I don’t understand why the teaching profession is so deeply disrespected in our culture. Were the balance of our schooling experiences so negative that we, as a nation, have chosen to devalue the act of teaching as a result? Teachers are underpaid, required to buy their own classroom supplies, chided heavily for the summer vacation, and above all else completely disrespected by parents who–on average–view the teacher as an enemy combatant who is somehow either holding their kid back or responsible for the fact that their kid cannot get ahead.
We routinely cut education budgets, school shop, complain about the length of the school day, blame teachers for the social conditions created or allowed by the system, fail to award the teachers doing good work, and then immediately blame all teachers for the handful of really bad ones out there. Not only does this have a negative impact on the education of the moment, but it furthers that negative relationship between teacher and student down through the generations. I suspect that everyone has had a good teacher at some point. I want to hope that a safe and productive learning environment is the rule instead of the exception, but more and more it is becoming a rarity to hear that or to hear about good teaching at all. Perhaps we as a society ought to get back to looking for silver linings as opposed to looking for that awful stroke of lightning that burns down our confidence in learning as a whole.
This is not a quick-fix situation, but something endemic to the American society as a whole. We have trended towards the quick and easy, but education is neither. Fixing education is even less so. I am constantly reminded by the contrasting viewpoints of thinkers who argue, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and those who remind us that our education system is essentially the same as it was when we founded the country. I fear it is not the kind of responsiveness we ought to be practicing as world leaders. Moreover, I fear our so-called world leadership has become far less academic and inspirational and far more monetarily driven. We are powerful because we are profitable. However, to remain profitable we must be able to capitalize on the mental resources of our citizens. Unfortunately, we have gone far away from that, settling for fly by night apps and imported intelligence.
I believe it is time we started giving back to the teachers, so they can put us back up where we belong.