Why are teachers considered intellectually inferior?

Great Debates
1

I found the following quote in Are Really Smart People as Pissy in Real Life as They Are Online?:

In addition to this I have heard a couple other comments from people I’ve worked with over the years including; "Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,*” “He’s a professor, he doesn’t understand the intricacies of real world engineering,” “<insert name> doesn’t make a good consultant, maybe s/he should consider teaching.”

Is this really how people view teachers? If so, why are teachers considered “regular people”? As if that implies their degree is somehow less meaningful due to the profession they have chosen. Of course, I could be reading this completely wrong (because I’ve been considering teaching and have this phobia that the world will suddenly lose respect for me professionally, not that I should care, because I’m no longer a doer), but I’ve come across this perception before and am interested in knowing where it comes from.

*I think this is from a movie or something like that but my mother-in-law said it one evening when referring to why some people are hesitant to teach (like me).

2

…and those who cant teach, teach gym.

School of Rock with Jack Black

3

I’ve gone back to school this year to get my elementary teaching license, and I tell you, it’s been an eye-opener. One of my textbooks explicitly talks about the problem of professors steering academically-oriented students away from teaching, especially at the elementary education level; many of the ones who remain are not, shall we say, genius material.

One anecdote: a student in my children’s literature class introduced herself the first day of class by declaring how much she hates to read. She reluctantly made an exception for the Bible. Later on, our class visited a library, and she declared there how much she hates libraries. She’s exceptionally bad, but I’ve got other anecdotes, oh yes I do. Students who don’t know who the first president of the US was. Students who choose to teach kids a math concept that they don’t grasp themselves. Students who find it remarkable that I read more than five books over the course of the summer.

The professors were sometimes awful as well. I had two different professors tell me that I ought to go straight to graduate school, skipping the job of a teacher entirely so that I could become a professor. These are professors in the elementary education department who are trying to purge the profession of the academically inclined. What the hell is up with that?

A friend of mine gave an interesting theory. Used to be that a woman had three major choices:

  1. Get married and pop out babies;
  2. Become a nurse; or
  3. Become a teacher.

If you loved kids, you became a mom. If you wanted to help people, you became a nurse. If you loved knowledge, you became a teacher. Teaching was not a particularly respectable choice, but it often attracted the most academically-inclined women to it.

Now, women have got many more choices than these three. The nursing profession has seen dramatic wage increases, so it’s retained its share of competent women (and men). But teaching wages have not risen so dramatically, and there are many more opportunities for academically-inclined women; so the book-leariningest women have been leaving the profession. The vaccuum, for the most part, hasn’t been filled by book-learning men: it’s been filled by those who love children and by those who don’t have particularly high ambitions.

I hate that. It disgusts and depresses me. But it’s only part of the story. The other part of the story is that there are people trying to improve the state of elementary education; I figure that if I’m going to enter this field, it’ll be my job to hook up with them and try to work alongside them to professionalize the field.

Daniel

4

I don’t think teachers are necessarily less bright than people who “can,” but I will say this:

They have different priorities in general. They value time more than money (or they’d be in the private sector). They don’t have any desire to be on the forefront (or they’d be researchers). They might not have the constitution for an 8-5 job, which could mean that they don’t do well being a servant to the man, they have social issues that keep them from being able to relate well to people their own age, or they have something else that they must attend to requiring a flexible schedule. There are the rare ones that love to teach so much that they would do it no matter what.

Personally, I’d teach if it paid what I make.

5

Let me first say that my mother is an international speaker in education, a former long-time teacher, and then an education college professor. That said, even she admits that many people going into teaching just aren’t genius material. If you look at standardized test scores on things like the GRE comparing education majors to non-education majors you will see that the scores are very much lower for education majors versus virtually everyone else. Majoring in education certainly doesn’t make people dumber than average but it does seem to attract many that are.

6

I read deevee’s comment as an error of judgement. He/she has implied that, because they’re regular people you deal with on a day-to-day basis, they’re not necessarily bright people.

To demonstrate such assumptions:

If I valued time, I’d work a 40-hour week. I don’t.

The forefront of what? You’ve made a lot of implications there.

My God, how patronising and insulting. My timetable is completely inflexible. As for “social issues that keep them from being able to relate well to people their own age”, maybe we prefer to spend some time with people who don’t make blanket assumptions about everything and everyone?

7

Are you perhaps under the impression that teachers never have to take their work home?

Or that working 7:30-3:30 with every minute of your day accounted for (i.e. you don’t get lunch off, you may have lunch duty) is less strenuous than working 8 hours with an hour off in the middle to do whatever you like? My mom teaches 5 year olds and she works a lot harder than I do; she’s got more flexibility (and better legs, even though she’ll be 56 next week) thanks to her career.

My mother isn’t dumb, by any stretch, but there are things she has trouble with-- I don’t think it’s her intelligence that makes her a great teacher. She’s certainly a better teacher than I would ever be, even though I tutored her through college algebra. I think it’s her ability to deal with children as people, for one; her love of learning, for another. It’s not as important to be able to answer a child’s every question as to cultivate a love of finding out, and the skills to do that: listening, reading, looking carefully, politeness and clarity of speech so you can ask others.

Rather than judging teachers solely by their own accomplishments, why not judge them by the accomplishments of those they teach as well?

8

Funny, I read Jawdirk’s post as coming from a teacher, the last comment being a witty conclusion about his/her love of teaching.

Teachers are just like any other profession. There are brilliant people and stupid people. I don’t think the percentages are significantly different from any other job. If there is any across-the-board difference, it is that teachers are more idealistic. Most people in any given job are not too bright, its just that not-too-bright teachers are more obvious that in other professions.

9

Some of the stupidest people I ever met were professors at the prestigious private university I attended. My favorite was the art history teacher who handed out assignments written in Xeroxed magic marker. I am not making this up.

On the other hand, the other half of the faculty were exceptionally bright, inspiring educators.

So that’s all I have to say about that.

10

Actually, Charlie Brown from the peanuts comic strip.

11

The gym part was said by Charlie Brown, the first part of the quote is probably older than that.

12

“…And those who can’t teach administrate.” H. L. Mencken

13

Teaching as a profession has a couple of inherent pitfalls for unwary practicioners. For one thing degrees tend to be named after wider fields than anyone actually studies. Sure, she’s a professor of Literature, but much of her time as an undergraduate and all of her time in grad school could have been spent on the influence of Jean Price-Mars, Antenor Firmin and the Haitian noirist movement on the later poetry of Emily Dickinson. She didn’t have time for a thorough study of Haitian history, or in fact a close reading of all of Dickinson’s poems, much less her correspondence. Instead, her energy was focused on the two articles (one published, one not, both in French) that mention both Dickinson and Firmin (10%), repeated skimming of Dickinsoniana to find any sort of parallel not mentioned in those articles (another 10%), and elaborate theoretical grounding in support of and rehearsal of rhetorical defenses for the proposition that any of it should matter to anyone living or dead (80%). This was an effective allocation of resources: she scared the committee and got her degree. But now she’s teaching Shakespeare to freshmen, and there could well be a couple of kids in her class who are better equipped for the job.

A second trap comes from the fact that a teacher will spend a great deal of his time with people younger and less-informed than he, who have been trained to be deferential to him. Over time, this can skew one’s perspective: one learns to overestimate one’s own competence and to compare oneself too favorably with others.

Neither of these indicates intellectual inferiority. But they can lead teachers into situations in which they look pompous and foolish. Unfortunately, no one who has ever been a student is likely to overlook such instances, as they might if another profession were involved.

14

My personal experience in teaching mathematics to education majors leads me to conclude that many of them are a few sharp pencils short of a full cup. Moreover, my friends with “real majors” who have explored the education course are to a person horrifed by the utter and complete lack of academic rigor.

I can verify that there are strong under-currents of anti-intellectualism that flourish among the education faculty, at least among those who focus on pedagogical advocacy (as opposed to those who actually know something about an actual subject area).

There shouldn’t be any pure education programs. Education below certain grades should be supported by a cognitive psychology track as part of a real psych degree, as opposed to a fluffy/faux ed degree. When subject matter is to be taught, a core degree in that actual subject is the gold standard, with a supplemental educational track tossed in.

15

And so begins a flame war.

(I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I can still tell a fight’s coming.)

16

My state changed its certification requirements a couple of years ago to reflect similar. I remember a media-fueled outcry in that some said that making the requirements more difficult would stop a lot of people from exploring the teaching profession :rolleyes:

When I was in ed school almost 20 years ago, all that was needed was enough credits in your “core” subject if you were planning to teach middle or high school. For elementary certification, I believe it was a certain number of psychology/child development courses. In either case, you didn’t necessarily have to major in either as an undergrad.

FWIW, a lot of us who went into education because of a genuine love of a particular subject and working with kids were laid off time and again because of statewide budget cuts. Parochial and private schools were off-limits, at the time, to those fairly or brand new to the profession because of their low turnover. Moving out of state? Some did; others, for one reason or another, couldn’t.

At some point the dream dies, and you find yourself in corporate dronehood. It was never supposed to be that way – at least, as they told you (and you wholeheartedly believed) in ed school.

17

I agree, that program would probably turn out better teachers, but how do you find people that are smart enough to make it through such a program, and yet passive enough to settle for low pay, crappy hours(much of it unpaid), high student-to-teacher ratios in many areas, and funding for supplies so low in some districts that teachers must pay for supplies out of their own pockets? People who go through the trouble of getting a “real” psych degree are usually smart enough not to want to go through all that trouble just to be treated like that.

18

I wasn’t aware that they were considered intellectually inferior. Both in my student days and now as a parent I’ve seen teachers who are quite bright and also those that you wonder how they got into college. I’ve seen smart and dumb teachers, smart and dumb doctors, and smart and dumb engineers. Smart people are not prevented from being teachers and dummies aren’t stopped from getting through med school.

19

The only conclusion that I can draw from the OP is that he/she thinks cops and firefighters are intellectually inferior. I take issue with that sentiment.

20

Smart people may not be prevented from becoming teachers, but in today’s environment they are certainly discouraged.