"Our deepest fear is not
that we are inadequate
Our deepest fear is
that we are powerful beyond measure."
The world wants standing on its head. I'm not the first to say so.
What if teachers were 'powerful beyond measure'? Really. What if they were and didn't know it, if some didn't want to know it? What would it take to hide their potential from themselves? How would we go about hiding it from them? Who would have to collaborate in how elaborate a subterfuge in order to prevent the unmeasured power of the teacher from manifesting? How would one go about it?
I might begin with an 'ounce of prevention' by making teacher education programs the curricular equivalent of frontal lobotomies in hopes of scaring off the wildest of the talent. It's not perfect, as evidenced by the talent that still emerges from the catacombs, but it's a start.
Next I might work to drive the most talented of the survivors out of the field by ensuring that they teach only the prescribed content by means of only the prescribed methods using only the prescribed materials. I would review their lesson plans weekly and calculate the number of square inches on their bulletin boards that are dedicated to student work. I'd count the number of students who met the benchmark at each grade level and suggest to the teachers that any deficiencies were most likely his or her fault. And these days, I'd add a requirement that they blog no fewer than three days a week in order to keep parents informed regarding the daily happenings in class.
I would limit each teacher's career to a narrow range of age levels by requiring separate endorsements for teaching 8-year-olds as opposed to 11-year-olds. (I would already have taught them some really bad pop psychology as a justification for making meaningless distinctions.) I would impose stringent requirements for renewing licenses. I would be sure that it took the patience of Job to earn the right to teach both science and English at the high school level.
I would create arbitrary age groupings that include students whose ages range across 365 days and I would declare that group to be a 'grade'. I would ignore the fact that the oldest third of any given 'grade' is closer in age to the youngest third of the 'grade' ahead of them than it is to the youngest third of students in its own 'grade'. I would talk about grade and grade level standards and benchmarks and would insist that these represent something real and 'objective'.
Why the obvious ruse? What purpose is served by this conspicuous fraud? If I can create habits of mind that cause the surrender of common sense and the lowering of intellectual expectations, then I can render intellect ineffective and replace the virtue of critical thinking with the habit of enthusiastic compliance.
Moving to those whose specialty is to work with older students, I would pass a law that required special training to teach math to 13-year-olds...training that in no way would authorize one to teach social studies to 13-year-olds. This would serve the dual purpose of convincing both teachers and their students that 13-year-olds' math instruction is a highly technical specialty and that it's OK for a 30-year-old teacher not to have mastered more than one narrow piece of what we expect every thirteen-year-old to study. This has the added benefit of limiting the achievement of 13-year-olds, who tend to falter under this arrangement, creating the need for a technology of 'teaming' by means of which math specialists, social studies specialists, language arts specialists and science specialists can get together to help students to integrate the very subjects that they themselves have helped to splinter.
If all of this seems too absurd to be true, then I am making my point. Those with the lowest tolerance for absurdity (because I don't have the imagination to have made any of this up!) will be sorely tempted to depart. We are effectively pushing good minds out of education (often within the first three to five years, giving rise to the need for a 'mentorship program'!) and threatening to dull the vision of those that remain.
The teachers who both possess the wild talent and the will to endure the structural realities of contemporary public education are doubly remarkable. You and I are fortunate to know many of them. But every curricular reform, every new mandate, every revision of licensure requirements, threatens to further marginalize them. We should do something.
What if teachers are powerful 'beyond measure'? What if we wanted to face that 'deepest fear'? What might we do differently?
