Somewhere in some book some place is a line that goes something like, "Education consists of a wise and caring teacher, a humble and curious student, and a log for the both of them to sit on."*

It's a bit mawkish, but there's still something to it. In education, you need someone willing to share their understanding. You need someone who wants what's being shared. And you need something to hold them up, to free them from other labors so one may give and the other receive.

In this phrase's economy, Populi is the log—rather, it's just part of the log.** And whatever their marketing language might claim, every other software vendor out there also sells nothing more than log parts. If a company promises to unlock unlimited possibilities to unshackle teachers and students and take education beyond any place it's ever gone before—or some similar bloviation—well, there's a pithy barnyard phrase for that.

It's up to the teacher to care and speak. It's up to the student to listen and do. And the log? Its job is to be sat upon. Log-part vendors like us have a duty to make the log comfy, to shear it of pointy branches, and free it of ants and beetles. Nothing more. If the log starts putting on airs about how it's part of the conversation or how it frees education from the constraints of sitting, it's getting outside of its core competencies. If a teacher is unwilling to teach or a student is unwilling to learn, no amount of technological gee-whizzery is gonna overcome that fundamental failure of communication.

Populi is, as we've mentioned before, in the business of replacing software. Put another way, we're made to help the log do its job: to help your people free up teachers and students to pursue what matters.

* At this writer's first college, phrases like this were as common as blue in the sky.

** Other log parts include: buildings, staff, administration, budgets, infrastructure, donors, and so on—all of these exist to free up teachers to teach and students to learn.