The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher (1991)

This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit.

Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools, inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck?

The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans.

I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the current political equilibrium of these goals.

[3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard to make change from within such an organizational structure.

The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech. If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches, but that's for another post.

Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two.

[1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. [2] Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81. [3] Callahan, R. E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press. [4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.

If you think about it, that is completely obvious. How could one person prepare lessons in all topics when the students range all over the ages 7 to 15? The answer: they did not even try. In fact, you can look at older text books and see they were designed around the idea of a lot of self-teaching, perhaps with only a few pointers here and there (and if you were very bright and dedicated, you did not even need pointers).

The teachers primary job was to assess. The children were assigned lessons and expected to read that lesson several times until the teacher could get around to quizzing them. Good students the teacher might deign to allow to ask questions afterwards. If the student did poorly but was clearly trying hard, the teacher might offer corrections and advice. Otherwise the teacher had a free hand to beat the student for the crime of being stupid or lazy or both.

In the 19th century, there was nothing weird about so-so students dropping out at the 4th or 5th grade level. Even the dedicated were done at age 14 or 15, unless they intended to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, etc. The normal means of learning was through formal or informal apprenticeships: you were supposed to either educate yourself, or ingratiate yourself to a highly competent adult and learn at their elbow.

It is a modern fad to obsess over the teachers. In the old days of the one room school house, the teachers had to only meet a rather low bar of competence, and then the onus for learning was put on the student.