The Tyranny of the Urgent

Learning, Doing, Being

The podcast my sister and I created out of nothing more than our desire to talk to each other has grown into something: a business. We started Reframeables two Augusts ago, sitting down together at her kitchen table to write a grant application that we called “A flock of birds.” Borrowing from Anne Lamott, bird by bird we have brought together multiple creative projects that fly together, V-shaped, towards the very intangible (and heartfelt!) goal of supporting art-making in Canada. On the podcast we have already had more than 50 conversations with artists and thinkers, all reframeable allies who, like us, strive to reorient life through the stories they tell. From Sang Kim to Ian Williams, Zarqa Nawaz to Aimee Bender, Bec and I are in the business of asking big questions.

Artist: Tyler Tabobondung Rushnell - Wu Tang

Asking questions is key to good teaching. Yes, students ask teachers questions, and yes, there are times where an educator feels obliged to give answers, but veteran teachers with a love of learning know that it is the big questions — the ones we ask of ourselves — that will sustain a career over time. Unfortunately, from primary school all the way up to post-secondary, one of the effects of education’s obsession with providing “answers” has been a businessification of learning. I didn’t know the term until grad school, but over two decades in the public classroom I was instinctively wary any time private interest “answers” were presented as the way forward in terms of literacy or life skills. The businessification of education means the narrative of schooling is only read in one limited way: school exists to prepare students for “real life” and “real life” means getting a job. There is no room in this business model for learning to be anything other than a stepping stone to a paycheck. One learns to be and do something for that is where value is placed. There is no value placed on simply learning to be — full stop.

I think Charles E. Hummel got it wrong back in the 1960s when he wrote Tyranny of the Urgent. That time management “bible” of sorts continues to be applied by thinkers and doers in many fields, most notably in business, where the term refers to urgent tasks that become “tyrants” in our work day and keep us from “being the productive, goal achieving people we all want to be.” In fact, it was reading that definition that inspired my writing this post. It stopped me short and confirmed for me that someone like Hummel would not be terribly interested in our podcast. I used to drive students crazy with my constant questioning of grades and why their hyper focus on end results. I was desperate for the grade 12s and now for my MEd students to see value in the learning as it happens. I want to flip the tyranny of the urgent on its head and ask a Big Question: Instead of focusing on how to make the most of the limited time one has to be productive in a day, what might it look like to resist the tyranny of such constrictions that make a business of our interior worlds. We could be spending more time investing in simply being. What would the return on investment look like in that business model?