The Teaching Profession

We've got a bit of a dust-up underway with an anonymous writer who has undertaken a spirited defense of the the teaching profession. Only problem is, no one was attacking the teaching profession--just a group of them acting together under union influence.

If you have the time, it's worth reading this longish piece from the NYT magazine on building better teachers. It gives the reader an appreciation of the challenges of modern education and the truly tough row that today's teachers have to hoe.

But I think the anonymous teacher defender pretty much gets it right in one of his or her posts--we are concentrating so much on teachers because society has given up on families. Two trends should be looked to as having contributed to the decline in US education--the ongoing demise of the traditional family (through divorce and illegitimate birth), and the dramatic increase of women in the workforce. The education and socialization of children in our society has been largely contracted out, and we look to today's teachers to pull off what the family was responsible for in decades past. This is not a good strategy for the long-haul.