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PARTISAN REVIEW
The educational establishment claims there is a drastic shortage of teach–
ers. And they are right. There is a shortage of teachers if you define a
teacher as someone with a fund of knowledge and the desire and ability to
transmit that knowledge to the young.
But what they are asking billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money for
is to produce more of the overtrained but undereducated teachers who
qualify for positions in the public schools under the present system of cre–
dentialing. The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future
has issued a call for "professionalization." What its members, primarily
drawn from the teachers' unions, the major education schools and their
related organizations, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher
Education and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards,
have in mind is closing the door to any prospective teacher who has not
graduated from an NCATE-approved school. These are the institutions
that have brought us the misguidedly well-meaning and pathetically igno–
rant teachers in today's classrooms. One of the respondents to the Public
Agenda survey defined their mission thus: "[Teachers] should see them–
selves not as transmitters of knowledge, but as allowing students to learn
how to learn themselves."
Asking students to teach themselves and each other may not be as
bizarre an idea as it seems in a system in which their teachers know as lit–
tle as the present teaching force, schooled
in
pedagogical method and all but
innocent of any substantive knowledge. They have spent years learning how
to teach but almost no time acquiring anything worth teaching. Mter years
of mind-numbing courses in the latest fads
in
classroom methodology, the
history of educational philosophies, strategies for educating the variously
handicapped (euphemistically referred to as "special education") and tech–
niques for teaching in languages other than that used by most citizens and
most businesses in the country (euphemistically referred to as "bilingual
education"), plus some practice teaching that most of them later identify as
the only useful part of their preparation, they are considered to possess the
credentials necessary to be hired as classroom teachers.
What they are missing are the rudiments of what it means to be edu–
cated themselves-knowledge of the culture, history, and traditions of our
democratic society and its institutions, an overview and appreciation of the
great achievements in the sciences, li terature, and the arts, and an abili ty to
communicate these things in the richness of language appropriate to their
understanding. How meager is the learning possessed by the average
teacher today is made clear when we realize that more than a third of those
now teaching such essential subjects as English and math neither majored
nor even minored in those subjects. Two out of every five science teach–
ers never took science as their major or minor field of study, and three out
