Teachers Are Soldiers In War Against Ignorance
The similarities between our standing army and our standing teacher population are striking.
- Army is over 500K strong
- Teachers over 1M strong
- Army is underfunded
- Teachers are underfunded
- Army not welcomed by occupied population
- Teachers not welcomed by student population
- Army's soldiers are out numbered
- Teachers are out numbered
Both the Army and Education suffer from the problems of scaling quality. Both have only one solution. Help the population you're managing help themselves.
Soldiers are not the ideal tool for nation building.
Education, in the model of teachers disseminating knowledge and being bottle necks for quality, is not the ideal tool for empowering individual learners to realize their own potential.
This gets to another issue which is that schools are not about "empowering individual learners to realize their own potential". Schools are about grading and getting the population up to the bar of being able to read, write and do some basic arithmetic.
The military is moving towards an Army of One. Maybe we should do the same for our teachers. Maybe we should empower each teacher to be an agile, capable, leader of learners. First, they need the tool and resources.
Farbood Nivi
4 Comments
Reader Comments (4)
"Leader of learners"... I like it!
"Help the population you're managing help themselves."
I was actually just thinking about this last night. You see, I was thinking about donating some money to feed people oversees.... and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by the millions of dollars that I would need to actually feed them!
Then it hit me: The only way for the hunger problem to truly be solved is to teach those people how to provide for themselves. I'm not going to say that your monetary donations to feed those people end up in a black hole.... but until we teach those people how to provide for themselves, we're going to be donating money to third-world countries until the end of time!
Actually, if someone wants to go oversees to teach these people how to provide for themselves, I would probably be more willing to donate my money to that man than to continue to donate it to organizations who are feeding the poor. (Not that feeding the poor is a bad thing, it just seems to be a short term solution).
James,
Check out Kiva.org
As usual, I agree with you Farb. Differentiaition of instruction should be the philosophical underpinning of classroom instruction, but its is often at odds with the larger culture of testing. in fact the one size fits all education, while efficient, does not produce the intended results. Which brings up the issue of testing and its purpose. Alfie Kohn has written and spoken more eloquently on this issue than I can. A good starting point is: http://www.alfiekohn.org/business.htm
Another note, I love Kiva.org too. These are some other great causes:
http://www.freerice.org/ You do vocabulary and each correct definition gives 20 grains of rice to the poor.
http://www.bread.org/ This organization is looking to eliminate hunger.
www.water1st.org/index.html Everyone deserves the right to safe
water!
http://www.laptop.org/ Raise money to buy an XO laptop for a child in a developing nation.
http://shop.buildanest.com/ You are what you wear? Rebecca Kousky, 26 started “Nest” a shopping site whose proceeds help struggling female artists in the developing nations of Brazil, Mexico, Tanzania, Turkey, and Guatemala. Ms. Kousky uses the proceeds to provide loans for women. Usually the money is paid back in goods, rather than cash. Thus far the repayment rate has been 100%.
http://my2centsforchange.org This site allows students a forum to sound off about topics that concern them and can be a catalyst for groups discussion in the classroom.