Consider the following comments on change.
The only constant in life is change.
Heraclitus
A society that fears change will mistake its habits for its principles.
We celebrate the reformer and forget the people who paid for the reform.
Progress is just change that won the argument about what to call it.
Nothing changes a community faster than the thing it swore would never happen.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that change is neither progress nor decline in itself, but a process whose value depends on who decides it and who absorbs its costs. Open by granting that resistance to change is often dressed up as principle when it is really fear, and that stagnant institutions decay. Then complicate it: not all change is improvement, and the language of progress is frequently how the powerful normalise upheaval that others must endure. A strong third move separates the pace of change from its direction, since a community can be marched somewhere worse very efficiently. Caution: resist both the worship of disruption that treats novelty as virtue and the nostalgia that remembers a past that never existed.