Teaching is the oldest profession
By Grace-damn-the-torpedoes-Valentine
Being an employee is not always synonymous with being a
teacher. Schooling and education are
also potentially asynonymous, tho we often use these terms
interchangeably as well. John Taylor Gatto’s
writings, while controversial are written from the teacher’s view, the goal of
their work is to teach rather than to school.
In a few words, what Gatto said was that education means to address
intellectual and cognitive needs, and to refrain from social engineering. That
is what schooling is. That’s what
employees do.
The reason I said I was never meant to be a teacher was
because I had confused the distinction between education and schooling. I had to remember, really dig to find the way off of that hook.
I’m not saying that there are no teachers
employed in schools. There are some who
manage to get thru. The Haberman
Institute was a prof. dev. darling for a while, their claim: teachers can hide
and get past the social engineers. They
had a profile, and a quiz and some other stuff you could buy to learn how. Not kidding.
The profile was a multiple choice instrument written with double blinds,
the kind of thing that slays people who read thru the aguilar campus rather
than the prefrontal cortex, (neuro-atypicals for short) so when my “administrator/evaluator/coach”
saw my results she inferred I was bipolar. Dr.Nadia Webb has a word or two for
her, well she and a few other experts actually have a whole book for that coach
to read. Ha. As if.
Social engineering agenda are most effective when targeting
the belly of the bell curve, and schooling as its handmaiden, is equally
limited. The outliers on either end
simply cannot be schooled by employees.
For these students, only teachers will do. But the bell curve is not carved in stone. It’s just a statistic and it represents a
highly fluctuant entity, human culture as measured by cognitive
performances. Whether you think it’s the
Indigo children or the mercury in the vaccines or permissive parents or the
black spiders in space, people tend to agree, people nowadays are very
different. Very. What was counter-culture once is mainstream
now. The belly is on a diet, and it’s
shrinking. Normal is the tiny waist on
the Barbie doll, and, well, you get the picture.
Yeah, so here, I’ll fix that hook from my why I teach
essay. Teachers who are employed by
schools are super-undercover agents, partisans fighting underground for
intellectual liberty. Their numbers
sometimes dwindle, but as my mentor reminds me, teaching is the oldest
profession. Like cockroaches and Keith
Richards, we will be around long after the engineers have rounded that last
bend in the arc of justice promised by the prophets.
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