Remember your favourite teacher? What do you think it would be like to work for him? Remember a favourite boss? What would it have been like to be taught by her? I realized something about my elementary and high school days that I hadn’t considered before: students are treated like employees of a company, paired with Pointy Haired Bosses, rather than paying customers of a learning institution.
I can’t say this observation is new, but it’s certainly new to me and the realization was so powerful for me that I felt compelled to write this post.
I wouldn’t call anything I did in school “learning”. I’d call it temporary remembering. Material force-fed to me by teachers I couldn’t respect, because they failed to engage me, or respect me either. I resent the exercise, even to this day.
For me, these apathetic teachers didn’t seem at all interested in helping me to understand what it was I was supposed to learn. My assignments, tasks and tests, were pointless efforts that started at point A, and ended at point B.
Looking back, I was just horse pulling a carriage. With teachers as blinders, my “job” was to keep moving, avoiding distractions until I arrived at my destination. The journey wasn’t the reward… arrival at the end unscathed was the goal.
Twenty years later and I’m still hearing the same stories about teachers and teaching. Teachers are given management-like responsibility and rather then treat students like customers, they dish out seemingly pointless assignments and tasks, with a do-this-because-I-said-so attitude. Don’t even get me started on the subject matter, and course materials.
For the record, I don’t think all teachers are Point Haired Bosses… only the majority and it’s unfortunate to think that it’s been twenty years since I attended school and we still let Pointy Haired Bosses teach our kids.
I apologize to all of the really great teachers out there. I have no way of recognizing you for your efforts. Unfortunately, neither does your employer (eeek!) I had a couple of really great teachers that were so excited about what they wanted their students to know about the world, they couldn’t help but engage them as customers, leading them along the way.
There’s a solution to all of this, but teachers are going to like it. The majority of them just don’t have the patience, leadership and mentorship skills required to teach our kids. But computers do.
In another twenty years, I hope we will have rid our education system of the Point Haired Bosses as teachers and replaced them with computers and online courses designed by people who do understand what’s required for learning. One teacher at the head of a math class? Pffft. Why would we do that when each student could be paired with a learning robot, or some equivalent mentor, via computer display?
These computer teachers will have all the answers of the world, the patience required to entertain young minds, they’ll be programmed to learn from their students and probably most importantly, the teacher to student ratio is 1:1 and tailored to each student’s learning capabilities and needs.
When computers and robotics began operations at the car factories a lot of people complained they were taking away valuable jobs from people and families. It’s now 2012, and I don’t think this can happen fast enough from an educational perspective.
On the plus side, maybe these teaching computers could retrain the Pointy Haired Bosses.
What do you think?
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