There’s an old story about a town that was planning to build a playground. In the town council, someone brought up the problem that the proposed site was at the edge of a cliff, so there was a danger that children might fall off. The council then got into a debate about whether to build a fence at the top of the cliff or station an ambulance at the bottom!
The point of the story, of course, is that it’s ridiculous to invest in remediation of problems that could have been prevented. Yet in education, that is what happens all the time. We spend billions on remediation and special education, not to mention damage caused by preventable delinquency and mental health problems, while investing relatively little in prevention, or research on which preventive approaches work.
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