As one who has played in the game of education all my life, I wish people could begin to think about professionalizing teaching, not licensing. We license plumbers and electricians.
I’m talking about professionalizing teachers on the level of lawyers and physicians. Remove teachers from labor unions too. Unions are wrong for professionals. Teachers need to be part of professional organizations like professors and doctors and members of the bar to qualify and guarantee that they earn six-figure salaries. Professional associations serve the interests of the public as well as members to establish values, standards, and the quality of colleagues. Think levels of professional preparation including interns, assistants, and master teachers.
Our kids are our most valuable renewable source and treasure, yet we treat their education with something close to disdain, as though they are unworthy of a full investment in their young lives and the preparations of the teachers responsible for their development. Strangely, we blame children for not liking school when school systems and teachers are the problems the children must endure. It’s like being made to drink castor oil because it’s good for you.
Why should our investment in human learning on the level of elementary and secondary be any different from learning in graduate schools or post-docs where we invest almost without hesitation? Because the attitudes governing the culture toward schooling are left-over attitudes from the 19th century when we believed we had to train people to run lathes and locomotives and operate typewriters. That no longer works; the schools need to serve another objective.
Young people of the 21st century must be inculcated with a love of learning that drives them to learn continually for a lifetime. And that is not about passing tests, a small aspect of what students need to do. Instill the joy of learning and demonstrating mastery becomes an everyday part of the joyful process and the satisfaction that comes with learning.
We must bring teachers and parents together in schools. Let’s have periodic luncheons or informal coffee meetings where parents, mentors, and children join to assess progress and concerns. Again, use professionals like physicians and lawyers as a model. Experiment with new ways of preparing teachers, with school days that are different. Let the Federal Department of Education offer grants to teachers and schools to enable specific experiments in learning.
Make project-centered learning with mentors the primary method, which is exactly what humans did for ten thousand years. Our ancestors apprenticed young people to masters of crafts. Then we began the current crumbling public schooling system we’ve clung to since about 1850.
It’s time to think and re-evaluate the entire system.
Bill, your thoughts are spot on. However, I think we should also consider what courses are important, and just how they could or should be presented in the most effective manner. For example, should schools not only prepare people to make a living, but also prepare them for the realities of living in our society--not an idealized version of "what should, or could be, but the way things actually are. Should students be taught such basics as balancing a check book, living within a budget, the dangers of going too far into debt, etc.? Are such things as what we used to call civics (how our gover John Broadwell
2020-05-01
(Ran out of space, so continued) ..how our government works, studies of other forms of economies, American and world history, literature and arts, and so forth important before students are released into life?
One more thought, if we established teachers as professionals, as opposed to union members (for example), treated them as such, and compensated them accordingly, how would we hold them to appropriate standards, If we don't have a way to evaluate and insure those doing the teaching are held to a high standard, then the system would fall apart.
Just some idle thoughts.
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