Back to top Mission . Education is fundamentally a backward-looking enterprise. Looking back is an inevitable, central feature of schooling. A school s mission is to transmit knowledge and values, to prepare children for the future, which it can only do by teaching them about the past - not just history, but the assembled body of knowledge in each subject. We can only teach what we know.
Continuity is a core value in school life.
Good teaching is always creative, but not perpetually innovative, and while it benefits from regular refreshers and occasional overhauls, it doesn t demand the kind of continuous updating that, say, law or medicine or high technology do. Given its mission, a school must be sufficiently businesslike to survive, but it is no more about profit than a family is. It also means that teaching is both very personal and highly individual. For another, a complex array of external factors, from divorce and poverty to the Internet and TV, affects the motivation and performance of all students. No lesson, even with the best students, is uniformly replicable.