Theory and Practice One

Even in education, theory loses out to practice. Sounds great in theory, we say, but it’s just not practical. Anti-intellectualism comes at a price, however, when theory is such a debased tender. We find ourselves leaping from practice to practice in a frantic effort to raise test scores, dragging theory along with us like a campaign banner. No wonder that after thirty years of this jumping and flapping teachers come to regard educational theory as nothing more than the opposite of anything practical. Theory becomes, as it were, that which can never be put into practice.

Theories—even bad ones—are worth indulging. Theories are all we have to prove that we are doing what we do in education on purpose. Before we worry about good theories and bad, we should be sure that we have any theory at all. The absence of a theory is the absence of purpose. Try to define practice without purpose and you will discover why the word theory is still around, despite how impractical we know it to be.