Give it to me, I will take it to the moon.”

The Creator said, “No. One day they will go there and find it.”

The salmon said, “I will bury it at the bottom of the ocean.”

“No. They will go there too.”

The buffalo said, “I will bury it on the Great Plains.”

The Creator said, “They will cut into the skin of the Earth and find it even there.”

Then Grandmother Mole, who lives in the breast of Mother Earth and who has no physical eyes but sees with spiritual eyes, said, “Put it inside of them.”

And the Creator said, “It is done.”

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And the  story continues:

The humans, not knowing they created their own reality, found two boxes – one, a box of apples, and the other a box of bananas. The apple box was sizeably bigger than the banana box, because there were a lot of apples. The apples could roll around their box but the bananas could not, and the humans could not quite work out how to get the bananas to move around. So they called the bananas “special apples” and gave them a lot less attention than the apples.

One day some of the humans realised that the special apples were being forgotten so they decided to put some of them in the apple box. They said, “Isn’t it great to have the special apples in with the apples?” But other humans said, “No! They are not really apples and they can’t roll around – so they shouldn’t be in the apple box.”

So the humans scratched their heads and thought, perhaps we should change the special apples to be more like ordinary apples and less like bananas. They tried teaching them special ways to roll. Then they tried changing the apple box. They tinkered and they tankered, building partitions, dispersing the special apples amongst the apples, even bringing in oranges to help. But nothing seemed to work and, strangely, there seemed to be more and more special apples and even more strangely, some of the ordinary apples began changing into special apples!

The humans were perplexed and decided to have a review of the boxes. They decided the review was about ensuring that the boxes were responsive to, and effective in, providing for the special apples. They focused on success, working together, funding allocation, quality, accountability and inter-box co-operation. They even considered getting rid of the special apple box all together.

But still the humans couldn’t agree.

Then one of the humans cleared their throat and said, “I have an idea.” The other humans stopped arguing and looked at the human with the idea and said, “Whatever could be more important than a review of the boxes?”

And the human with the idea said, “A fruit bowl.”

The other humans were skeptical: “What a preposterous idea! Why would a fruit bowl be better?”

The human with the idea said this: “All this time we’ve thought rolling was important, but actually, what’s important is gravity. Gravity can either be yielded to or resisted. Apples yield to gravity by rolling but can’t resist well; yet bananas can roll a little, but then resist gravity by holding firm. Both rolling and holding firm are as valuable as each other, but apples and bananas need to work together to help each other respond to gravity. We could even add grapes and avocados and other fruit to the bowl and, after a while, we would get used to realising that what’s important is being fruit and responding to gravity in different ways, rather than being apples and being able to roll.”

The other humans looked at each other and thought to themselves, “This is a huge change. I’m not sure we can do it..

But the Creator who had been watching this – and who knew the humans created their own reality, smiled and said, “It is done.”