This article seeks to challenge a perceived mythology previously touched upon which is now widely established in the English educational system and is associated with what the author has elsewhere called the establishment model of educational policy. This establishment model is grounded in a "state learning theory." It reflects a set of ideas and values associated with particular perspectives upon constructing a knowledge society, shaped by the influences of globalism, neo-liberal socioeconomics, a utilitarian and marketplace ethic in education and an emphasis upon individualism as a consumer. This individualism reflects a predominant concern in current policy for the production of a renewable, but dehumanising form of learning as an accredited credential at best and at the least a reformed civic capital. All packaged as education for the real world. A declaration of the key purpose of education as the production and commodification of knowledge as an asset for and unit of economic consumption generates worrying implications for education in terms of practice and professionality, and unsurprisingly educational leadership. To deal in diversity, complexity and change as schools must do, both today and tomorrow, the author considers these three ideas as each refers to an alternative notion of educational management that is not part of the remodelling mythology. Such an approach deliberately worries about the relationship between the old and the new, about definitions of knowledge, values and worth, and crucially as part of a wider explanation for a model of inclusive leadership. It is also an approach that deliberately pays regard to the tacit knowledge characterised as folklore so easily castigated as irrelevant fiction or even yet more cleverly suborned and recast as a new and better orthodoxy. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)