backward design

Backward design implies that teaching and learning are both a means to an end. In rhetoric that would appeal to backward design theorists, this end ought to be the generation of inquiry (broadly) and the generation of inquiry based on the preoccupations of a particular field or area of study (more specifically). I can't say I disagree, but I have some fundamental, or you could say philosophical, issues with anything functioning as a means to an end. Cannot learning be an end in itself? Cannot teaching, too, be and end in itself? That is not to say that the act of teaching and learning can be a one time engagement with the end resolving within that engagement, but rather cannot learning and teaching result in their own fruitful ends? More importantly, can teaching and learning be both and simultaneously a means to an end and an end in themselves?

Backward design is difficult because it forces a consideration of results. If we think of a teacher as say an artist working from backward design, we end up with an artist who necessarily places the implications of his completed work, and the effects of those implications upon the beholder, before the form. Is there anything at stake in this way of thinking? It is obvious that something is to be gained, but is anything lost? Is what is lost justified in the end result? Maybe so and maybe not, but it must be considered that classroom time belongs not to the teacher, nor to the student, but to the collective of those present. It is not your time, nor my time, but rather, in the words of that great philosopher Jeff Spicoli, "our time." Should our time be spent as a means to an end, or as an end in itself? Can it be spent as both? And is there anything wrong with a little snack on our time?