Sometimes I suspect that the teaching profession may attract the wrong kind of people. (Speaking about the elementary and high schools. Universities are a bit different, e.g. they do research, they deal with adults, etc.)
When you think about it, teacher is a servant of the government, nominated to impart the cultural wisdom to children. Think about what psychological type would this job description attract most. To say it mildly, probably not the “open to experience” ones. (In the youngest classes, it also gets mixed with the “loves little children” ones.)
I was a teacher shortly, and I remember how shocked were my students, when I answered one of their questions with “I don’t know”. It was like I broke some taboo. I asked: “Guys, you asked me something which is outside the scope of the lesson, outside the scope of what is taught at this school, so it’s not an incompetence on my part to not know that. And it’s impossible to know everything, even within the subject one teaches. So if you ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, what exactly did you expect me to do?” After a while the students concluded that they would expect me to just make something up, because in their experience that’s what an ordinary teacher would do. It’s not because they would prefer to get a bullshit answer, but because they accepted “teachers being unable to admit not knowing something” to be a perfectly normal part of the world.
Now try to take this kind of people and make them admit that, essentially, they were doing their whole jobs wrong. That many things they believe necessary are actually harmful, a large part of their “knowledge about teaching” is actually a myth, and the part that isn’t a myth is probably still somehow exaggerated and dogmatized. They are not going to take it well.
Now think about the people above them in the power ladder. The school inspection is former teachers, probably the most dogmatic of them, who already don’t even have the feedback that comes from actually teaching the kids. My short experience with them suggests they are completely insane. They are the ones who will take the stopwatch, measure how many minutes during the lesson you spent doing “teamwork”, and judge the whole lesson by this number alone, ignoring everything else. (Unless instead of “teamwork” their momentary obsession happens to be something else.) And the layer above them, the bureaucrats in the department of education, they are not even teachers, they don’t know fuck about anything, they are merely creating more paperwork for everyone else, based on the recently popular buzzwords. The whole system is insane.
(This description is based on my country, maybe it is slightly less insane at other places.)
Right, that’s a good example. And then the normal people stigmatize that sort of thing, as if Montessori kids are weird.
Sometimes I suspect that the teaching profession may attract the wrong kind of people. (Speaking about the elementary and high schools. Universities are a bit different, e.g. they do research, they deal with adults, etc.)
When you think about it, teacher is a servant of the government, nominated to impart the cultural wisdom to children. Think about what psychological type would this job description attract most. To say it mildly, probably not the “open to experience” ones. (In the youngest classes, it also gets mixed with the “loves little children” ones.)
I was a teacher shortly, and I remember how shocked were my students, when I answered one of their questions with “I don’t know”. It was like I broke some taboo. I asked: “Guys, you asked me something which is outside the scope of the lesson, outside the scope of what is taught at this school, so it’s not an incompetence on my part to not know that. And it’s impossible to know everything, even within the subject one teaches. So if you ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, what exactly did you expect me to do?” After a while the students concluded that they would expect me to just make something up, because in their experience that’s what an ordinary teacher would do. It’s not because they would prefer to get a bullshit answer, but because they accepted “teachers being unable to admit not knowing something” to be a perfectly normal part of the world.
Now try to take this kind of people and make them admit that, essentially, they were doing their whole jobs wrong. That many things they believe necessary are actually harmful, a large part of their “knowledge about teaching” is actually a myth, and the part that isn’t a myth is probably still somehow exaggerated and dogmatized. They are not going to take it well.
Now think about the people above them in the power ladder. The school inspection is former teachers, probably the most dogmatic of them, who already don’t even have the feedback that comes from actually teaching the kids. My short experience with them suggests they are completely insane. They are the ones who will take the stopwatch, measure how many minutes during the lesson you spent doing “teamwork”, and judge the whole lesson by this number alone, ignoring everything else. (Unless instead of “teamwork” their momentary obsession happens to be something else.) And the layer above them, the bureaucrats in the department of education, they are not even teachers, they don’t know fuck about anything, they are merely creating more paperwork for everyone else, based on the recently popular buzzwords. The whole system is insane.
(This description is based on my country, maybe it is slightly less insane at other places.)