What is teaching?

In our time teaching is best described as preparing individuals for the next step in life. We expect people to take a few years to learn to speak, walk, get along with others and then we put them in school so that they can learn skills that are not as well learned in the home.

Kindergarten is to prepare for grade school, which prepares you for junior high. At this point you are prepared for high school which is about getting into a good college. When our students arrive, they can think a variety of things that are untrue about college --

1) they are going to be given the secret of their chosen profession and become an asset when equipped with that knowledge;

2) they can think that they are being punished and have contempt for the whole process which results in a membership card required to get a job they should have been given anyhow;

3) they could be in college because that is where the single people of their age are - for obvious reasons.

I have written, before, about how I think that writing should be a craft as opposed to an art. But when I walk down the halls of the university I am convinced that school is becoming less of a craft. I observed today an older student who was back in school to get a masters. He was fired from his job and does not have other options without the masters. He is enjoying it, mostly, and talks frequently in classes, a bit too much actually. It is a bit of a consumption experience for him, but when he talks to other students about what it will take to succeed, they give him quite a bit of deference. He knows something about what it means to turn these abstract habits into a paying job, something that is not taught in school.

This made me think that we should not fear the concept of trade schools. I think we have a bad idea about them. Some things can only be learned in the context of application. Engineering might be one. Business is certainly one. When I was a student at Alabama, the MBA students were consulting with different firms and, if they and their results were liked, were offered jobs there at the end of the projects. This seemed to make sense -- the elimination of Asymmetric information for both parties.

I may be naive, but my vision of what would work in school is to have classes that were more geared around what people needed to know in a functional way. If your major at least was structured this way, it might make the electives more fun and relaxing. We might see students do well in a humanities class because it is an opportunity to do something different. I don't see this in my school. I see people generally valuing completing a degree but not earning one. They have no idea what it used to mean to accumulate the skills and insights required for a degree back when it meant more relative to the general public. By making the Bachelors a virtually universal expectation, we robbed it of some of its motivational capital.

I think more classes should structure the learning goals around some aspect of the craft of becoming educated. For Humanities this means that students should learn to think creatively and learn how to write. For engineering, perhaps students should offset some of their expenses by doing instructor led consulting (where they could be fired if they don't perform consistently).

I want to get out of the habit of seeing our students as kids that are preparing for something else that is important. We owe it to them to see them as young professionals that are filling in gaps in their credentials. Adolescence is long enough without subsidizing the hook-up scene. Besides, having a purpose in your daily activity should make you more attractive to your potential partners anyhow...