We may start at the end, as in “The end of a man’s life is not his end.”  What a lovely line.  The end of a life is clearly its end.  There is no more.  But end is such a powerful notion that the proposition remains.  One’s end is not one’s end, because that is not what life is about.  That’s not its purpose, not what it is for.

Years ago I met with the observation that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Being a fool, I dismissed this observation with the remark: “So does the sentence –‘A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.’”  But the end of a story is not its end.  Ask any teacher who has tried to teach what makes a story a story.  Children often will tell a ‘story’ that is not a story, but rather a series of events punctuated by the phrase ‘and then…’  How do you explain the difference between a series of happenings and a story?  How do you get a child to see that the end of a story is everywhere in the tale?

There is a most telling moment in a fine book called Learning in Science by Osborne and Freyberg.  The authors interviewed students while classes were going on.  At one point they asked a child what the purpose of the activity was and the child answered “I never really thought about it…it’s 8.5…just got to do different numbers and the next one we have to do is this (points in text to 8.6).”  Here we are right in the middle of ‘and then…’  An end-less sequence of items is not very satisfying.  Learning needs story.  It requires an end and we are missing that end.  We are missing it everywhere.

Not entirely.  Into this void has stepped of late a facsimile of an end –the state-wide exam.  No longer are we merely doing exercise 8.5, now we are preparing for a test.  The question immediately arises:  Is this really the end?  Is it what schooling is all about?

It is August now, but June will come and we will have come to the end of another school year…a last day.  But what if we have only finished exercise 8.5.  Perhaps we will do 8.6 when we come back.  And if we don’t come back?  Well, it’s not like there was really an end, was there.