Replacing the Ellipsis

How do avoid falling down the gaps

Photo by Farnoosh Abdollahi on Unsplash

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Education is a humanist enterprise staffed largely by people of good faith who want to do good in the world. In many cases, teachers could be pursuing higher paid, higher status occupations, but choose to work with young people instead. Nevertheless, teachers have the full range of human flaws and one of these is a tendency to be a little, well, woolly.

Woolly? Yes, that’s the right term. Agency depends upon cause and effect. We identify a goal and then take a step that by some plausible mechanism should move us closer to that goal. There are three components to this — a goal, a step and a mechanism. Sometimes, of course, we could simply be experimenting, but most of the time we are trying to make use of what we already know to solve the problems we see around us.

There is no shortage of goals we can identify in schools. So, how does woolliness disrupt this process and how do we fix it?