On teaching and teaching reform.

Dana Goldstein, subbing for Ezra Klein, has a great piece on the missteps of US education reform. There's been a lot of talk in recent years on the pointlessness of standardized testing and of tying the results of said testing to evaluations of teaching capability, but this post does a really good job of not just railing at the obvious but getting at the heart of what US education reform has become and how the policies that shape it have also shaped the initial training of American teachers. It compares these processes (the so-called Teach for America model) with the processes of highly successful educational training systems in Finland, China, and Canada.

The nod to Canada puts me in mind of an education commentary in the L.M. Montgomery novel Anne of the Island. Fed-up with life as a country schoolmarm, Stella Maynard writes to her friends that she's going back to school to get out of the teaching grind. She states:

I'm tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I'm going to write a treatise on 'The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.' It will be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter's salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe 'immediately and to onct.' 'Well, you get your money easy,' some rate-payer will tell me, condescendingly. 'All you have to do is to sit there and hear lessons.' I used to argue the matter at first, but I'm wiser now. Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four—his mother sends him to school to 'get him out of the way'—and my oldest twenty—it 'suddenly struck him' that it would be easier to go to school and get an education than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts of research into six hours a day I don't wonder if the children feel like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph. 'I have to look for what's coming next before I know what went last,' he complained. I feel like that myself.

"And the letters I get! Tommy's mother writes me that Tommy is not coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like. He is only in simple reduction yet, and Johnny Johnson is in fractions, and Johnny isn't half as smart as her Tommy, and she can't understand it. And Susy's father wants to know why Susy can't write a letter without misspelling half the words, and Dick's aunt wants me to change his seat, because that bad Brown boy he is sitting with is teaching him to say naughty words.

"As to the financial part—but I'll not begin on that. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make country schoolmarms!

On the one hand, it makes me think that the more things change the more they stay the same. On the other hand, it makes me think that this was late-nineteenth-century Canada not twenty-first-century United States--and then I despair for my country. Again.