Michael Strong argues for The Missing Institution:
Teaching is fundamentally a performance art — real time interactions in chaotic and complex human situations. There are no institutions in our society that provide for an environment in which master practitioners of this performance art systematically transfer their expertise.
Instead, academic departments of education have an effective monopoly on teacher training. In order to become a professor of education one must complete a Ph.D. and publish a series of research articles. The ability to produce academic research articles is not related to the ability to practice a pedagogical performance art. The analogy that I find compelling is musicianship — while there is nothing wrong with the academic study of music, one would never imagine that academic courses taught by music scholars provide the optimal path to becoming a performing artist. We don’t require Placido Domingo or Adele to take courses taught by music Ph.D.s in order to perform. There is no reason to believe that there is any correlation between being able to ace an exam on music theory and being a dazzling vocalist. Why should we imagine that such a correlation exists in education?
There are brief student-teaching assignments at the end of many teacher credentialing programs, but they are the lost stepchild of an education department — one doesn’t climb the academic career ladder for creating a better student teacher program. Moreover, even these programs are designed and controlled by education professors rather than by virtuoso teachers.
Imagine, instead, if Escalante had been a great martial arts teacher. He might have established his own school. Students from around the world would have flocked to learn directly from him. Gradually, some of his best students would open up their own schools. They would prominently display their lineage, the fact that they had studied directly with Escalante. People who were interested in becoming serious about a particular martial arts form would ask around to discover who were the best teachers. Those schools could charge a premium. Sometimes such schools would trace their lineage back through several generations of great teachers.
I describe the fact that there is no Escalante School of Mathematics Teaching as “The Missing Institution.” In the absence of government and academic domination of education for the past century, we would have seen the creation of many such training centers founded by brilliant educators, each designed to transmit their artistry.
Indeed, the Montessori and Waldorf educational systems were each designed by inspired educators; their work has existed outside of the system for nearly a century, despite considerable hostility from the establishment. Both have their own teacher training and school accreditation systems. This demonstrates that distinctive pedagogies spontaneously generate distinctive teacher training systems when they are able to do so. “The Missing Institution” is not missing in the case of Montessori and Waldorf (though in each case the training institutions are imperfect and financially precarious).
It seems some enterprising math teachers, even if ensconced in our bureaucratic school system, would distill some of the secret sauce of Escalante’s system.
The advance of math maps the advance of civilization, but discouragement of math progress has been a thing at times. Middle Age scholars hid their results from rivals; the Church banned the study of infinitesimals; capable people not given positions. There were times of public accolade and interest. Today the study falls into the “uncool” category.
Burn it all.
Rebuild later, much later, with new people and away from the conflation of Barracks with Pedagogy, or, in short, no more schools. Schools are obsolete, and dies by being obscene.
No man it seems can gaze at rows of military age males without playing at Socrates/Caesar/Lenin. No woman can resist infantilizing or castrating them, both crop, cripple or destroy their human potential and at great cost.
The concept of handing one’s children to the state for most of their childhood to be formed into soldiers, farmers or workers is Prussian and was done to mobilize the State as one unit- so Prussia could survive and thrive. Had it been larger, had it not twice attacked both East and West it would have…and then, with peace and prosperity Prussia would be where America is now…asking why are still doing this in particular with the great harms being done the children, the parents, the nation.
Genug.
“The younger men generally underwent torture to demonstrate their bravery.”
“Obviously we won’t and shouldn’t return to the voluntary tortures of the Mandan.”
Nonsense. I went through years of voluntary torture. It was called grad school. Physicians have an even more extreme version, called “residency.”