The Paradox of Elite Education on a Small Island (Part I)
Let us take an island of five million souls. They are used to mercantile behaviour; make education into a market, where ability is your capital, and clever use of it will reap profit. Although the intellectual capital is not pegged to obvious material value, for some years, the more such capital you generate, the more access to goods and services you get: a better teacher-student ratio, more facilities, a more effective social network.
Some of these elite intellectual capital management funds, while not directly adding value, create value by ingenious schemes based on investor confidence. Since people are sure that value is added, they see participation in such funds as adding value to the capital, and so the capital appreciates in value while not being backed by anything tangible. The funds use this increased participation to pay for fancier derivatives.
So it is with schools. Assert that all your intake are in the top percentiles, and you will get extra funding. You can use this funding to hire more teachers. If you are smart, you will hire teachers from the top percentiles; if you are desperate, you will hire teachers so that you have more teachers. The theory is that if investors see many warm bodies, they will assume there is fire.
But this is not true. In fact, the clever and more perceptive students will quickly see that many of their teachers, not being top-of-the-range, are disguising (some not so well) insecurity, inadequacy and incompetency — the three I-terms on every good educational adviser's list of things to look out for. Occasionally, these traits are parlayed into idiocy, irrationality and intransigence, where mere indolence was insufficient to irritate.
The math is simple. Your top percentiles are in the professions: law, medicine, some kinds of engineering, banking, politics (yes, on this small island, that too is pegged to professional rates). Rare are the people who are good enough to earn the big bucks but who prefer to be teachers. As the Main Man once said, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach, teach teachers."
What a litany of woe that is. And yet, as a modern educational Galileo might have said, still it moves.
Some of these elite intellectual capital management funds, while not directly adding value, create value by ingenious schemes based on investor confidence. Since people are sure that value is added, they see participation in such funds as adding value to the capital, and so the capital appreciates in value while not being backed by anything tangible. The funds use this increased participation to pay for fancier derivatives.
So it is with schools. Assert that all your intake are in the top percentiles, and you will get extra funding. You can use this funding to hire more teachers. If you are smart, you will hire teachers from the top percentiles; if you are desperate, you will hire teachers so that you have more teachers. The theory is that if investors see many warm bodies, they will assume there is fire.
But this is not true. In fact, the clever and more perceptive students will quickly see that many of their teachers, not being top-of-the-range, are disguising (some not so well) insecurity, inadequacy and incompetency — the three I-terms on every good educational adviser's list of things to look out for. Occasionally, these traits are parlayed into idiocy, irrationality and intransigence, where mere indolence was insufficient to irritate.
The math is simple. Your top percentiles are in the professions: law, medicine, some kinds of engineering, banking, politics (yes, on this small island, that too is pegged to professional rates). Rare are the people who are good enough to earn the big bucks but who prefer to be teachers. As the Main Man once said, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't teach, teach teachers."
What a litany of woe that is. And yet, as a modern educational Galileo might have said, still it moves.
etched with acid at 8:38:00 am
1 Comments:
Perhaps the amount of value 'added' to a certain school's curriculum may not be based on teachers' ability to teach.
Going by that assumption, the students of 'lesser' primary schools would not be able to do well enough to enter good secondary schools. On the contrary, many students from those schools are doing extremely well, even by standards of better schools.
The gift that is seen in the students could be innate instead of developed.
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