Two-Faced

The problem with the Imperial Eagle of times past is that it has two heads. Traditionally, the two heads represent the avaricious vision of an empire that looks both east and west, claiming the whole world for itself. My observation is that some people prefer to think in terms of time rather than space — so the two heads look backwards and forwards in time, as in a balance between traditions and progress — and some other people prefer to think in terms of other things.

What really irritates me is this: You can choose to be a traditionalist or a progressivist, you can even choose to be both if you cleave to the values of the past and use them as a basis for future development; what you should not do is be neither, reacting against both tradition (oh, it is a hindrance and most of it is an old boys' club) and progress (why should we try new things unless we can manipulate them to make us look good without actually doing anything). Yet, this is the case from where I look out upon the world of education.

I suspect in the whole island, there are only about eight good principals. Of these, about half are power-hungry mad people, half are game-players seeking to win some imaginary zero-sum game, half are educators (and half are not) and half are seeking to entrench themselves by making a kingdom in this world. Yes, those are indeed multiple halves. But with eight, you can see how easily that can work out.

A cube can be divided into eight smaller cubes. It has six faces, and it has a centre that is equidistant from all faces, and also equidistant from all vertices. It contains both the tetrahedron and the octahedron within it. You can do complicated rotations and other symmetry operations with it, and it is good at returning to its original state. Unfortunately, this is what education is like sometimes.