I teach in the hope of making the world a better place.
While practically every teacher I have known over many years came to teaching in part with this hope, only a few outstanding teachers are able to carry it fully into a life in teaching. What happens? To begin with, most of us attend colleges or preparation programs that neither acknowledge nor honor our larger and deeper purposes—places that turn our attention to research on teaching or methods of teaching and away from a serious encounter with the reality of teaching, the art and the craft of teaching, the morality of teaching, or the ecology of childhood. Our love of children, our idealism, is made to seem quaint in these places. Later, we find ourselves struggling to survive in schools structured in ways that make our purposes seem hopeless and inaccessible. We may have longed for child-centered communities of shared values and common goals, but mostly we settle for institutions, procedure-centered places characterized by hierarchy, control, and efficiency. [William Ayers, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Teacher’s College, 1993, pp. 8-9]
I went into teaching wanting to do it differently, to be the kind of teacher who leads by example, not by coercion. But once I get into the daily grind of the work that I do, surrounded by people who insist that I support the status quo—administrators, other teachers, parents, students—I start to slide. I start to forget why I’m there and what I’m trying to do. Instead my goal becomes to get through the day without getting criticized. I get worn down. And I start to hate my job because I’m constantly trying to use power I don’t believe in to enforce policies I don’t believe in. And I’m feeling so pressured and stressed and busy that I don’t even realize that is what’s going on, until it gets so bad that it forces me to stop and spend time reevaluating. Then I recommit to working for change, but the second I get back in that environment, the slow erosion begins again. [an acquaintance of the author] quoted by [Derrick Jensen, Walking On Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution, Chelsea Green, 2004, p. 78]
Over and over, teachers have told us that they began their careers with excitement and enthusiasm, eager to work with the students to facilitate their intellectual and personal development. But as the years passed and the pressures and demands intensified, the teachers have said, they lost much of their enthusiasm. They point to standardized curricula, where they have to teach specified material rather than what seemed right to them, and to the pressures on them to be sure their students get high standardized achievement scores. …
In a way, it is all quite ironic. Parents, politicians, and school administrators all want students to be creative problem-solvers and to learn material at a deep, conceptual level. But in their eagerness to achieve these ends, they pressure teachers to produce. The paradox is that the more they do that, the more controlling the teachers become, which, as we have seen so many times, undermines intrinsic motivation, creativity, and conceptual understanding in the students. The harder the teachers are pushed to get results, the less likely it is that the important results will be forthcoming. [Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, Penguin, 1996, pp. 157-158]
[T]he [teaching] job is carried on under impossible conditions of overcrowding and saving public money. Not that there is not enough social wealth, but first things are not put first. Also, the school system has spurious aims. It soon becomes clear that the underlying aims are to relieve the home and keep the kids quiet; or, suddenly, the aim is to produce physicists. Timid supervisors, bigoted clerics, and ignorant school boards forbid real teaching. … A commercially debauched popular culture makes learning disesteemed. … Progressive methods are emasculated. Attention to each case is out of the question, and all the children—the bright, the average, and the dull—are systematically retarded one way or another, while the teacher’s hands are tied. Naturally the pay is low—for the work is hard, useful, and of public concern, all three of which qualities tend to bring lower pay. It is alleged that the low pay is why there is a shortage of teachers and why the best do not choose the profession. My guess is that the best avoid it because of the certainty of miseducating. Nor are the best wanted by the system, for they are not safe. [Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society, Vintage, 1960, pp. 24-25]
[S]chools in the United States are subjected to many powerful pressures, from such bodies as teachers’ and administrators’ unions, school boards, state legislatures, and the voting public. … These combined pressures make it very difficult for individual teachers to operate with much autonomy or sense of empowerment. Perhaps as a reaction to the fact that external agencies often attempt to institute far-reaching reforms “from the top,” schools—like other bureaucratic institutions—have developed strong protective mechanisms that often preclude any meaningful kind of reform or strangle it before it has a chance to take hold. …
Even though educational systems may pay lip service to goals like “understanding” or “deep knowledge,” they in fact prove inimical to the pursuit of these goals. Sometimes these goals are considered to be hopelessly idealistic or unrealistic; at most, in the view of educational bureaucrats, schools ought to produce citizens who exhibit some basic literacies and can hold a job. But even in cases where these goals are taken seriously, events conspire to undermine their pursuit. Particularly when systems are expected to produce hard evidence of their success, the focus sooner or later comes to fall on indices that are readily quantified, such as scores on objective tests. Measuring of understanding must be postponed for another day or restricted to a few experimental schools, which are allowed to operate under waivers. [Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books, 1991, p. 139-140]
[T]eachers are often encouraged—at least at the rhetorical level—to take the initiative and to be forceful and imaginative in their teaching. In fact, however, they feel caught in a bind, for adhering to the regulations is so time-consuming and exhausting that little time or energy remains for innovation. Risking censure or worse, a few teachers will ignore the regulations in order to pursue a more individualized program of instruction. Most teachers, however, will achieve an uneasy truce, with both their superiors and their students, by adopting “defensive teaching.” Adhering to the rules, not making excessive demands on anyone (including themselves), asking students mostly to memorize definitions and lists rather than to tackle challenging problems, they will maintain control over their classrooms, but at the cost of educational inspiration. [Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach, Basic Books, 1991, pp. 140-141]
Every teacher who is told what material to cover, when to cover it, and how to evaluate children’s performance is a teacher who knows that enthusiasm for one’s work quickly evaporates in the face of being controlled. Not every teacher, however, realizes that exactly the same thing holds true for students: deprive them of self-determination and you have likely deprived them of motivation. [Alfie Kohn, “Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide,” Phi Delta Kappan, Sept. 1993, https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/choices-children/]
A teacher’s guide provides instructions for the teacher as to certain methods guaranteed to help us lead our students to a set of seemingly inevitable conclusions …
Unfortunately, while seeming to make the teacher’s job more simple, the teacher’s guides are also taking away the satisfaction of all independent and creative labor in the preparation of the daily work. The guidebook seems to be the teacher’s friend. Insidiously, it also robs the teacher of the only intellectual dignity which our profession still allows us: the individual, passionate or whimsical exhilaration of invention. [John Kozol, On Being a Teacher, 1981, Oneworld, 2009, p. 49]
Part of the tragedy is that teachers themselves were recruited to produce—under careful guidance—the objectives, materials, and tests for the programs that were to undermine their professional skills and authority. The boredom and frustration to which students were then subject carried the reassuring label “produced by teachers.” All of this still goes on today, with teachers recruited to write “standards” for themselves to attain, as if teachers never had any standards before …
The author of a highly successful commercial instructional program that employed all of these fragmented techniques told me why they had to be so detailed and specific—“You can’t trust teachers to teach.” His program was so detailed it even told teachers when to smile, and to ignore student questions if the program hadn’t provided answers.
And that is the belief that has lead to the proliferation of experts claiming that teaching in the future can be entrusted to computers. [Frank Smith, The Book of Learning and Forgetting, Teachers College, 1998, pp. 71-72]
Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge. This is an art very difficult to impart. Whenever a textbook is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. If it were easy, the book ought to be burned; for it cannot be educational. In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place. [Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays, Williams and Norgate, 1955, pp. 6-7]
Teachers themselves are perceived as competent to the extent that their students excel, with excellence defined in an ever narrowing arc. Whenever teachers believe that their role is to ensure high test scores rather than to help students learn, they pressure themselves and in the process use controlling, autocratic teaching techniques. Here control means emphasizing extrinsic rewards (particularly when they are dispensed competitively), allowing students little choice for how they go about learning, and threatening to withdraw emotional support as a means of punishment. …
With standardization and greater accountability in school performance comes superficial coverage, and the possibility that we may be simply teaching children a series of “tricks” that enable them to perform well on standardized tests yet leave them deficient in basic understanding. …
Today it is only the brave, dedicated teacher who deemphasizes immediate performance goals for the sake of teaching to more lasting objectives, which include encouraging the will to learn and the productive use of the mind, especially when these goals are not easily measured. [Martin Covington, The Will to Learn: A Guide for Motivating Young People, Cambridge UP, 1998, pp. 227-228]
FairTest makes [this] point in its “National Resolution on High-Stakes Testing”: “The over-reliance on high-stakes standardized testing in state and federal accountability systems is undermining educational quality and equity in U.S. public schools by hampering educators’ efforts to focus on the broad range of learning experiences that promote the innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and deep subject matter knowledge that will allow students to thrive in a democracy and an increasingly global society and economy.” [Ken Robinson, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education, Viking, 2015, pp. 162-163]
Bad working conditions are not the only reason why we do not have enough able teachers, or why good ones are prevented from performing as they should. … Not only do we pay our teachers too little for work they are expected to do, we also fail in this country to give them the respect that the worth of their service to the community deserves. Teachers in the United States do not enjoy the social status that the importance of their position merits.
Add to all this the many administrative, public relations, and quasi-menial duties that teachers are asked to perform, duties that take mind and energy away from teaching, and it is easy to understand why our educational system is not able to attract many of the ablest young into the teaching profession, or to turn those who do join the ranks into adequate teachers. [Mortimer J. Adler, The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto, 1982, Touchstone / Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 57-58]
[I] am not saying that among our fifty thousand bureaucrats there are no persons of real worth. The issue is precisely that of the effect of the institution upon the individual. The institution, the educational system in all its branches, is corrupting to the individual, and though the corruption may in many cases take the form of considerable expertise, the fact remains that competence is destroyed. [George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School, 1969, Vintage / Random House, 1970, pp. 275-276]
Let me say again, as I have said before, that schools are worse than most of the people in them and that many of these people do many harmful things they would rather not do, and a great many other harmful things that they do not even see as harmful. The whole of the school is much worse than the sum of its parts. [John Holt, Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children, 1974, HoltGWS, 2013, pp. 167-168]
[T]housands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. [John Gatto, “The Psychopathic School,” 1990, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society, 2005, pp. 21-22]
It has long been known that nearly all college students who want to become teachers and who as seniors elect the education courses required for certification, fall back discomfited by what they are asked to learn. Though young and moved by a generous impulse, they can see that the “methods” taught are mere word-spinning and that while the relation of method to subjects is non-existent, subjects themselves are the last concern of educationism.
In short, teacher training is based on a strong anti-intellectual bias, enhanced by a total lack of imagination. The trainers live in a thick cloud of nomenclature, formulas, “objectives,” evaluations, and “strategies.” …
What then are the native qualities to look for in the person who, though not one of those born to the task, would make a good teacher? … brains enough to feel bewildered and revolted by the educationist language—and courage enough to admit it. [Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, U of Chicago P, 1991, pp. 97-98]
Consistently, for decades, those college students who have majored in education have been among the least qualified of all college students, and the professors who taught them have been among the least respected by their colleagues elsewhere in the college or university. The word “contempt” appears repeatedly in discussions of the way most academic students and professors view their counterparts in the field of education. …
When the president of Harvard University retired in 1933, he told the institution’s overseers that Harvard’s Graduate School of Education was a “kitten that ought to be drowned.” More recently, a knowledgeable academic declared, “the educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least amount of hard work.” Education schools and education departments have been called “the intellectual slums” of the university. …
In short, some of the least qualified students, taught by the least qualified professors in the lowest quality courses supply most American public school teachers. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, pp. 23-25]
The biggest liability of the American public school system is the legal requirement that education courses be taken by people who seek careers as tenured teachers. These courses are almost unanimously condemned—by scholars who have studied them, teachers who have taken them, and anyone else with the misfortune to have encountered them. The crucial importance of these courses, and the irreparable damage they do, is not because of what they teach or do not teach. It is because they are the filter through which the flow of teachers must pass. Mediocrity and incompetence flow freely through these filters, but they filter out many high-ability people, who refuse to subject themselves to the inanity of education courses, which are the laughing stock of many universities. One of the great advantages of the private schools is that they do not have to rely on getting their teachers from such sources. [Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas, Free Press, 1993, pp. 288-289)
The professional educators have been denounced as “self-serving paragons of mediocrity,” who have imposed patterns of accreditation on the various local educational systems, making it impossible for teachers of the young to exercise their craft unless they enroll in certain prescribed courses in pedagogy. These courses are often characterized as irrelevant if not detrimental to a genuine teaching process whose fruits should be the acquisition of the skills of communication, familiarity with the cultural heritage of our civilization, and basic knowledge of the major intellectual disciplines. [Sidney Hook, Education for Modern Man: A New Perspective, 1946, Wipf and Stock, 2019, p. 10]
For the most part, the members of the teaching profession are overtrained and undereducated. Teaching is an art and a teacher must be trained, but since the technique is one of communicating knowledge and inculcating discipline, it is not educational psychology and courses in method and pedagogy which train a teacher, but the liberal arts. A good teacher must be a liberal artist. Further, a teacher should have a cultivated mind, generally cultivated regardless of his field of special interest, for he must be the visible and moving representative of the cultural tradition to his students. [Mortimer J. Adler, Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 78-79]
Public-school teaching in the United States is … an indigenous petty civil service, characterized by the usual gradations of rank and bureaucratic modes of organization. A civil service has its traditions, derived from the duties for which it is responsible. They may be—in the public school they are—traditions of responsibility, benevolence, and devotion to duty, and they influence the actual conduct of the school system strongly. But the traditions of a civil service are not those of chivalry; they do not emphasize courage, feeling, imagination, breadth of vision, and independence of action. In the tradition of the school, a teacher who manifested these qualities would be thought to need help in adapting himself to functioning well in a group situation. He would get lots of it. [Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, 1959, Dell, 1970, pp. 128-129]
Next to the clerk in holy orders, the fellow with the foulest job in the world is the schoolmaster. Both are underpaid, both fall steadily in authority and dignity, and both wear out their hearts trying the impossible. How much the world asks of them, and how little they can actually deliver! …
The art of pedagogics becomes a sort of puerile magic, a thing of preposterous secrets, a grotesque compound of false premises and illogical conclusions. Every year sees a craze for some new solution of the teaching enigma, an endless series of flamboyant arcana. … The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child. Teaching becomes a thing in itself, separable from and superior to the thing taught. [H. L. Mencken, “The Educational Process,” 1918, A Mencken Chrestomathy, Vintage, 1982, pp. 301-302]
Professor David Hawkins, in his article “What It Means To Teach,” said some good words about teaching. … He says, in part: “…the teacher is one who acquires authority through a compact of trust, in which the teacher seeks to extend the powers of the learner and promises to abridge them only transiently and to the end of extending them. …”
“A compact of trust.” Yes—but how can there be a compact of trust when the student is not free to choose what he shall learn, or when, or how, or with how much and what kind of help? How can there be a compact of trust when the student is not free to choose or to change his teacher? How can there be a compact of trust when the teacher may be obliged (as I once was), in order to keep his job, to do things that he knows will harm the student, destroy his confidence and ability to learn? [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, p. 60]
A teacher who does not use fear and does not need to use it, who makes his students less afraid, and so makes them harder for others to make afraid, threatens every other teacher in the S-chool. His natural authority undermines their official authority. They will see him as standing on the wrong side—the student side—of the line between Us and Them. Thus, S-chools tell teachers all the time not to “fraternize” with students, to “keep a professional distance.” [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 205-206]
Society is not willing to let adolescents run loose and parents are not willing to tend them at home. Therefore they must go to school. Almost all teachers, from kindergarten to graduate school, are to a greater or lesser degree being paid to keep students in a room or busy with homework who don’t want to be there. [Peter Elbow, Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching, Oxford UP, 1986, pp. 91-92]
Only when all parents, not just rich ones, have a truly free choice in education, when they can take their children out of a school they don’t like, and have a choice of many others to send them to, or the possibility of starting their own, or of educating their children outside of school altogether—only then will we teachers begin to stop being what most of us still are and if we are honest know we are, which is jailers and baby-sitters, cops without uniforms, and begin to be professionals, freely exercising an important, valued, and honored skill and art. [John Holt, What Do I Do On Monday?, 1970] quoted by [Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 75]
[F]orced attendance fundamentally transforms schools into jails. Students know they are there because they must be there. That has subtle, corrosive effects on students, teachers, and administrators. … One should not expect anyone to be both a good teacher and a good prison guard. Yet that is what is expected of teachers today … [Sheldon Richman, Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. 86]
Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means, the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. Whoever takes that right away from us, as the educators do, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think, that for all our lives we must depend on others to tell us the meaning of our world and our lives, and that any meaning we may make for ourselves, out of our own experience, has no value.
Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.
This does not mean that no one should ever influence or try to influence what others think and feel. … But I refuse to put these others in a position where they feel they have no choice but to agree with me, or seem to agree. I want them to have the right, if they wish, to reject absolutely any and all of my ideas, as I would want and demand for myself the right to reject theirs. Also, I have learned that no one can truly say Yes to an idea, mine or anyone else’s, unless he can freely say No to it. This is why, except as an occasional visitor, I will no longer do my teaching in compulsory and competitive schools. [John Holt, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better, 1976, Sentient, 2004, pp. 3-4]
Related:
– What is “reality of encounter” and why is it important in education?
– What are the effects of coercion in education?
– What is the nature of authority? How is it gained or lost?
– How does “global competition” effect education?