[To Jay P Green blog Nov 13 on New Yorker article — Better All The Time: how the “performance revolution” came to athletics – and beyond]
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time ]
Teacher Training Is A Key To Societal Benefits
It wasn’t the “performance revolution” which produced such enormous benefits for Finland. Nor was it competition from other countries for markets. It was the notorious reputation Finland had for being the suicide capital of the world. The incidence of teen suicides was particularly troubling.
Deliberate and vastly improved public education was the main approach adopted. Along with augmenting other social services, teacher training became a high priority for longer and more concentrated training. Each graduate was skilled in identifying and addressing special needs. About 25% of students are at one time or other receiving specialized, customized education assistance.
This New Yorker article — Better All The Time: How “performance revolution” came to athletics – and beyond (Nov 10, 2014) — is really, bottom line, about teacher training. Yes, it’s a long article, with most of the content about athletics, then somewhat about manufacturing, then at the end is the QUESTION. “What are the fields that could have become significantly better over the past forty years and haven’t?”
The author, James Surowiecki answers: “In one area above all, the failure to improve is especially egregious: education.”
It’s teacher training where the author would recommend the application of insights gained from the sports and manufacturing fields. The very nature of sports — highly competitive — lends itself to application of skills mastery. Competition, choice and reliability were the leading factors in improvements in consumer goods — cars, TVs, etc. “Lemons, for the most part, have become a thing of the past,” says the author.
Not mentioned, but certainly known by the readers, is the fact that many legal actions for “wrongful deaths”, for example, were also a stimulus for improvements as well as Nader’s book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.”
What’s to be done about education? Unfortunately, we have no Nader. The closest we’ve seen was an article by Nat Hentoff, a long-time writer for the Village Voice who wrote: The Greatest Consumer Fraud of All, Social Policy, Nov/Dec 1977. He proposed the usual, obvious, intuitive solution — consumer/client/parent power and suits for damages. Of course, those in the education reform cause know the fierce opposition to that approach. And, we know how the “floodgates” argument has been used to quash malpractice suits.
Furthermore, the education field has become not just any field of endeavor like sports, manufacturing or medicine but a conduit for political transformation of society. Leaders of this intended transformation in the teacher unions and university teacher training faculties strategically oppose any drift away of their captive consumer audience.
We are awaiting a Review of Teacher Training in Australia. When a new conservative regime took over from a Labour government two reviews were launched. The one on the Curriculum is now being examined and we’re expecting the second soon.
Australia is a highly politically polarized nation and feathers are starting to fly. The curriculum review had two controversial commissioners in charge — of course, seen as government messengers. Interesting that Kevin Donnelly, one of the two, had this to say about Australia’s teacher training just two years ago: “Many of the academics involved in teacher training have never been classroom teachers or worked in schools. Many are also committed to a cultural-left, progressive view of education that uncritically celebrates fads like open classrooms, critical literacy and personalized learning . . . students are often indoctrinated with ineffective theories like constructivism . . . much of the theory in teacher education is postmodern, neo-Marxist, politically correct and new-age.”
In my opinion, North America will find relevance in both reports.