HAQs

HAQs are hotly argued questions, pronounced hacks.

• What do you think about nature and nurture as determinants in educational experience and achievement?
• What do you think are the social (or political) forces (or concepts) that are pedagogically strongest?
• Do you think the purpose of educative efforts are social or individual?

HAQs are questions that have long agitated people, often with the frequent restatement of polarized positions. They raise matters of sufficient importance that the issues do not go away, despite the frustration of stubborn opposition. HAQs need consideration through patient, generous conversation in which the parties to it attend closely to what others say, for the opposition most needs to be spanned, not overcome. Good conversation will encompass a HAQ in an ample, many-sided understanding.

Ah! It is clear! To propose that life is "principally" this or that is supremely dangerous, for in an instant it will be "exclusively" either this or that. Then terrible things happen.... It would be an easy job to exist if we could do things unilaterally. But — and here is the problem! — to live is to travel at one time in every direction of the horizon; to live is to have to do with both this and that.^[1] —

Ortega y Gasset

1. ↑ José Ortega y Gasset, "Un rasgo de la vida alemana," 1935, Obras V, p. 191.