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Today's AXC book review (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind) is about "The Educated Mind" by Kieran Egan. This is my second time reading half of it, skipping to the bottom, and feeling frustrated about it.
The reviewer is clearly invested, excited, and has put a lot of effort into their review. At the same time, I can't think of how the ideas, as presented, could possibly useful as a teacher, parent, or even if I were trying to design a new charter school or something.
A while ago, I went to a two hour lecture (with no breaks! In tight stadium seating, so it was impossible to even go use the restroom!) with someone going on and on about neural imaging and The Science of Reading (tm) and Background Knowledge and whatnot, with five minutes towards the end suggesting that perhaps it would be worthwhile to look into actual books or something sometime, as part of Professional Learning Communities (tm). These are, in general, things I'm interested in, but it was all about the five strands of something, which each split into three strands, which each have seven flavors, or something like that. There was no clever resolution as in the rhyme about the man going to St Ives.
This review felt kind of like that. It either is kind of the same as one would intuitively expect, and so doesn't need explaining (yes, of course we should tell stories. Clearly. Does anyone except Eustace Scrubb's parents disagree?), or it's something very complex that teacher's will struggle to follow and probably fail at (nobody is going to succeed at teaching "ambiguity, meta-skepticism, balance, lightness" in school, to ~30 assorted youth at a time).
A bit ago I was listening to Jordan Peterson interview a man who had opened up a private school in Wichita, Kansas (Zach Lahn, Wonder). The school sounded nice. I would plausibly send my children there, were I in a position to do so. They have a system with older students mentoring younger ones, a binary choice to discuss each morning, and one time they had a disrespectful student, but then they expelled him. It isn't just rich kids, he argued: he has a nurse working two jobs to pay the tuition! I stopped listening at that point, and felt a bit spiteful about it.
Maybe I should stop following this stuff, and just keep my head down. It's not like I'm planning to open up a new Eganian charter school in my city anyway. But educational discussions follow me around, haunting my steps, ever since growing on in a very countercultural, education aware household, reading John Taylor Gatto as a teen. I tried to go to in-person events, and it followed me. The ladies tea was talking about it, with a homeschooling mom of four, a mom with her kid in private school for culture war reasons, and someone getting people to sign a culture war adjacent education petition. I tried going to church, and the pastor's wife was talking in the nursery about Sunday School curriculum, with some sort of Montessori adjacent Catholic derived philosophy or something. I tried going to a friend's house, and they were also talking about Education. All of it sounds kind of exhausted and on edge.
One of my friends was asked to help develop parts of a national curriculum and tells me that teachers are pretty stupid, allergic to nuance and don't even follow the curriculum that much. Not all teachers and so on... But it was like there was some vast Power that was inserting errors of fact, errors of punctuation, errors of logic into the curriculum, that my friend was swimming against the tide. Endless anecdotes of frustration at incompetence.
I get the sense that mainstream education in the West is systemically broken, not something that can be fixed by tweaks around the edges. Sometimes you have to disassemble the whole thing and try again from another angle. It's like an auto-catalytic process: there's a force that makes certain dysfunctional teaching doctrines prestigious, so education professors teach bad dogma, smart people are filtered away by various incentives, bureaucracy proliferates out of control, behaviour and culture of school declines and everyone just asks for more money even as standards fall.
What can you do other than set up charter schools or similar outflanking? How do you change incentives if the institution is already rotten? If you reward schools with high graduation rates, they simply raise the graduation rate and everyone is worse off with grade inflation.
If the problem is that teachers are stupid and allergic to nuance, then structural changes are not going to have much effect. We're going to have to attract smarter, less nuance-resistant people to the teaching profession. And that is going to mean raising pay substantially. Because when I was teaching, we had plenty of smart, nuance-friendly Teach for America teachers, but the vast majority of them left to go to law/medical/business school.
Nah, just abolish teachers certificates -- anyone with a bachelor's in whatever can teach that subject. It's quite a comfy job for smart slackers, just that the pipeline tends to push those people on to something else -- which by the time they are done, another two years to get suitable indoctrinated is a bridge too far to consider.
Teacher's certificates are already not required to teach in private schools, or charter schools in some states. In some states, it's quite easy to get a teaching certificate -- people with a BA can attend night school while teaching full time (and the classes aren't all that hard). Difficult while raising young kids, but otherwise not too bad.
These states do not have better test scores. These states still have teacher shortages.
It's fine with me to let people with a Bachelor's in something, anything, teach in their area of competence. The teaching programs I've participated in were not particularly grounded in reality. But this is extremely unlikely to make things significantly better, because the cushy jobs for smart slackers (which is to say, the jobs where the main job is communicating information, rather than "community building and classroom management") already have adequate teachers. And that community building and classroom management is not particularly about intelligence. It's basically orthogonal to academic ability.
Those states aren't taking my suggestion -- night school to get a teaching certificate may seem like a trivial inconvenience, but it's a quite a bit higher bar than "submit a resume, criminal record check, and interview".
So which jobs are contributing to the teacher shortage? (real question, idk -- but if they are not focused around "communicating information" (aka "teaching") my instinct would be to eliminate those jobs -- et voila, shortage eliminated!
I would personally be fine with that, but unfortunately, "willing to put up with BS administrative tasks, which are often long and dull" is actually part of the job. Working in public schools is a long procession of trivial inconveniences.
Special education, bus drivers, custodians, less than full time positions, bilingual positions, educational assistants who make ~$20,000, normal teaching positions in the sort of school where the "students" are getting into knife fights, yelling down the teachers, throwing furniture at teachers, and the administrators are yelling at teachers in the hallway. Also some of the schools where the "students" can't speak English, but the teacher is teaching entirely in English. Maybe also some math and science, though the last time I've seen those positions going unfilled was quite some time.
I suspect that the deal with things like bus drivers and custodians is that they still have to pass a background check and be proven safe with kids, but there's no status, and they don't pay well. Educational assistant jobs also pay terribly, and they can be transferred to super unpleasant and sometimes dangerous one on one behavioral special education positions.
You might naively think "I am not a special education teacher, and so I would not have to teach special education students, about whom I know very little." This is not true. More than half the elementary classrooms have a couple of children in them who have pretty high support needs, need a great deal of individual attention, but won't get it, because there are also at least 20 other kids, simultaneously learning normal kid stuff. I'm not going to describe the people in question in too much detail here, but it can get rough. Especially since everybody has to be super vague about the situation.There are also a lot of "BIPs" now -- behavior action plans, which mean that every time the child acts badly, the teacher is punished by having to fill out a lot of forms (while they are "teaching" -- elementary teachers do not necessarily get a prep period every day), and the child is sent to the counselor for a doughnut or something.
The aggressive classrooms are self evident. I knew someone who became a professional dancer after having a desk thrown at here, and the district did not do anything about it, and the offender came right back. I knew a shop teacher who quit mid-year after a young person was running around with sharp tools and propane torches, but could not be removed from the class.
In one sense, there is a clear and obvious route to correcting these situations: perhaps it was unwise to make public schools the childcare/detention facility of last resort. Perhaps that shouldn't be the job of schools. Yet here we are. And the legislature could probably go ahead and say "anyone who can pas this fairly difficult test is free to teach," and that might be a good idea, but it will still not improve conditions, so it would still be a pretty hard sell outside of a couple years of idealism for most people who aren't committed enough to at least take a couple of night school classes while applying.
Edit: also, this https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/difference-between-tech-hiring-and-teacher-hiring/
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