ARE WE TOO BUSY TO THINK?

Abstract

"A curious quality of education is that ... few study it in any serious way at all. In our hurry to purvey or consume it, we pause infrequently to question what we are up to. We are alternately too brash and reactionary and always, it seems, too busy to decide which and why. More importantly, we are too caught up with pressing numhers and immediate crises to decide what we should he doing in the first place. So we stumble on, giving and receiving schooling without full reflection on the truly sophisticated and ethically loaded practice it involves."

The words are those of Theodore Sizer, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They are words that should be pasted on to the desk of every teacher, every principal, every supervisor in the land - and if the desks of these individuals tend, like mine, to become so cluttered that such a message is likely to be buried, perhaps a better place for it would be the mirror that we peek at each day in order to ascertain that the face and hair that we are going to present to the world are reasonably acceptable.