Ed Schools Are the Key to Reform

There is a popular view that the nation's need for teachers can be met with well-meaning liberal arts graduates who are willing to work in the schools. Higher education, after all, finds its teachers among those who were trained only to research their subjects, and look how well that has worked out. This argument against education schools and professional teaching relies on the fact that teaching is a natural act, part of the ancient repertoire of human behaviors, vastly older than formal schooling and formal teacher education. The question is whether university-based teacher education offers anything that can take anyone much beyond the natural teaching skills everyone has. And, even if ed schools could, can the nation's needs still be met, less expensively and adequately, by the people who majored in what they plan to teach and have the natural teaching techniques and styles we all have in varying degrees?

The view that "natural teaching" is enough for today's challenges is wrong. Natural teaching leads to serious pedagogical mistakes that harm both weak and superior students. When the teacher and the pupil have dissimilar backgrounds, increasingly the case in the modern school, we can expect that the natural teaching skills that support familial instruction will not operate to the benefit of all the school's students.

Well-meaning and well-read persons with good college grades make certain pedagogical mistakes with their pupils for whom they have low expectations. They treat these pupils not as individuals but as a group, seat them further away and outside the classroom zone of frequent teacher-pupil interaction, look at them less, ask them low-level questions, call on them less often, give them less time to respond, give them fewer hints when they are called upon, and give them less praise and more blame than other pupils. And they do all this out of a mistaken sense of kindness that is seemingly oblivious to the pedagogical harm their undisciplined actions...