Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-1997

Abstract

In considering how curriculum and teaching influence education, it is revealing to note that most faculty members treat curriculum the way bankers treat investments. They generally spend much time, planning, and careful thought on curricular matters--reasoning here, analyzing there, relying on experience, and carefully considering both the long-term and short-term dividends of knowledge--but when it comes to teaching, many faculty members operate less like bankers and more like barnstormers, flying by the seat of their pants and guiding themselves primarily by instinct or by repeating whatever worked yesterday. Few teachers feel that they have either the intellectual or professional grasp of teaching that they have of curriculum. Plato's complaint about poets and politicians (as opposed to craftsmen or philosophers)--that they always operate by rules of thumb, even when they are brilliant, and thus can neither explain how they do what they do nor teach the doing of it to others--describes all teachers at least some of the time.

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