Not That Anyone Asked

This past week, a radio session with Dr. Laura, the proponent of “any idiot” can do a better job by home schooling children than useless, incompetent public education teachers, set my teeth on edge. Really? That’s the message you want to send to both parents and students? You really want young people to walk through the public education classroom door convinced that “any idiot” can do a better job of teaching them than the well-educated, trained professional educator? That mindset is so helpful, and instilling that kind of disrespect from an early age certainly facilitates the teacher’s job performance.

Imagine that parent bringing that child into the public classroom: nothing the public education teacher says or does will matter because … s/he’s a useless, incompetent public education teacher who cannot perform the job for which s/he is well-trained, hired, and paid. The parent/teacher conference is a waste of time because, using the Dr. Laura educational philosophy, rather than discussing the child’s failure to perform to standardized educational expectations, the conversation needs to be about how incompetent and useless I am. It’s obvious to “any idiot” that, if s/he can do my job better than I do it, s/he needs to run the meeting and school me in how to handle the child’s unique educational needs, including a wide array of alternative learning activities that more appropriately support their child’s personal relationship with learning.

I see the flip side of those parental “idiots” who do feel that they can do my job better than I can do it. Unfortunately, it often results in a student who earns straight A’s on official transcripts, but who has never read a novel, never written a formal essay, never had an intelligent, self-generated conversation because the home-schooling parent believes that alternative kinds of “educational activities” are more valuable than teaching solid basic knowledge. For the student who has no specific foundational skills, the challenge to go beyond basics is overwhelming.

There are also many parents who do not home-school their children, but who send them to public school grounded in the belief that Dr. Laura posits: all teachers are useless and incompetent, and public education is a waste of time, money, and effort. If I were a doctor or a dentist, I could strap the patient down, anaesthetize him/her, and get the job done without interference, while a well-trained aide stands next to me to do the grunt work – but I’m a teacher. My client is most often a younger person, currently primarily 18-30 years of age, perhaps minimally successful in public education not because the teaching wasn’t provided, but because that demographic prefers to be anywhere/do anything other than attend school, complete homework assignments, and pass competency tests. And, stating the obvious, I don’t have the luxury of dealing with one patient at a time: in public schools, even academic core classes have 40-45 students every teaching period. Makes the job much more challenging when the single teacher in the room has to reach and teach 40-45 totally unmotivated students who have been taught by both their parents and society that the professional educator standing in the room is incompetent and useless, according to Dr. Laura!

Students spend far more time planning how to avoid being at home and not completing school assignments than they spend actually completing homework. Students spend far more time using electronics to manipulate their public media social status than they do using the same tools to ensure a good education. And while all of this avoidance of educational responsibility is occurring, where are the “idiot” parents, the ones who can educate their children better than the best professional public educator? They are often downstairs, believing that their child is upstairs in their well-appointed, closed door bedroom, doing homework. No fact-checking is done because … my child would not lie to me: if s/he says s/he did the homework and turned it in, that’s what happened. Often boldly stated, as often strongly implied, is the corollary: YOU must have lost his/her work because YOU are a useless, incompetent public school teacher!

My concern is not that I am not well-qualified to do my job, but that far too many parents and their off-spring share Dr. Laura’s perception that I make no difference in the big educational picture because the student’s parent, the “any idiot” Dr. Laura supports, could do a better job than I.
If a parent looks back on his/her own educational experiences, s/he will realize how hard teachers work to perform their jobs. Teachers aren’t just communicators of factual material, but attendance clerks, disciplinarians, emotional support systems, educational counselors, in-class room decorators and motivational speakers, as well as custodians and extra-duty supervisors.

If Dr. Laura will think about the tremendously negative message she sends daily to parents, as well as to immature, impressionable young people, perhaps she could alter her scathing condemnation of public education and start pointing other fingers in different directions, rather than always falling back on the “bad teacher” excuse that has become the mantra for today’s society.