> a utilitarian certitude that rapidly hardens into dogmatic inflexibility…
Fascinating perspective to me, and probably the right one. The term “best practices“ gives me a warm feeling because I view it as a good starting point, one that will save me some time because others have figured out what not to do. It never occurred to me that best practices would be a static thing.
I feel the same way in the sense of not wanting to reinvent the wheel, but I often reflect on how implementation of 'best practice', 'zero tolerance' or other aspirational standards often falls upon administrators who might not have (or want) expertise in the practice area.
Most 'best practices' are good defaults, but the superlative rhetoric comes with the unstated assumption that any deviation is necessarily inferior, and that the best cannot be iterated upon. This drains agency from actors within a system, selecting for predictable mediocrity rather than risky innovation.