In a world where we typically parent the way we were parented and teach the way we were taught, I quite often reflect on how or why I became a progressive educator, despite being taught in such a non-progressive manner.

I had a discussion yesterday with some early childhood folks, and we all were frustrated with the lack of child development courses in Elementary Ed. Degrees here in NM. Especially because this year they changed from K-12 to PreK-12…..with no change in required courses!

I do think that a teacher with an advanced degree in the subject area has a leg up on others.

Yet we have all seen (or, perhaps, experienced) those who have a great grasp of their subject but can’t teach it. Still, I would take someone with subject knowledge over a teaching degree (I hire teachers). I have also seen people with education degrees and “visions” who have fallen flat on their faces when they have tried to implement them. None of my teachers have education degrees, and all of them are doing a terrific job for our kids.

Furthermore, I think that much of what has gone for education reform has been foisted on the public so that people can test the theories they developed in eduation classes, with disastrous consequences for our kids. The current “cram-in-the-facts” approach we are now experiencing is a good case in point. What good are all these facts if you don’t understand their significance? (presuming they have any). We prefer to focus on teaching our students how to think, so that they can make informed judgments about the facts they require, and know where to get reliable and relevant information.

I think many of us, in large part, do not trust our own ability to think through difficult issues, to understand hard ideas, and to make up our own minds. There are at least two reasons for this. First, a large portion of American adults feel under-educated. The did not graduate from high school with a good grasp of logic, a sense of the flow of history, and a basic understanding of the Great Ideas. In fact, most people did not graduate from college with these. Most graduate feeling like they got bits and pieces that were never really linked together in a coherent whole.

But there is an even deeper reason for our reliance on experts. We are a “classroom” society. Our culture tells us that in order to know something, in order to be an expert, in order to learn something, we have to be taught. Our model for modern education is simple: if we want to learn something, we take a class, or go to a seminar, or listen to a lecture.

A professor-friend of mine tells me that when he teaches freshman philosophy, the hardest thing for him to do is to convince his students to talk back to him. They sit nicely and write down what he tells them, but they are afraid they might say the wrong thing if they talk back. They are not accustomed to conversing with any sort of give and take. And why should they be? They have spent most of their previous twelve years sitting and being lectured to. They have become passive learners. Most people have been taught to accept this as a primary method of learning.

In large part, the project of self-education is an act of resistance against mainstream culture. It sends a message, “I don’t care how fast I do this, I don’t care how much of it I do. I don’t care how many books I get through. I am not in search of immediate gratification and visible results; I am in search of learning and thinking.” This pushes back against our ‘credentialist’ society, which tells us that the faster we work, the more we do, the more we produce and accumulate and experience, the better we are.

Our economy is structured this way: the faster and more productive you are, the more money you will make (a myth). But self-education helps us to re-orient ourselves away from that which is a market ethic. Speed and productivity are not moral goods. It is not ethically superior to do more and to be faster. Reading to yourself instead of doing something “more productive” with your time pushes back against the speed ethic, the more-is-better ethic. It resists the message that says, “in order to be worthwhile, you must produce something tangible.” When you choose to read instead of mow the lawn, you are refusing to to accept that your worth as a person is measured by the visible results that you produce in the world. You are asserting, instead, that your worth as a person is based on who you are and on who you created yourself to be.

I’m very glad to have found this site.
Susan Gaissert
http://sgaissert.wordpress.com