I had an ocular event recently. The vitreous in my left eye peeled away from the retina. When this happened in my right eye last year, it tore my retina. Back then, the resident on call lasered the retina to keep it from peeling away from the eyeball and blinding the right eye. This time, they kept an eye (pardon the expression) on my left eye to see (ahem) if and when they’d need to apply the laser again. I got lucky the second time: no retinal tear.
I saw five different eye doctors at Tufts Medical Center in Boston during the course of my two retinal events. I have no idea if any of them are mutually acquainted. I do know that they sounded and acted like experts. I also know that they sounded remarkably alike. They knew the same things and gave me consistent diagnoses and treatment recommendations. They all looked into my eyes and saw the same thing, which they described the same way, as a posterior vitreous detachment, or PVD.
Now, it may feel unfair (and annoying) to compare medicine and education, or doctors and teachers. But what’s revealing about my experience with doctors is that their professional identity, their sense of vocational self-worth, seems to reside in their ability to master and deploy their subject-specific knowledge. They get no extra points for being creative or inventing their own diagnoses. Only after many years of supervised practice will the young doctors I’ve seen ever get the opportunity to invent new procedures. Most of them will never do so, and will nonetheless have respectable careers in medicine.
Teachers don’t get the kind of respect doctors get, for a variety of reasons, obvious and otherwise. [See the Varkey Foundation Report from 2018.] Instead, teachers get autonomy, the delegated authority to make stuff up in our classrooms, to invent our own curriculum and pedagogy. I’m now convinced that this form of compensation is a pathology.
If doctors made diagnoses and treatment plans based on their own experience of what works, plus some late-night downloads from doctors-pay-doctors, would you respect them more? Or would you figure that you’d been transported back to a medieval village where the local barber dispensed home remedies? ‘Doctors’ who practiced this way would find it extremely difficult to communicate with each other about our health. Patients would need to figure out how to reconcile their physicians’ various diagnoses and prescriptions. Freelancing, ‘creative’ doctors would not inspire confidence. They would also have a hard time buying malpractice insurance. They would certainly enjoy a version of autonomy. They’d have traded respect in order to get it.
Teachers have generally bought into this bad bargain. I did. I thought I was a professional because I had the autonomy to decide what to teach and how to teach it, within very broad and barely enforced guidelines. So long as I taught the main events in my history classes and so long as the students seemed pleased enough to learn about them from me, I was a respectable teacher.
What if we aspired to be regarded more like doctors? That would require, among other things, that we all get rigorous scientific training and a set of common, validated procedures for ‘treatment’ (instruction and assessment). In order to practice (teach), we would need to be provided all the requisite tools, including complete curriculum materials, not asked to hunt them down on the internet the night before a lesson. We would need to stay abreast of developments in our fields, both in content and pedagogy. We would need to accept responsibility for outcomes and (gulp) be held accountable for malpractice.
If teachers practiced more like doctors, we would have less autonomy but more responsibility. The job would probably be harder, not easier. The job would also, in my view, be more effective, and therefore more rewarding.
We’d still have the kind of discretion that matters: how to teach our particular students under the particular conditions in which we encounter them. No scripted curriculum can diagnose and clarify the confusion you notice in the room, any more than a scientific study can diagnose a patient in the doctor’s office. Doctors and teachers have plenty to do without inventing their fields on the fly.
The teacher’s job, just like the doctor’s, is not to practice folk wisdom on clients, but to apply scientific principles to particular cases. Teachers need to know their students well and make them smarter using the best tools available. That should be enough to satisfy anyone’s professional ambition.
If the educational establishment equipped teachers with tools and training equivalent to those provided for doctors by the medical establishment, we would lose what passes for autonomy, but is more appropriately regarded as a form of institutional neglect. In return, we might get what our profession has so desperately and tragically lacked for so long: respect.
G.S.