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The trend and fads lead to research and the ability to make use of educational technologies that make
learning more effective and trigger innovation amongst students. When students are exposed to an
environment where they can think for themselves and seek solutions to the challenges that society is
faced with, from within themselves they adopt a solution-seeking mindset. This opens their mind to
what is happening elsewhere across the globe as they embark on adopting and localizing global
solutions at the grassroots level. This widens the local body of research and places our education
systems competitively on the global stage. When education seeks to provide answers to existing
challenges and to create new and innovative ways of achieving even better results in our development
sectors, then it is responsive to the emerging needs. So, trends and fads can be helpful in today’s new
normal. Because of our economic and social obsession with trends, it is not surprising that there is an
almost equal and opposite reaction in our modern obsession with fads. Too much of anything will cause
a reaction, often in the opposite direction. Even worse, we often suppose that fads are trends. Fads are
marketed as the next wave of the future, oddly one right after another. 

Philip Rieff quoted “There is nothing culturally more subversive than the modern commerce of quick
turnover in ideas.”  

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg also quoted “To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation.”  

We should play with fads because they can be fun and to have a new way of learning in the midst of
COVID-19. From styles of clothing to styles of culture, they are about being in the moment of life and
reveling in being alive. Just keep them in perspective. Trends are about movement. Fads are like waves
on the water. They rocked the boat and so they captured our attention. Trends are like the currents that
move the boat. Currents are more difficult to see but have far more power. One can navigate by learning
more about the currents of trends and stop obsessing about the waves on the water. 

We work with trends because that’s where our work will do the best long-term thinking applied to the
notion of leveraging our resources and efforts to multiply the outcome. If you can pull some fads in to
help achieve this goal, trends can work even better.