“We are 20th-century teachers using 19th-century methods to reach 21st-century students.” That’s what I heard a bright, committed teacher tell her fellow educators at a recent educational technology conference. That terse, powerful statement reflects what many people, including myself, have often voiced or thought. These days, the mantra that seems to be on everyone’s lips is that schools must abandon the traditional scarcity model, where students are shown how to find information, and embrace an excess model—one in which young people are trained to select from among many competing resources and craft their own narratives. But does this radical transformation reflect the reality of today’s schools?

A friend of mine who has worked with education, video games, and computers long enough to have seen many new technologies—and many new education models—come and go, questions whether this paradigm shift is realistic. In particular, he wonders how educators can bridge the huge gap between all this talk about the need for new technologies in the classroom and the reality of schools with their old equipment, limited budgets, testing benchmarks, anxious parents, and high turnover rate among young faculty members.

My friend’s caution is sobering. It reminds me of how easy it is to have an insight on the macro level that sounds good, even feels convincing, and just doesn’t square with everyday facts. And that made me think of Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the World: A Language History of the World (HarperCollins, 2005), a book that I’m reading and loving. Ostler, who is chairman of the nonprofit organization Foundation of Endangered Languages, is one of those amazing people who has mastered 26 languages and seems to know just about everything. In this book, he asks a very interesting question: Why have the written forms of Chinese and Egyptian lasted for thousands of years even though they were challenged by other simpler, more flexible, and more “modern” written languages? Indeed, why have these two written languages survived even during periods when China and Egypt were invaded and conquered? Nowadays, we assume that when a new technology arrives, an old one dies. But why did these clunky, rigid languages triumph?

Ostler suggests a variety of reasons—one of which is that in these two ancient cultures, the literate classes liked having a difficult, traditional, native-born written language. They liked that more than they craved ease, modernity, or convenience in dealing with foreigners. And that brings me back to schools, technology, students, and change. The fact that technology makes new kinds of educational opportunities possible doesn’t imply that teachers, administrators, school boards, and college admittance personnel—not to mention students and parents—want, or even need, those new methods.

My skeptical friend also pointed out an article called “Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform,” which appeared in a back issue of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education’s Ed. magazine. In this article, two veteran professors of education, David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban, argue that when it comes to public schools, what we need isn’t talk of complete and total change—which, in fact, they say, never happens. Instead, what public education needs is tinkering, talking with teachers, learning what is and isn’t working. There’s something calm, sobering, and real in that message.

I’ll leave the pronouncements about 21st-century skills and radical reform to education analysts and other columnists. For those of us who write for, teach, or work with young people in schools and libraries, the old and the new are likely to overlap and blend, not suddenly displace each other. Doesn’t that make sense? Doesn’t that sound more realistic than a vision of a completely transformed educational system? It does to me.