Critique of Teacher Training and University Priorities

Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 23 If a teacher is better at teaching a child than a parent is, it must be because the teacher knows something the parent doesn’t know or, at least, doesn’t know how to teach. This makes the teacher more ef- fective than the parent, but for very uninteresting reasons. You can’t teach what you don’t know, of course. But knowledge alone is meaningless because teaching is not about the transfer of knowledge. I realize that a great many people think that this is what teaching is about; except if that were the issue, students wouldn’t even think about rating their teachers on anything except how much they knew. And, by the way, that is about the last thing teachers are ever rated on. For the most part, teachers are rated by students on how entertain- ing they are. But entertainment and teaching are really not particu- larly related. They are not unrelated because you can’t get through to someone who has tuned you out. But you can entertain your students and get great ratings and still teach them nothing. Here is the Big Ten professor again: At a big state university, which one would think has an obligation to supply training to the students of that state in a major field in which students can readily find employment, the faculty could care less about that and they only want to do graduate teaching. We teach courses that are modeled after courses in the professor training schools like Harvard and MIT. But how many professors do we need? Superstars who bring a lot of funding are very important in the university. The superstar system made sense when there were superstars. But today how many of these superstars have really big ideas? Does my school really have any superstars at all? I don’t think so. The School of Education, where I am also on the faculty, has a research focus, which they do badly. Most of their students plan to be teachers. But they teach them the literature and not how to teach. It is the same situation as in computer science. They really want their students to become professors of education. They are not teaching teachers to teach because they don’t care about that. They look down their noses at teacher preparation schools. Ninety-eight percent of their undergraduates HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023769