Today is World Teachers Day. It’s a day we honor teachers around the world and thank them for their dedication and hard work, building our future.
Andy Hargreaves poses a thought experiment: Imagine a world without teachers!
He begins:
Never has there been a more important time than this moment, right now, to think about and appreciate what great teachers have done for our children and also for us. We have seen what the world looks like when its teachers are taken away from our children. We have witnessed online how teachers have struggled mightily to master complex digital platforms and to try and make virtual class interactions with children as enriching as possible. Plunged into virtual learning at very short notice, our own grandchild’s teacher has posted materials as early as 4am. We have also learned about all the teachers who delivered curriculum materials, workbooks, pens and paper to poor working class homes when many children were unable to access online learning. We’ve been experiencing a world without teachers. So it’s time to reflect on why teachers truly matter.
Andy remembers a teacher who changed his life, Mrs. Waring.
This is what so many teachers do. They inspire our children with new interests, develop their curiosity about learning, give them the chance to undertake protracted projects that enable them to explore their interests, and, to some extent, themselves in depth. And they engage with the totality of their children’s development as human beings. Even when you’re not perfect and have let yourself down, teachers like this still stand by you and help put you back on the right path again.
So it’s a disgrace and a shame that for more than 20 years, in many countries, politicians thought they could lower the cost of government spending by disinvesting in public education, and by demeaning and discouraging its teachers. They thought they could privatize schools and deregulate teaching so that teachers would be less qualified, less unionized, and less well supported, and therefore move on quickly before their salaries started to climb. And they thought and still sometimes think that teachers were expendable and could be substituted with digital devices. They claimed that education could take place anytime, anywhere, with teachers or without them. And they believed that impersonal algorithms could replace teachers’ professional judgments. Government leaders, media and business critics, and more than a few thought leaders, promulgated crude stereotypes of bad teaching that was allegedly ruining children’s lives. In-person teaching was portrayed as being teaching from the front, in the boring classes of factory age schools. These portrayals, as fictitious as the US voter ballots allegedly dumped into unnamed rivers, have then been used to try and replace teachers with online learning.
Then, all of a sudden, the biggest natural educational experiment in human history – taking nearly 2 billion children out of school – has made everyone think again. What is a world like without teachers?
It’s a place without an economy because parents can’t go to work if their children aren’t in school.
It’s a place where teenagers can’t be with their peers, developing their senses of identity and responsibility away from their parents.
It’s a place that can’t protect young people from being bullied, or prevent many others from turning into bullies.
It’s a place that builds no sense of community or of how to participate in society.
It’s a place where teachers can’t be the high water mark that separates order from chaos, where they can’t intervene calmly when there’s trouble, and where there’s no-one to help children focus, when they are otherwise easily distracted.
A world without teachers is also a place where children have no way to learn how to express their own ideas and listen to others, to take their turn, and to value differences.
Teachers ignite new interests, show you the difference between your first effort and your best effort, and help you achieve things you never would have thought possible if you had been left to yourself.
Teachers help young people learn about racism, prejudice, climate change and the Holocaust, even and especially when youngsters’ parents don’t.
A world without teachers is a world deprived of learning and with a lot less love. Appreciate your children’s teachers, and reflect back on the teachers who made a difference for you.
It’s time to bring our teachers back, not just physically in our schools, but also morally, at the very center of our societies. Please celebrate World Teachers Day.
I’m surprised this story hasn’t been posted on this blog. Anyway, I’m pasting it in here, as it seems relevant to this topic.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/05/the-students-left-behind-by-remote-learning
There are a few untruths in this article. I live in MD not far from Baltimore City and my son attends one of the “elite” private schools in the area. There are Archdiocese schools and there are Independent faith based schools (many Catholic). Archdiocese schools opened fully, giving parents the option for online schooling (they will pray away the virus SMH). Most of the Independent faith based schools decided mid August to go all virtual instead of the 50% hybrid plan. In 1 county, the County Exec shut down the full opening of the Independent schools because the infection rate was still high in that area….the wealthy parents started suing immediately. My son’s HS was one of the only ones to open at 25% and it has gone amazingly well….BECAUSE they maintain healthy buildings and upgraded with the new filters, it’s not over crowded, they have a large campus and set up event tents for outdoor learning, masks are worn, hand sanitizer available etc. The effort it is taking is absolutely incredible and I can’t imagine this happening in any public or charter school in Baltimore City. The city school system has been underfunded for years and the effort to just get basic services for online learning into homes is pitiful. Santalese is a Broadie and I wouldn’t put it past her to be sowing the seeds of chaos for a State takeover of those schools…..Just my opinion .
I am just kind of stunned that there is approximately zero discussion on this log about the tragedy that is unfolding for students.
This blog, I meant.
We already have a world where the anti-educators outgun the educators.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
A world without teachers is the billionaire’s nirvana. Betsy, the Koch family and the Waltons are trying to use the pandemic to allow parents to use voucher funds to establish “micro-schools.”
Here’s the dystopian vision. Basically, ten parents pool their voucher cash and hire a so-called teacher to provide education to their children. There is zero accountability in this scheme, zero safety standards and zero regulation. Some parents in Arizona are already doing this so the parents can go to work knowing that their children are being looked after. In the true spirit of libertarian lunacy, there is no required training or professional standards for the so-called teachers to meet. The facilitator would basically be an independent contractor with no benefits or pension. This person would be able to earn a whopping $26,000 per school year according to Jennifer Berkshire.https://truthout.org/articles/covid-19-microschools-are-betsy-devoss-latest-privatization-scheme/
Heck of a student-teacher ratio, though.