The Educator's Dilemma

A pastor once told me that his job was to comfort the hurt and hurt the comfortable. To some extent, that fine balance is the basis of the teacher's dilemma.

You see, all teachers know that cognitive dissonance (i.e. the stuff you are learning is different from what you believe) is the beginning of learning. If you think the stuff you're learning is the same as the stuff you know, then you won't bother.

However, in these days of oh-so-softly customisation of education, sometimes people say we should fit our educational approaches to the strengths and weaknesses of the students. This is also true; making a screwdriver a better screwdriver is probably more useful than turning it into a hammer.

But there are a few problems. Here are some of them.

1) It's hard work to rewire someone's neural net so that new stuff is learnt.

2) If you don't need a screwdriver you might need to perform a tech conversion.

3) You might see a potentially excellent screwdriver, but realise that everyone out there for the next few years is using joint-and-nail.

And so on. The educator's dilemma is to decide whether...

a) to follow the route of hurting people (face it, even if you're very nice, there are issues about people in authority — perceived or positional — using it to brainwash or otherwise influence others), or

b) keeping them happy by helping them do what they do best (and who cares if they don't learn stuff that's useful but which they don't want to learn?).

The main solution is probably along the lines of being wise enough to know how to combine the two into some sort of synthesis, unique to each student and learning relationship. In human society, the older ones will always be the first teachers of the younger ones; we should invest the time we take to grow older in learning to be wiser and make wiser.

Reluctant Learners

I once heard a senior educator say, "You can teach all you like, but if the student hasn't learnt, you haven't really taught."

The problem I have with this is that it is akin to saying, "You can hit the wall all you like, but if the wall hasn't crumbled, you haven't really hit it."

There should always be some degree of collaboration involved. The student has a duty to try to learn. It is not a scenario in which the teacher is an entertainer to be appraised by the skeptical crowd at 'Education Idol' or some such — it is one in which the teacher is a conductor (at the very least) expecting some degree of compliance from an orchestra.

There are many other metaphors that will serves us well, but the 'go ahead, impress me, and if I haven't learnt — it's because you haven't taught' concept is rubbish.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The word 'reluctant' is not a passive one; the Latin reluctari means 'to struggle against'. A reluctant learner, like some I have encountered, is not a passive lump, but one who struggles against the teacher and the teaching process.

Nowadays, that unteachability is seen as a sign of 'independent thinking' and indeed seems to be considered a virtue. And so, we have reluctant teachers — teachers who must struggle against such silly ideas as accepting such thinking without critical evaluation.

Professional Specialization

When people find out what I do for a living, the next question tends to be, "So what do you teach?" It irritates me a lot. I mean, if you say you're a doctor, people are not normally so ill-mannered as to ask you, "What specialty?" and I think that's generally true for lawyers and engineers.

The answer I normally give is: "I'll teach anything that I can teach. Hopefully it's something that the student(s) will benefit from."

Come on, all teachers in Atlantis are trained to teach. Just because they are pseudo-certified in two teaching subjects doesn't mean either a) that they are sufficiently educated, or b) that they are specialists, or c) that they will know how to handle all the things they're supposed to have been taught to handle.

I mean, all doctors in Atlantis learn anatomy, physiology, microbiology, pharmacology, community medicine, pathology, blah blah blah. It doesn't mean either a) that they are sufficiently educated, or b) that they are specialists, or c) that they will know how to handle all the things they're supposed to have been taught to handle.

Someone once told me that doctors specialise so that they can reduce expectations. As a specialist, you can duck your professional responsibilities by saying that you are a specialist and hence not qualified to do other stuff — a dermatologist can thus excuse the inability (or lack of desire) to handle an obstetrics case even though the requisite training was received.

Apparently, the same thing is true of teachers. If you're a Chinese teacher, nobody can ask you to teach Science. If you're a Science teacher, nobody will panic you by dumping a Lit class on you. This means that you don't have to think so much, you don't have to learn so much, you can be more confident about being a greater ignoramus than you were in school while being more learned about less.

What a life. What a profession. What nonsense.

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.