Having lived with teachers, in-laws are teachers, daughter and daughter-in-law are teachers, I find some of criticism of schools unrealistic. Faced with 30 kids, 10 of them from dysfunctional homes, 3 with specific learning difficulties and expectations from society/government that they will be ready pass this exam at end of the year, some tough choices get made. Getting better results from schools needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out. Pay out lots of dough to private schools and you get two big bonuses—much smaller classes and far fewer children from dysfunctional families.
It sounds like you’re defending teachers against the accusation of Being Bad, which is not what I took to be the thesis of this post. At its core, the post is highlighting damage done by the current school system. Some of that damage is done by teachers who mean well and have high skill but are up against an impossible situation, as you describe. Some is done by teachers who are unskilled or malicious and are enabled by the current system. A lot just kind of happens due to the structure regardless of what any individual wants. It’s still useful to track the damage being done.
I would admit outright that there are bad teachers—I was fortunate in not having many, but certainly knew which ones in the school were. What I am uncomfortable with is that I perceive that the harms described are criticisms of the process, whereas I think that much of the process is created by the structures in which school exist. Schools structures and teaching practise has evolved to meet the expectations and constraints that the wider society has imposed.
Eg—paying attention. Well if teacher is explaining say difficult part of german grammar that the textbook (if there is one) doesnt cover well, then yes, the teacher wants the student attention. If student prefers Twitter and teacher doesnt demand, then what are the consequences? Possibility 1. The student flunks exam. At uni level, this is what happens. No consequences for lecturer, and only for student. In my country, teachers AND schools are judged on pass rate. Ergo—teacher demands attention. Possibility 2. Student confronted with the grammar asks for teachers help. Teacher has to go over the point again unnecessarily, using time that could have been spent advancing the wider learning. Ergo—teacher demands attention. Possibility 3. Student got the point, doesnt need teacher, so why not spend time on Twitter? Indeed, and if teacher suspects that will probably ignore—except that social pressure applies. Why is x allowed on Twitter but I am not?
The alternative to school seems to be home schooling. Well and good but a massive investment (if thought of in terms of earnings lost by parent teacher). This is reducing class size to one. If class size doesnt matter, then why is this a better option again?
I have recent dealings with extended family member who is dyslexic - a common problem estimated at about 10% pop. Local dyslexia association fights hard for change in practise to cope, but hard cold reality is that the practises advocated for are just not practical with many real-world classrooms. A teacher does not have the time given current resourcing within my country. The answer is better resourcing, but that is a structural problem. Fix that and you can fix the teaching practise.
If student prefers Twitter and teacher doesnt demand, then what are the consequences? Possibility 1. The student flunks exam. At uni level, this is what happens. No consequences for lecturer, and only for student. In my country, teachers AND schools are judged on pass rate. Ergo—teacher demands attention.
To clarify—the judgement does occur in uni, in your country?
What I am uncomfortable with is that I perceive that the harms described are criticisms of the process, whereas I think that much of the process is created by the structures in which school exist. Schools structures and teaching practise has evolved to meet the expectations and constraints that the wider society has imposed.
It’s called ‘Harms and possibilities of schooling’ not ‘Harms downstream of the bureaucracy which sets the rules and funds for schooling.’ Making such a point could be done in two posts (perhaps more would be required). But step 1 is establishing there is a problem. (As you put it ‘with the process’.) Step 2 might be figuring out how to fix the process (which you might separate into:
The better way
changing things to implement the better way
changing things so this even begins to be possible)
If there were no issues with the process, then what reason would there be to go mucking about with
the structures in which school exist. Schools structures and teaching practise has evolved to meet the expectations and constraints that the wider society has imposed.
Actually that quote didn’t make my point—it made it seem like criticizing the process is great if it changes ‘the expectations and constraints wider society imposes.’
The answer is better resourcing, but that is a structural problem. Fix that and you can fix the teaching practise.
And what reason is there if nought is broken? The post starts at the beginning.
Pattern—to first question. In my country, schools and teacher in schools are judged formally or informally by pass rates. Universities, not much, and university lecturers would only be investigated if there was serious concerns about incompetence or unfair exams.
As I said, my discomfort is with tone that teachers are doing it wrong and all teachers are bad.
Eg “It’s fine if the kids aren’t paying attention to what you’re teaching, why are you trying to teach 20 kids at once anyway?”
Well, because as teacher, you dont have a choice.
eg “Have it run until 1720”. So how many hours a day do you think teachers should be working then? Every teacher I know is at school early, home late and working through the evening. No wonder they burn out. This does not strike me as remotely realistic.
I am concerned that teaching is ineffective, that classroom failure has serious downstream effects. The harms here: Well frankly, I am not convinced that teacher demanding your attention is a harm. Fact of life in a society that needs educated people.
Of course. It does seem like that problem should be fixed at a different level. I also think that if you keep increasing past the number 20 indefinitely, eventually the idea one teacher will do will become ridiculous, and things will have to change greatly to even begin to handle such a situation.
I had a few classes (well before uni***) that didn’t (often) revolve around lectures or powerpoint presentations*, instead work was largely done out of a textbook. And the teacher answered questions/helped people who were struggling. (Sometimes several people had the same question, and so it switched to being covered for the class.) But that is a particular teaching style, and it seems like it’s going to work better for some subjects**** and some people.
*They were seen as a tool for covering a lot of info quickly, but in a way that was suboptimal for students (attention) for long periods of time**, and were used when necessary but not otherwise.
**The longer a lecture, the more this is an issue.
***I remember it worked well for a coach teaching a topic, and was better than the some classes that weren’t run that way.
****A class that involves reading books will, of course look at least a bit like this—in or out of class.
Living in the modern world means that a child really needs to learn to read and write/type. For many children, they would much rather be outside playing. Me and my children were motivated and reading before arriving at the school gate. We “suffered” the harms above to some extent unnecessarily but for many, many of classmates, some from homes with no books, learning those basics was tough. They certainly werent going to learn it at school without restricting their liberties. The harms suffered in that were well and truly compensated for by the critical life skill of reading.
Helping with a dyslexic, I see the school in no way able to cope with current staffing. They really want you to pay for outside school programmes with one on one teaching. Effective if you can afford it, but well beyond the means of many families.
Children mostly caring about playing outside sounds like a perspective from another time.
Children care about being able to use their phones in various ways. They text with their friends. They play computer games where being able to read is useful.
Or maybe another place. Extremely unusual for kids here to have phones in first 4-5 years of schooling. And much as my dyslexic relative would like to read what a computer game is saying, it doesnt inspire the hard work needed for learning to read. Not fun compared to other screaming around with a ball.
Children became grown-ups 200 years ago too. I don’t think we need to teach them anything at all, much less anything in particular.
According to this SSC post, kids can easily catch up in math even if they aren’t taught any math at all in the 5 first years of school.
In the Benezet experiment, a school district taught no math at all before 6th grade (around age 10-11). Then in sixth grade, they started teaching math, and by the end of the year, the students were just as good at math as traditionally-educated children with five years of preceding math education.
That would probably work for reading too, I guess. (Reading appears to require more purpose-built brain circuitry than math. At least I got that impression from reading Henrich’s WEIRD. I don’t have any references though.)
200 years ago was different world—reading wasnt required. Ask anyone who cant read as an adult how tough that is. The 10% with dyslexia need intervention fast.
[To respond to not the literal content of your comment, in case it’s relevant: I think some teachers are intrinsically bad, some are intrinsically great, and many are unfortunately compelled or think they’re compelled to try to solve an impossible problem and do the best they can. Blame just really shouldn’t be the point, and if you’re worried someone will blame someone based on a description, then you may have a dispute with the blamer, not the describer.]
criticism of schools unrealistic
Well, it’s worth distinguishing (1) whether/what harms are being done, and (2) under what circumstances the harms can be avoided. I don’t know precisely what you mean by “criticism of schools”. I don’t think you mean, it’s unrealistic—fantastical, unbelievable—that schools do these harms. I take you to mean, it’s unrealistic not to do these harms to kids. I don’t want to blur between “there’s no way to avoid this” and “this isn’t happening” (largely because it’s just not true that there’s no way to avoid it), or between “this is happening” and “we must do certain things, and blame/punish certain people” (because the implication just doesn’t hold, and the implication is sometimes used to couple the belief with the plan more than it has to be, and then push against the belief because the supposedly implied plan would be bad; as in “if school were harmful, I’d have to take my family and go live in the woods and be cut off from society; that would be bad for my family; therefore school is not harmful”).
To allow teachers to not harm their kids, parents might have to be willing to firmly disclaim for their kids anything like “expectations from society/government that they will be ready pass this exam at end of the year”. It may be unrealistic that parents would do that; I’d like to know why, but more acutely I’d like to see parents who are willing to do that organize.
Getting better results from schools needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out.
I’m not aware of good evidence that it’s easy to get better results for students simply by spending more money and that money is a key limiting factor. What makes you believe that?
“not easy to get better results simply by spending money” is not in conflict with “getting better results needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out”.
It could be the results are nonlinear, and the real gains happen a long way past the current funding levels. It could be there are many required improvements, and money is just one constraint, but visible enough that it makes the others un-testable.
As the Gates Foundation research suggests currently a bachelor of education doesn’t teach anything that helps teachers to help their students get better education results. You could save a lot of money by simply not paying people with a bachelor of education more money.
ChristianKI. That I think is a USA problem, but many teachers here (NZ) have rated teaching college as pretty much waste of time, with all their real learning coming from ground-zero experience under good mentors. As I perceive it, the problem with teaching college is that they are closely aligned with the university system and lecturers want to teach their research interests, not necessarily “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom”. My daughter-in-law went through experimental system where she was put into classroom of low-decile school as paid teacher after only a few weeks of intensive training, albeit with far reduced hours and a mentor. A few week-long intensive training camps during the year. Something of “crucible experience” with I gather a substantial dropout rate and a longer route to full teacher registration, but arguably a better training than college. Long term analysis of the programme will be interesting.
Unfortunately, problems of US academia are not limited to the US. The problem isn’t just that professors focus on their research interests. If there research would be about useful things like “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom” there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s rather that they focus on critical theory instead of focusing on actually effective studies.
Instead of asking how a teacher can effectively project his authority in a classroom so that the children follow his teachings, they rather want to deconstruct authority. This is in turn is different from changing the school system to something like what happens in Sudbury Valley, so it ends up as a quite useless activity.
Changing this is not a question of money but of political will to change structures.
I do expect that projects like the one you describe are an improvement.
Hmm, I had to look up what “critical theory” is, but I do remember complaints like in early 80s about one college in particular. A friend of sister went through it and called it the “Society for the Protection of the Unborn Thought” (Society for Protection for Unborn Child was a prominant anti-abortion organisation here). Needless to say, it didnt make an impression on her, and think that particular problem vanished in reforms of the 90s.
My daughter went through the conventional college route to teaching but the complaint were more lecturers hobby horses on continuous teaching practise evaluation, learning styles etc. - ie theoretically useful but not the most important things for beginner teachers. Lots of what an ideal learner and classroom should be like but not a lot on how to get there.
Indeed. Perhaps focusing on MORE teachers (aka smaller class sizes) is more important than BETTER teachers (though I suspect both matter). And certainly more important than MORE CREDENTIALED teachers.
Note that it may well be that this should to be framed as “don’t pay teachers less because they didn’t get an Education degree” rather than “don’t pay them more if they did”. And it does open the can of worms of productivity measurement. Teaching is no different from many vocations in that it’s nigh-impossible to be objective and mechanical about who’s doing it well and who isn’t. It IS different from many vocations in that it’s government-administered and has a very strong union which prevents less-legible but more-useful measurement.
What percent of the population should be teachers?
While I agree that small classes are generally better, there are simply too many students, so if we make small classrooms, too many teachers will be needed. Everything has a cost, and at some moment we have to say something like “no, we can’t have 20% of adult population working as teachers; and we definitely can’t have the smartest 20% of adult population working as teachers, because smart people are needed in other professions, too—or would you perhaps prefer to have a stupid surgeon operate on you?”.
Education does not scale well, at least the way we do it now. Small classes just make it worse. What are the possibilities?
better use of books, movies, computers. A teacher standing in front of the blackboard explaining stuff, could be replaced by a book or a movie telling the same thing. (But what if you have a question? Okay, so replace half lessons with books and movies, and the questions can be asked during the remaining half.)
some kind of pyramid education, where older kids would teach younger kids? Again, let older kids teach younger kids half of the lessons, the remaining half would be with the adult teacher.
maybe just… teach less? If kids don’t pay attention, maybe just let them go (to a room where babysitting is provided without education).
And definitely decouple teaching from certification. You should not get diploma for “being there”, but for having the knowledge (regardless of whether you obtained it at school, at home, or anywhere else).
In my vision, a school would be a huge babysitting center, where parents can leave their kids between 6:00 and 18:00, with voluntary classes—some of them taught by teachers, other by students, or external people. Places for silent study, reading books. Computers with educational software and automated tests. Students can take an exam on any subject they want, at any moment. You get a diploma for completing a certain set of exams. You could spend N years at the school without getting the diploma. Or you could learn at home, and then just come to school to take the exams and get the diploma.
What percent of the population should be teachers?
In some sense, 100% - it takes a village and all that. More reasonably, maybe 5% or so to have pre-college teaching as their primary occupation. 22% of the US population in 2020 was under age 18, so this would give a comfortable class size of 5-15 (varying by subject), with some slack for admin and supervision.
You’re right, of course, that scale is the big problem—most people don’t WANT to spend the resources (money and human productivity) that is implied by universal good schooling. But they don’t want to admit that either, so they just complain. There are correlates here to cost disease in health care—the appearance of helping being more important than actually helping, and the political infeasibility of providing less service to the less-able-to-pay.
I have this vision in my head of teaching being primarily the responsibility of retired folks.
In that society, “retirement” (and perhaps more importantly retirement benefits like Social Security, Medicare, etc.) involves spending a few hours to a day (or more, if you want) at a local school, teaching.
This:
Keeps the older generation more involved, while giving them a platform to share their knowledge/experience with the young (which is arguably the a large fraction of the value of keeping them around to begin with)
Gives students (K-12 mostly, but no reason it couldn’t include college) the chance to interact and learn from people who’ve had lives and careers already, exposing them to more options, opportunities, and cultures
Helps pay for retirement benefits by having retired folks work in the public sector (perhaps with a small additional stipend for doing so?) And we’re also only talking about ~1 class a week, unless they wanted to do more
I do quite like most parts of your vision, though it would likely need to be supplemented with a set of specialists for learning disabilities or counseling, and so on.
I like this. Mostly because my idea of perfect education is “everyone uses something like Khan Academy”, where the usual response is: “but what about the small kids who can’t read yet?” Your proposal addresses this part.
I don’t have data to back my claim up, but as a maths teacher it’s clearly easier for me to reach three students than 30, just because I have so much more time to give to each student (epistemic status : I’m currently teaching one course where I have 30 students and one where I have 3...)
Largely based on studies on class size. Some say effect is only modest but reducing class size from 35 to 25 is pretty meaningless. Reducing below 20 though is different story. A high-needs child in a large classroom is really going struggle—only so much time that a teacher can give them. I have also looked at what experiments in “Charter schools” have done—with much higher $$ per child than state are able give.
Anecdotally, (and from serving on school board), what is wanted is quality teachers but pay and conditions make retention difficult.
Having lived with teachers, in-laws are teachers, daughter and daughter-in-law are teachers, I find some of criticism of schools unrealistic. Faced with 30 kids, 10 of them from dysfunctional homes, 3 with specific learning difficulties and expectations from society/government that they will be ready pass this exam at end of the year, some tough choices get made. Getting better results from schools needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out. Pay out lots of dough to private schools and you get two big bonuses—much smaller classes and far fewer children from dysfunctional families.
It sounds like you’re defending teachers against the accusation of Being Bad, which is not what I took to be the thesis of this post. At its core, the post is highlighting damage done by the current school system. Some of that damage is done by teachers who mean well and have high skill but are up against an impossible situation, as you describe. Some is done by teachers who are unskilled or malicious and are enabled by the current system. A lot just kind of happens due to the structure regardless of what any individual wants. It’s still useful to track the damage being done.
I would admit outright that there are bad teachers—I was fortunate in not having many, but certainly knew which ones in the school were. What I am uncomfortable with is that I perceive that the harms described are criticisms of the process, whereas I think that much of the process is created by the structures in which school exist. Schools structures and teaching practise has evolved to meet the expectations and constraints that the wider society has imposed.
Eg—paying attention. Well if teacher is explaining say difficult part of german grammar that the textbook (if there is one) doesnt cover well, then yes, the teacher wants the student attention. If student prefers Twitter and teacher doesnt demand, then what are the consequences? Possibility 1. The student flunks exam. At uni level, this is what happens. No consequences for lecturer, and only for student. In my country, teachers AND schools are judged on pass rate. Ergo—teacher demands attention. Possibility 2. Student confronted with the grammar asks for teachers help. Teacher has to go over the point again unnecessarily, using time that could have been spent advancing the wider learning. Ergo—teacher demands attention. Possibility 3. Student got the point, doesnt need teacher, so why not spend time on Twitter? Indeed, and if teacher suspects that will probably ignore—except that social pressure applies. Why is x allowed on Twitter but I am not?
The alternative to school seems to be home schooling. Well and good but a massive investment (if thought of in terms of earnings lost by parent teacher). This is reducing class size to one. If class size doesnt matter, then why is this a better option again?
I have recent dealings with extended family member who is dyslexic - a common problem estimated at about 10% pop. Local dyslexia association fights hard for change in practise to cope, but hard cold reality is that the practises advocated for are just not practical with many real-world classrooms. A teacher does not have the time given current resourcing within my country. The answer is better resourcing, but that is a structural problem. Fix that and you can fix the teaching practise.
To clarify—the judgement does occur in uni, in your country?
It’s called ‘Harms and possibilities of schooling’ not ‘Harms downstream of the bureaucracy which sets the rules and funds for schooling.’ Making such a point could be done in two posts (perhaps more would be required). But step 1 is establishing there is a problem. (As you put it ‘with the process’.) Step 2 might be figuring out how to fix the process (which you might separate into:
The better way
changing things to implement the better way
changing things so this even begins to be possible)
If there were no issues with the process, then what reason would there be to go mucking about with
Actually that quote didn’t make my point—it made it seem like criticizing the process is great if it changes ‘the expectations and constraints wider society imposes.’
And what reason is there if nought is broken? The post starts at the beginning.
Pattern—to first question. In my country, schools and teacher in schools are judged formally or informally by pass rates. Universities, not much, and university lecturers would only be investigated if there was serious concerns about incompetence or unfair exams.
As I said, my discomfort is with tone that teachers are doing it wrong and all teachers are bad.
Eg “It’s fine if the kids aren’t paying attention to what you’re teaching, why are you trying to teach 20 kids at once anyway?”
Well, because as teacher, you dont have a choice.
eg “Have it run until 1720”. So how many hours a day do you think teachers should be working then? Every teacher I know is at school early, home late and working through the evening. No wonder they burn out. This does not strike me as remotely realistic.
I am concerned that teaching is ineffective, that classroom failure has serious downstream effects. The harms here: Well frankly, I am not convinced that teacher demanding your attention is a harm. Fact of life in a society that needs educated people.
Of course. It does seem like that problem should be fixed at a different level. I also think that if you keep increasing past the number 20 indefinitely, eventually the idea one teacher will do will become ridiculous, and things will have to change greatly to even begin to handle such a situation.
I had a few classes (well before uni***) that didn’t (often) revolve around lectures or powerpoint presentations*, instead work was largely done out of a textbook. And the teacher answered questions/helped people who were struggling. (Sometimes several people had the same question, and so it switched to being covered for the class.) But that is a particular teaching style, and it seems like it’s going to work better for some subjects**** and some people.
*They were seen as a tool for covering a lot of info quickly, but in a way that was suboptimal for students (attention) for long periods of time**, and were used when necessary but not otherwise.
**The longer a lecture, the more this is an issue.
***I remember it worked well for a coach teaching a topic, and was better than the some classes that weren’t run that way.
****A class that involves reading books will, of course look at least a bit like this—in or out of class.
Living in the modern world means that a child really needs to learn to read and write/type. For many children, they would much rather be outside playing. Me and my children were motivated and reading before arriving at the school gate. We “suffered” the harms above to some extent unnecessarily but for many, many of classmates, some from homes with no books, learning those basics was tough. They certainly werent going to learn it at school without restricting their liberties. The harms suffered in that were well and truly compensated for by the critical life skill of reading.
Helping with a dyslexic, I see the school in no way able to cope with current staffing. They really want you to pay for outside school programmes with one on one teaching. Effective if you can afford it, but well beyond the means of many families.
Children mostly caring about playing outside sounds like a perspective from another time.
Children care about being able to use their phones in various ways. They text with their friends. They play computer games where being able to read is useful.
Or maybe another place. Extremely unusual for kids here to have phones in first 4-5 years of schooling. And much as my dyslexic relative would like to read what a computer game is saying, it doesnt inspire the hard work needed for learning to read. Not fun compared to other screaming around with a ball.
There’s no reason why children have to learn those skills in the first 4-5 years of schooling. The important thing is that they learn them.
Ok, I am curious, if they dont read or write in first 4-5 years, what do you expect them to learn in those years?
Children became grown-ups 200 years ago too. I don’t think we need to teach them anything at all, much less anything in particular.
According to this SSC post, kids can easily catch up in math even if they aren’t taught any math at all in the 5 first years of school.
That would probably work for reading too, I guess. (Reading appears to require more purpose-built brain circuitry than math. At least I got that impression from reading Henrich’s WEIRD. I don’t have any references though.)
200 years ago was different world—reading wasnt required. Ask anyone who cant read as an adult how tough that is. The 10% with dyslexia need intervention fast.
[To respond to not the literal content of your comment, in case it’s relevant: I think some teachers are intrinsically bad, some are intrinsically great, and many are unfortunately compelled or think they’re compelled to try to solve an impossible problem and do the best they can. Blame just really shouldn’t be the point, and if you’re worried someone will blame someone based on a description, then you may have a dispute with the blamer, not the describer.]
Well, it’s worth distinguishing (1) whether/what harms are being done, and (2) under what circumstances the harms can be avoided. I don’t know precisely what you mean by “criticism of schools”. I don’t think you mean, it’s unrealistic—fantastical, unbelievable—that schools do these harms. I take you to mean, it’s unrealistic not to do these harms to kids. I don’t want to blur between “there’s no way to avoid this” and “this isn’t happening” (largely because it’s just not true that there’s no way to avoid it), or between “this is happening” and “we must do certain things, and blame/punish certain people” (because the implication just doesn’t hold, and the implication is sometimes used to couple the belief with the plan more than it has to be, and then push against the belief because the supposedly implied plan would be bad; as in “if school were harmful, I’d have to take my family and go live in the woods and be cut off from society; that would be bad for my family; therefore school is not harmful”).
To allow teachers to not harm their kids, parents might have to be willing to firmly disclaim for their kids anything like “expectations from society/government that they will be ready pass this exam at end of the year”. It may be unrealistic that parents would do that; I’d like to know why, but more acutely I’d like to see parents who are willing to do that organize.
I’m not aware of good evidence that it’s easy to get better results for students simply by spending more money and that money is a key limiting factor. What makes you believe that?
“not easy to get better results simply by spending money” is not in conflict with “getting better results needs more funding than taxpayers are prepared to hand out”.
It could be the results are nonlinear, and the real gains happen a long way past the current funding levels. It could be there are many required improvements, and money is just one constraint, but visible enough that it makes the others un-testable.
As the Gates Foundation research suggests currently a bachelor of education doesn’t teach anything that helps teachers to help their students get better education results. You could save a lot of money by simply not paying people with a bachelor of education more money.
ChristianKI. That I think is a USA problem, but many teachers here (NZ) have rated teaching college as pretty much waste of time, with all their real learning coming from ground-zero experience under good mentors. As I perceive it, the problem with teaching college is that they are closely aligned with the university system and lecturers want to teach their research interests, not necessarily “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom”. My daughter-in-law went through experimental system where she was put into classroom of low-decile school as paid teacher after only a few weeks of intensive training, albeit with far reduced hours and a mentor. A few week-long intensive training camps during the year. Something of “crucible experience” with I gather a substantial dropout rate and a longer route to full teacher registration, but arguably a better training than college. Long term analysis of the programme will be interesting.
Unfortunately, problems of US academia are not limited to the US. The problem isn’t just that professors focus on their research interests. If there research would be about useful things like “strategies for effective engagement of ADHD and ASD students in your classroom” there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s rather that they focus on critical theory instead of focusing on actually effective studies.
Instead of asking how a teacher can effectively project his authority in a classroom so that the children follow his teachings, they rather want to deconstruct authority. This is in turn is different from changing the school system to something like what happens in Sudbury Valley, so it ends up as a quite useless activity.
Changing this is not a question of money but of political will to change structures.
I do expect that projects like the one you describe are an improvement.
Hmm, I had to look up what “critical theory” is, but I do remember complaints like in early 80s about one college in particular. A friend of sister went through it and called it the “Society for the Protection of the Unborn Thought” (Society for Protection for Unborn Child was a prominant anti-abortion organisation here). Needless to say, it didnt make an impression on her, and think that particular problem vanished in reforms of the 90s.
My daughter went through the conventional college route to teaching but the complaint were more lecturers hobby horses on continuous teaching practise evaluation, learning styles etc. - ie theoretically useful but not the most important things for beginner teachers. Lots of what an ideal learner and classroom should be like but not a lot on how to get there.
Indeed. Perhaps focusing on MORE teachers (aka smaller class sizes) is more important than BETTER teachers (though I suspect both matter). And certainly more important than MORE CREDENTIALED teachers.
Note that it may well be that this should to be framed as “don’t pay teachers less because they didn’t get an Education degree” rather than “don’t pay them more if they did”. And it does open the can of worms of productivity measurement. Teaching is no different from many vocations in that it’s nigh-impossible to be objective and mechanical about who’s doing it well and who isn’t. It IS different from many vocations in that it’s government-administered and has a very strong union which prevents less-legible but more-useful measurement.
What percent of the population should be teachers?
While I agree that small classes are generally better, there are simply too many students, so if we make small classrooms, too many teachers will be needed. Everything has a cost, and at some moment we have to say something like “no, we can’t have 20% of adult population working as teachers; and we definitely can’t have the smartest 20% of adult population working as teachers, because smart people are needed in other professions, too—or would you perhaps prefer to have a stupid surgeon operate on you?”.
Education does not scale well, at least the way we do it now. Small classes just make it worse. What are the possibilities?
better use of books, movies, computers. A teacher standing in front of the blackboard explaining stuff, could be replaced by a book or a movie telling the same thing. (But what if you have a question? Okay, so replace half lessons with books and movies, and the questions can be asked during the remaining half.)
some kind of pyramid education, where older kids would teach younger kids? Again, let older kids teach younger kids half of the lessons, the remaining half would be with the adult teacher.
maybe just… teach less? If kids don’t pay attention, maybe just let them go (to a room where babysitting is provided without education).
And definitely decouple teaching from certification. You should not get diploma for “being there”, but for having the knowledge (regardless of whether you obtained it at school, at home, or anywhere else).
In my vision, a school would be a huge babysitting center, where parents can leave their kids between 6:00 and 18:00, with voluntary classes—some of them taught by teachers, other by students, or external people. Places for silent study, reading books. Computers with educational software and automated tests. Students can take an exam on any subject they want, at any moment. You get a diploma for completing a certain set of exams. You could spend N years at the school without getting the diploma. Or you could learn at home, and then just come to school to take the exams and get the diploma.
In some sense, 100% - it takes a village and all that. More reasonably, maybe 5% or so to have pre-college teaching as their primary occupation. 22% of the US population in 2020 was under age 18, so this would give a comfortable class size of 5-15 (varying by subject), with some slack for admin and supervision.
You’re right, of course, that scale is the big problem—most people don’t WANT to spend the resources (money and human productivity) that is implied by universal good schooling. But they don’t want to admit that either, so they just complain. There are correlates here to cost disease in health care—the appearance of helping being more important than actually helping, and the political infeasibility of providing less service to the less-able-to-pay.
I have this vision in my head of teaching being primarily the responsibility of retired folks.
In that society, “retirement” (and perhaps more importantly retirement benefits like Social Security, Medicare, etc.) involves spending a few hours to a day (or more, if you want) at a local school, teaching.
This:
Keeps the older generation more involved, while giving them a platform to share their knowledge/experience with the young (which is arguably the a large fraction of the value of keeping them around to begin with)
Gives students (K-12 mostly, but no reason it couldn’t include college) the chance to interact and learn from people who’ve had lives and careers already, exposing them to more options, opportunities, and cultures
Helps pay for retirement benefits by having retired folks work in the public sector (perhaps with a small additional stipend for doing so?) And we’re also only talking about ~1 class a week, unless they wanted to do more
I do quite like most parts of your vision, though it would likely need to be supplemented with a set of specialists for learning disabilities or counseling, and so on.
I like this. Mostly because my idea of perfect education is “everyone uses something like Khan Academy”, where the usual response is: “but what about the small kids who can’t read yet?” Your proposal addresses this part.
Do you have a link to the research about the effect of a bachelor of education?
I don’t have data to back my claim up, but as a maths teacher it’s clearly easier for me to reach three students than 30, just because I have so much more time to give to each student (epistemic status : I’m currently teaching one course where I have 30 students and one where I have 3...)
“What makes you believe that?”
Largely based on studies on class size. Some say effect is only modest but reducing class size from 35 to 25 is pretty meaningless. Reducing below 20 though is different story. A high-needs child in a large classroom is really going struggle—only so much time that a teacher can give them. I have also looked at what experiments in “Charter schools” have done—with much higher $$ per child than state are able give.
Anecdotally, (and from serving on school board), what is wanted is quality teachers but pay and conditions make retention difficult.