To the other commenters, this article isn't about college football. Most of the substance here is really obvious to anyone with a modicum of interest in teaching, but unfortunately that is what happens when you deal with politics and bureaucracy. You have to state the obvious, again and again and again.
Teaching is one of my secret passions. I have always been able to make people understand difficult things by talking to them and watching how they respond. When I study, people often ask me for help instead of the teacher/lecturer. I love it.
The thing is, being a teacher would be an incredibly stupid profession for people like me. I will earn twice as much money doing something else, navigating a tenth of the bureaucracy and being able to call the shots without bothering with twenty sorts of political correctness. There is no room in a normal Western school for my style of teaching. I'd be surrounded by imbeciles (imbeciles with authority) and not get paid for my effort.
There is something deeply wrong with our system when it deters people who actually want to do good. There is definitely a business opportunity here if I'd want to start teaching privately or start some private school. Rich people see what's wrong here, and are probably willing to pay to fix it.
Here's what needs to be done: Pay more to the best teachers (at least twice as much as they get today), abolish cartels and unions among current teachers, measure results, remove bureaucratic barriers to alternative styles and techniques, and drop all requirements of political correctness.
Most of these requirements are, for different political reasons, impossible to achieve in a publicly funded system. But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.
> But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.
I'm a miltary brat, so I've been in and out of a half-dozen public and private schools in my K-12 education. Everywhere I went there were private schools significantly better than the public ones.
The chaos seems to be confined along socioeconomic lines. The best teachers in the world can't teach kids that don't show up for class, and I'd say America is pretty split as to whether showing up for class is strictly necessary for future success.
I went to a private (school equivalent to) high-school myself..in Norway, and the same holds here. It was about three times better than any public school I'd been to thus far.
Teaching is one of my secret passions. I have always been able to make people understand difficult things by talking to them and watching how they respond. When I study, people often ask me for help instead of the teacher/lecturer. I love it.
The thing is, being a teacher would be an incredibly stupid profession for people like me. I will earn twice as much money doing something else, navigating a tenth of the bureaucracy and being able to call the shots without bothering with twenty sorts of political correctness. There is no room in a normal Western school for my style of teaching. I'd be surrounded by imbeciles (imbeciles with authority) and not get paid for my effort.
There is something deeply wrong with our system when it deters people who actually want to do good. There is definitely a business opportunity here if I'd want to start teaching privately or start some private school. Rich people see what's wrong here, and are probably willing to pay to fix it.
Here's what needs to be done: Pay more to the best teachers (at least twice as much as they get today), abolish cartels and unions among current teachers, measure results, remove bureaucratic barriers to alternative styles and techniques, and drop all requirements of political correctness.
Most of these requirements are, for different political reasons, impossible to achieve in a publicly funded system. But if some private school starts to produce much better students than the public system, there will be chaos.