Chester Finn:

In 1953, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin published one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated essays, titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” He was riffing on the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In this essay, Sir Isaiah divided people—well, writers and thinkers, those sorts of people—into two categories. As summarized in Wikipedia, they are:

…hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust, and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe).

Reflecting on my own engagement with education over the past sixty years, beginning just a dozen years after Berlin wrote, I find that I started as a hedgehog but have turned into a fox. My hedgehog self, I should add, was young, optimistic, probably naïve. Becoming a fox has meant growing skeptical, wary, perhaps jaded, though still determined.

Once upon a time—college senior time, LBJ time—I pretty much agreed with President Johnson that the way to end poverty in America while achieving other worthy ends was to beef up the education system, particularly the parts that served poor kids, and that the way to do that was to ramp up its funding, such as via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty, both of which he pushed through Congress.

When he signed ESEA in the one-room schoolhouse of his childhood in Johnson City, Texas, the president declared that: