Risk and waste

Bill Keller, in the NYTimes, makes an interesting point (about diplomacy and journalism) that corresponds smartly with teaching.  He writies, "In the end, you have to trust trained, experienced correspondents to judge how much risk is too much. And that brings me to the main point. To my mind, the bigger question for our business is not whether we sometimes err on the side of caution, but whether we are hiring, developing and deploying the next generation of trained, experienced correspondents to make those calls. That also happens to be the best possible investment in security."

To paraphrase and tweak to fit teaching,

• Think of 'risk' as the cost of teacher professionalism. The question is whether we are inducting enough prudence and creativity in our newer teachers to give them the freedom and respect to develop the experience in order to effectively and responsibility to judge wisely what works for their students.  
• Think of 'risk' as waste; society's willingness to let go the restrictive adherence to false consciousness of cost-benefit allowance of education spending.  Put another way, teaching is about taking chances; taking chances can be costly; the costs are the chances for students to learn in ways that resonate beyond the end of course assessments.

Distrust is much easier to generate than trust. Loss anxiety, and thus avoidance of risk, is much more aligned with the human condition than erring on the side of potential, and thus taking on more risk.  We seem to have given up on potential and settled for the simple, certainty of formulaic interventions in social action: financial engineering products; medical practice as a flow-chart of 'if/then' prognosis and diagnoses; plea-bargaining in the judicial system to avoid both reality and the expense of its pursuit; standardized curricula, lessons and their evaluations.

Keller recognizes that an induction process for newcomers to a field must rely more on the sagacity of the current practitioners more than the ideals of outside interests intent of reforming the field.  Yes; there is always the risk of hermetic insulation, a protective layer of reflexive rejection out of fear of losing autonomy.  That risk is not inevitable, assuming that those inside a profession develop the reflective, inquiry stance needed for ongoing development.  But fear of risk, erring on the side of caution, avoiding the public reaction to waste and excessiveness leads to and emerge from that closed-minded, protective attitude.

The big question: how do teachers reclaim (stake out) the kind of respect needed to foster the entrepreneurial risk that flows from and into transformative education?