AT last !! From within academia has come a very frank admission that what has been passed off as “teacher-training” for far too long might actually be a Waste of Time and Money, as big a WOFTAM as any other we’ve seen for ages.

In a challenging and uncompromising article in the Higher Education section of Australian, “Why school’s out at uni” [Wed 14 Dec 05], Associate Professor Tony Taylor of Monash (Victoria) University’s Faculty of Education has made the startling but unsurprising claim that “many university education staff are refugees from the classroom”, and that “faculties of education are over-stuffed with second-rate sociologists who’d drop dead with fright if parachuted into a Year 9 classroom”.

Good stuff, Tony — and not a single word which Dr Don Watson, jargon-slayer, would have to take the sword to.

The full article: HERE

And how refreshing coming, as it does, from someone deep inside academia. His comments should be made compulsory reading at every tertiary institution which claims to prepare teachers for classrooms; what’s more, they jell with the anecdotal evidence of real school-based professionals who’ve had to do quick repair jobs on un-, or even, badly prepared novice teachers.

Several of his findings — utterly appalling when pondered on — need top priority attention.

Refugees from the classroom

One is the inadequate classroom experience, in terms of both quality and quantity, of university education staff, sadly summed up as “refugees from the classroom, whose research, in an onanistic way, focuses on the inessential”.

” . . . My own experience as a member of selection and promotion committees in various institutions”, Taylor explains, “tells me that many of the successful applicants have spent as little as two years in schools. The career-building tactic appears to be get out of school as quickly as possible, and stay out.” Newspaper articles in the early 1990s pointed out that 15-year gaps between classroom experience and contemporary lecturing was usual.

Another, equally distressing, is the “not-very-hidden” contempt with which the very notion of training is held: universities have never been “comfortable places for faculties of education” and “university culture does not have a very high regard for professional training” of low-status^ [sic] occupations like teaching, social work and nursing”. [Maybe this is the source of the reported I-didn’t-do-five-years-university-to-just-wipe-that-senile-old-bugger’s-arse mentality ?]

Perhaps, too, this attitude towards professional training might go some way to explaining two unhappy phenomena.

One is the short career spans of so many beginning teachers.

Granted, conditions in some schools are truly spirit-sapping and ultimately soul-destroying, and for that the blame is widespread: ineptitude at all levels of government; traditional Anglo attitudes to teaching so acerbically summed up in G B Shaw’s “who can, does; who can’t, teaches”; the escape routes which private schools offer to the rich, the powerful and the influential; and the homely fictions about cute young teachers “keeping a page ahead of the kids”, to cite just a few.

But, perhaps also, if there is so little connexion between the content of B Ed / Dip Ed courses and what really goes on in schools, is it any surprise that shell-shock so quickly sets in ?

What’s more, this failure to do an E M Forster and “only connect” means that, in their professional “training”, few would-be teachers see, hear and learn little about the joys of teaching, real teaching, that is, as distinct from amateur social engineering or playing at revolutioneering.

Teaching year 9 can be a joy also

Good teachers love their work. There is no other work like it. But that’s a joy that no refugee from the classroom can convey, much less share. And, yes, teaching Year 9 can be a joy also.

It certainly re-inforces the accuracy of the anecdotes so often heard in school staff common rooms about novice trainees utterly bereft of even the remotest practical know-how. It most decidedly explains the touching almost childlike gratitude so many classroom teacher-mentors get from so many of these victims of what Taylor delicately terms academic onanism. I lost count of the number of 1990’s Novembers I heard statements like “If it hadn’t been for you and your colleagues, I’d’ve been clueless about what to do in three months’ time”.

If associate professor Taylor’s contentions are even half right, current teacher “training” might even be worse than no training at all — would-bes would have more chance of becoming successful could-bes by doing a degree full of relevant teaching subjects, and then following knowledgeable, committed and effective teachers round their classrooms for a couple of years. At the very least, they’d avoid being academically jerked off, which would be an advance in itself.

Taylor is wary of “forcing resentful academics back into the classroom” [however much schadenfreude that might give those who do the real work*] and of “sin-binning post-modernists, even though they have a strange fixation with elderly ideas about political / social control” [so much for universities being places of scholarship and for the free, fearless and untrammelled exchange of competing ideas]. But he does have some clear suggestions that ought to be taken up by authorities from the Federal Government down.

Perhaps, now that a prominent academic himself has “come out”, others may dare to follow, and more widely publicise the onanism which, till now, has dared not speak its name.

^ disgraceful, is it not, that these caring professions are so disrespected.

* my preferred solution, until it was overtaken by a most unexpected piece of progress, was to close all these faculties down and send their inmates outback to help build the Alice Springs-to-Darwin railway. Perhaps the local variants can do some useful stuff in getting Tasmania’s poor remnants of a rail network up to scratch ?

PS: Looks as if neither Richard Eye Eye nor the Chicken Run Girl has piqued anyone’s curiosity.

Leonard Colquhoun 7248