ABSTRACT
We are facing a multiple crisis within this country, a crisis of intellectual and imaginative nerve that currently afflicts policy makers, teachers in schools and the research community alike. We remain prisoners of an outmoded intellectual framework and a properly zealous political will; taken together they present a well-intentioned, if mistaken, symbiosis and as a consequence our demise is likely to deepen rather than disperse. Just as school effectiveness and school improvement articulate the moribund categories of a frightened, unimaginative society so the aspirant hegemony of the technologies of teaching provide a classroom equivalent which will do more damage more quickly and more widely than its institutional predecessor.
