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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.
That would not seem to address OP's concerns re improving the quality of education.
I am more qualified than the average high school teacher to teach any of math, physics, or computer science, at least -- I have a BSc, and therefore would need at least 2 years of indoctrination at the Education department before I would be allowed to teach high school in my jurisdiction.
I am a smart slacker, and could certainly get into earning ~80k p.a. for short days and summers off -- indeed I considered it prior to getting into remote software development. (yes I know most teachers do a lot of work outside of school hours -- they are not smart slackers)
But two more years of university is a bridge too far, so I find something else to do -- I submit that the population of people like me is much larger than the one that pursued teachers certificates -- so much so that even if there is no selection effect against being smart and nuanced in the teacher's certificate population, you would have many more such people considering teaching if you removed the need for an education diploma.
I hope this is clear?
Two more years is probably too long, and there's too damn much indoctrination going on, but in reality you can't just walk out of your college degree course and into a classroom and start teaching.
You can try, and this is the fun part of seeing student teachers doing practical work becasue the twenty or thirty eager little blossoms sitting before them in the classroom are quite likely to try and drive them crazy just for fun, but you do need practical instruction in pedagogical methods, supervision by experienced teachers, and learning how to control the little - darlings so they'll sit down, shut up, and learn something.
What about 10-20 years in industry? I would be an excellent CS teacher, and I'm quite sure I could wrangle math/physics to at the very least the low bar set by teaching diploma recipients who happened to take a couple of such courses at the 1-200 level during their four year indoctrination.
If you're talking about further/continuing education for adults, I'd agree. (Even 20 year olds might or might not be capable of sitting down, shutting up and learning).
But if we mean "average bunch of 12-15 year old kids, particularly boys" then nope. You can't use "your job depends on you not openly sassing your boss, which is me" against them to get them to sit down, shut up, and learn.
But I have a secret superweapon -- I was a 12-15 y.o. boy, and know what kind of thing they are interested in. This allows me to manipulate them into learning stuff without making the mistake of trying to be bossy. (which was pretty common with the teacher-teachers at my high school anyways, as I recall)
I do think that 'actual deep knowledge of the material' is a pretty significant advantage here -- kids can tell when you are just regurgitating the textbook at them and don't actually know what you are talking about -- which I would think would be quite common in someone who has a four-year teaching degree with a couple of STEM electives in the mix teaching grade 11/12 physics/math/CS/Chemistry/etc.
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