This is especially true among trustees who themselves work in fields undergoing explosive change. Eager to help their schools innovate, they are often amazed and chagrined by the resistance they encounter and by the schools persistently slow pace of implementation. For their part, heads and administrators know that schools often respond badly to such measures, but struggle to explain how and why. Consulting to a variety of corporations and to scores of schools has helped me to see that businesspeople, though they bring real commitment and the best intentions to their trusteeship, live by assumptions that are very different from educators . 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.