How Not to Teach Teachers

by JAMES D. KOERNER

UNLIKE most educational controversies, the training of teachers for the public schools is a subject that generates continuous heat. A kind of rhythm characterizes other issues — why Johnny can’t read, or college freshmen can’t write, why IQ tests are unreliable, or whether schools should be palaces; such controversies wax and wane. But the problem of how best to prepare teachers, being central to everything else in education, is a war without end. The traditional combatants, professors of academic subjects versus professors of education, have held a series of disarmament conferences in the last few years which, while not producing any substantive results, have eased the tension a bit. Still, the basic quarrel abides, and the cannonading continues from both sides, often rather wide of the right targets.

During the past two years, I have visited, for periods of from a day to a week, sixty-three institutions that train teachers — universities, multipurpose colleges, liberal arts colleges, and teachers colleges, in all sections of the country and representing all types of programs now in operation. I have looked especially at the preparatory programs for teachers of academic subjects, both the liberal arts and the professional part, and I have examined the graduate programs leading to the numerous masters’ and doctors’ degrees in education. I have visited about two hundred classes in both academic and professional subjects; have talked with many hundreds of administrators, students, and members of the faculty; have read through a small library of books, reports, monographs, pamphlets, and periodicals; have examined several thousand transcripts of credit for graduates of education programs; have attended innumerable educational meetings, conferences, seminars, and conventions; and in sundry other ways have acquainted myself with the massive industry of professional education.

It has been, I regret to say, a cheerless experience. When all the complexity of the field is recognized and all the necessary qualifications made, the simple fact remains that the education of American teachers, school administrators, and other professionals is more often a failure than a success. This is so because neither the liberal arts nor the professional component of these training programs comes even close to its theoretical goal.

In the first place, the field of professional education, which controls the training programs for teachers and administrators, has become an unwieldy, slow-witted, bureaucratic colossus, standing on a slippery foundation built on sand. It is the most poorly defined, formless field in higher education. It is the most derivative, taking its substance from the academic fields of psychology, history, philosophy, and the social sciences, all of which it has digested badly while adding little that is uniquely its own. Because it has failed to bring a unifying theory into this multifariousness, its training programs continue to be constructed on tenuous and untested hypotheses, or on whatever is expedient in a given instance.

ALTHOUGH education does not yet know how much or what kind of professional preparation is needed by teachers and administrators, it has constructed a plenitude of mandatory training programs on the assumption that it does. These programs, despite a long history of inadequacy, remain frozen into law in state certification requirements. More important, those who run teacher-training programs have become frozen in their own thinking and are now far too busy managing an established business with a rapid growth rate to have much time or inclination for the examination of first principles.

Education has been corrupted by money and power. It is a big business. It turns out a quarter of all the undergraduate degrees awarded by American institutions, and in 1963 will graduate about 150,000 persons eligible to teach in public schools, a good many of whom will not teach, and a good many more of whom will not teach long. It awards half of all masters’ degrees, and more doctors’ degrees, by a sizable margin, than any other single academic field. To man this giant machine, the field has well over 20,000 full-time faculty, making it second in size only to the field of English. Outside the institutions themselves, there is a constellation of large professional and service organizations that is an integral part of the education machine. All this has happened in an astonishingly short time, and success has seduced the field into arrogance and administrative busywork and away from basic concerns.

Thus, one of the reasons that the education of American teachers is fundamentally a failure is that professional education, which constructs and controls the training programs, has extremely poor credentials as an academic discipline. The fact that it has won recognition as such a discipline, which it has done through the abdication of responsibility by the liberal arts departments, is not a qualification; it merely makes possible the building of more academic empires on sandy foundations.

This general disability, as well as the specific ills that education is heir to, is mostly traceable, as it would be in any other field, to the faculty. It is an indecorous thing to say and is obviously offensive to educationists, but it is the truth, and it should be said: the intellectual caliber of the education faculty is the fundamental limitation of the field. Because no educational program can transcend the quality of its faculty, any long-range improvement in teacher training will have to wait upon improvement in those who staff schools and departments of education. Although a good many men of excellent ability are to be found in education, particularly among the younger faculty, their number is minute in relation to the whole.

Yet the preparatory programs for public school teachers are chiefly under the de facto supervision of the education faculty. It is here that admission to the training programs is controlled, here that the programs themselves are constructed, here that the future teacher accumulates courses in education and pedagogy, here that he develops whatever professional outlook he has, here that, hopefully, he learns what to do with what, hopefully, he has acquired from his academic courses. Cardinal Newman, who wrote one of the great treatises on liberal education, saw only one reason for courses: “The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it already lives.” It does not live in the greatest part of the present education faculty; in this unfortunate fact lies education’s greatest problem.

Weak students gravitate to weak faculties. Education students, along with students in agriculture and business administration, fill the lower ranks of the academic ladder. Every major study of the subject, beginning with a classic one in the state of Pennsylvania in 1928—1932 and coming down to very recent ones, has arrived at the same conclusion: education students show up badly, both in achievement and native ability, when compared with students in other fields — a fact that has been known informally throughout higher education for half a century. Teaching attracts poor students for a combination of academic, social, and economic reasons, but the bland acceptance of this condition by the education faculty, its failure to weed out the incompetent and to raise its standards of admission and performance create a circular problem: a weak faculty maintains low standards that attract weak students; together they deter better faculty from entering the field and raising standards that would attract better students into better programs. “All other reforms,” as John Dewey once observed, “are conditioned upon reform in the quality and character of those who engage in the teaching profession.”

Some headway is being made. A great many teacher-training programs that used to take anyone who appeared at the door have raised admission standards in recent years. A grade average of C or a shade better is becoming a common requirement in these programs. This is helpful, though it may not in itself mean much. Grade averages are most significant when one knows what the quality of the instruction is, what the grading practices are, and what groups a given student is competing against. A C average is not an impressive requirement, especially in teachers colleges and state colleges, if one is trying to educate educators, nor is it commensurate with grade averages for entrance to professional programs in other fields. Still, the grade requirement is on the rise and in time should make some difference in the quality of teacher turned out.

No headway is being made, so far as I can see, on admissions standards at the all-important graduate level. With the exception of students enrolled in the so-called Master of Arts in Teaching programs, who are usually capable persons, candidates for the masters’ and doctors’ degrees are rarely screened in education as they are in other fields. Ironically, it is often easier for one to be admitted to graduate study in education than to undergraduate programs in the same institution. A bachelor’s degree which might be twenty years old and from a third-rate institution is often adequate for admission, especially to those advanceddegree programs that are wholly under the control of the education division. Whatever reasons there may have been historically for taking low-caliber people in the training programs for teachers, there has never been and certainly is not now any reason for taking them in the graduate programs. The ramifying influence of low standards in graduate education is painfully clear: the masters and doctors turned out become administrators who hire teachers, construct curricula, and set standards in public schools; they also staff professional associations, accrediting agencies, and become professors of education.

THE education courses themselves deserve their ill repute. Most of them are indeed puerile, repetitious, dull, and ambiguous — incontestably. Two factors make them this way: the limitations of the instructor, and the limitations of subject matter that has been remorselessly fragmented, subdivided, and inflated, and that in many instances was not adequate in its uninflated state. That some teachers and courses in education can be found to equal the best in the academic areas is a happy fact. A course in the history of education, taught by, say, Lawrence Cremin of Columbia Teachers College, or a course in the psychological theories of how young people learn things, taught by Ernest Hilgard of Stanford, or one in the methods of teaching high school English, taught by Edward Gordon of Yale — such courses could be as valuable as any on the campus. But the mere effort needed to identify the intellectual leaders or the outstanding teachers in professional education today testifies to their scarcity.

The principal subjects of the professional curriculum—teaching methods, practice teaching, and the educational aspects of history, philosophy, and psychology — are almost never taught and the textbooks almost never written by persons who are themselves trained historians, philosophers, psychologists, or proven experts in teaching. Hence, there is nothing more obvious in the typical education class, apart from the remarkable docility of the students, than the lack of real depth and scholarship on the part of the instructor. Frequently, a strong strain of anti-intellectualism is discernible. Frequently, utilitarianism takes the place of intellectualism, the “tender-minded" approach, as William James called it, takes the place of the “tough-minded,” the ritualistic takes the place of the realistic, the uncritical acceptance of shibboleths takes the place of the critical analysis of ideas. There is a universal devotion to the “discussion method,” which most often signifies, as it does in public schools, an aimless, generalized bull session. Great use is also made of group dynamics, field trips, panel discussions, studentdirected projects, and an infinite variety of movies and other visual aids; these devices no doubt have their uses, one of which seems to be to kill time.

The best students are repelled by all this, the average ones are bored, the poor are pleased. With the exception of practice teaching, which is not really a course, the professional curriculum for teachers is perhaps 50 to 75 percent water. At the graduate level, the dilution is often much higher.

Apart from the question of quality, the quantity of education courses required or permitted in teacher training also deserves the harsh things that are usually said about it. This is one of the oldest issues between the academician, who has traditionally inveighed against what he regarded as an excessive number of education courses, and the educationist, who has usually claimed that the number of courses is quite modest and reasonable. Nobody, so far as I could discover in surveying results of educational research, had tried to collect information on the subject from the only reliable source that exists, the transcripts of credit for graduates of the various education programs. I therefore gathered a representative sample of such transcripts from thirty-two institutions and made numerous calculations from them.

The transcripts indicate, among many other things, that the preparing institutions go far beyond state certification requirements in education courses. Elementary school teachers get an average of forty-nine semester hours in education, while the average requirement for state licensure is twenty-four. Secondary school teachers get about twenty-seven semester hours, while the average state requirement is eighteen. Elementary school teachers, that is, spend about 40 percent of their four years of college taking education courses in such subjects as Educational Psychology (usually three or four courses under different names but covering about the same material), Audio-Visual Aids, Personal and Community Hygiene, and Elementary School Curriculum; they also take a seemingly endless series of discrete courses in how to teach each subject of the elementary school at each level of the elementary school. Secondary teachers spend nearly 25 percent of their time taking education courses. These are national averages. If one looks only at the liberal arts colleges, the averages go sharply down in education and up in academic courses; if one looks at schools that are present or erstwhile teachers colleges, which prepare very large numbers of teachers, the averages go sharply up in education and down in academic courses. These figures, of course, do not cover the graduate programs in education, in many of which not a single academic course is taken, and where the time is spent in courses so trivial that they must be seen to be believed.

I submit that this much undergraduate time devoted to education, especially in view of the redundant and intellectually thin nature of the courses and the consistently negative reaction of students to them, is indefensible. And it clearly cannot help but deter the very people most needed in teaching; a really bright student will not suffer such a diet. If educationists are serious about improving teacher training and the quality of students, one of the most effective steps they could take would be to reduce course offerings and requirements by perhaps 50 percent, while insisting that the remainder be taught with some distinction.

THE remedies for the faults of professional education are implicit in the discussion. If admission standards are low, they should be raised; if course work is sterile, it needs revitalization; if the faculty is weak, new graduate programs and new faculty hiring policies are indicated. The real question is not what needs doing, but how to get what needs doing done. The forces for change in teacher education are now greater than they have been for a long time. There are more “Young Turks” around, more support for new programs from foundations and college administrations, more interest on the part of academic folk, and more pressure for reform from the public than ever before. But to all these forces there are others that are opposite and often more than equal.

The greatest obstacle to reform is the field of education itself. This is natural. Teacher training is a major industry, the income from which supports not only schools and departments and professors of education but often other branches of the university as well, even entire institutions. Sometimes the income is fairly good, permitting high salaries and fast promotions for the education faculty. Like any vast bureaucracy, education is by nature pretty much dedicated to the status quo and has developed a centripetal circle of power to perpetuate it. At the center are the institutions themselves, while orbiting around them are accrediting associations, the state departments of education, and the administrator-dominated state and national agencies like the NEA. Such a concentration of power naturally looks with a cold eye on suggestions for change, especially those coming from outside. It has a built-in radar that sounds the warning at the approach of any proposal that threatens to diminish the establishment, or that might jeopardize jobs or status.

Thus, the field has a history of opposition, more or less automatic, to most proposals for reform that have been made over the last half century. It held the line for decades against increasing the liberal content of its programs at the expense of the pedagogical; it fought like a tiger to maintain in statu quo state certification requirements, that monument to administrative rigidity; it met criticism with fury, denunciation, and diversionary attack. There has always been, for example, enormous opposition to any proposal that would license teachers in a way that would make the most sense to a great many people — through a system of qualifying examinations. Under such a system, people could be qualified to teach when they could demonstrate their ability to do so, which would mean giving them better examinations in subject matter than are yet available, and possibly some sort of probationary internship. It would mean that the main criterion for entrance to teaching would shift from the mechanical counting up of credits and courses, often of dubious pedigree, to performance. In the nature of things, most teachers, whatever system prevails, will continue to come through organized programs in colleges, but they would be required under an examination system to prove their grasp of the subjects they propose to teach as well as their capacity to teach them. The doors to teaching would thus be open to anyone. Einstein might be able to teach third-grade arithmetic, after all; able immigrants might be admitted to the classroom to teach their native languages; and the services of many kinds of persons of genuine intellectual accomplishment might be made available to the public schools. An examinations system, whether administered at the state, regional, or national level, would also be a valuable cheek against the quality of individual institutions — certainly far better than the ineffectual accreditation programs now in operation.

Professional education, except in isolated instances, presents a monolithic opposition to such a scheme and goes to picturesque lengths to find reasons why mandatory qualifying examinations will not work. The educationists’ real objection, however, is to the reduced status of professional education, of course work, and of graduation from organized programs that inheres in the plan. Also, the concept of professionalism, which has preoccupied the field of education for so many years, is violated. Qualifying examinations seem to say that public school teaching is not really a profession (which it probably is not) and that people can perform well in it without professional preparation (which they obviously can). I do not believe that any system of qualifying examinations, beyond the perfunctory ones that now exist in a few places, has any chance of adoption. The conditions of life in the world of professional education preclude it, as they preclude other reforms that are urgently needed.

THAT being true, what are some of the practical, concrete reforms that could be made now within the existing establishment?

1. The time devoted in teacher-training programs to education courses should be restricted to state requirements, which allow ample time for pedagogical work of any consequence.

2. At least two thirds of the work for all graduate degrees in education (the Master of Arts in Teaching degree excepted, where it might be about half) should be in the liberal arts area, and students in these programs should be required to measure up to the customary graduate standards.

3. The regular four-year undergraduate program should remain the standard preparation for new teachers. The Master of Arts in Teaching programs should by all means be continued and encouraged for liberal arts graduates without previous work in education; but the accelerating movement toward making five years of preparation mandatory for all new teachers is ill advised. It merely takes the pressure off the undergraduate programs to improve themselves, and it inflicts an enormous and unnecessary burden on an already overtaxed system of graduate education. Four years are ample, provided they are wisely used.

4. The remaining teachers colleges in the United States should be shut down or converted to general-purpose institutions, and those that have already been converted in name should move much faster toward conversion in fact. Removal of the word “Teachers” or “Education” from the name of the school, even when done by the state legislature, does not make the school a liberal arts institution. Most of the colleges that have made such changes still have the same faculty teaching the same kind of students in the same kind of programs as they formerly had.

5. Undergraduate majors in education should be eliminated, and all teachers, including elementary teachers and special school personnel, should be required to major in an academic subject. A reasonable reduction in education courses would make this possible, while the time devoted to the student’s general education would remain about what it now is.

6. Education courses that are derived directly from academic disciplines, such as those in educational psychology and in the history and philosophy of education, should be taught only by persons fully qualified to teach in the appropriate academic departments of the same institution. This commonsense recommendation would mean that 90 percent of the people now teaching these courses would cease to teach them, and so is a bit utopian, but it is a goal toward which education ought to be moving with all deliberate speed.

7. If competent faculty cannot be secured to teach methods courses — and most such courses are incompetently taught now — formal courses in the subject should be eliminated.

8. Persons whose graduate training has been in education and who have no recognized qualifications in an academic field should not be allowed to teach academic courses, as they now frequently do in teachers colleges and many smaller institutions.

Unfortunately, the political realities of the education field dictate a future built upon the past, which means that modest, short-term gains, a kind of mild meliorism, will probably be the pattern of the future. The key question is whether improvement of this sort can keep up with the problems of exploding enrollments, the advancement of knowledge itself, and the other educational exigencies of the nation. In any event, continued improvement in teacher education, slow or fast, will come only in response to unrelenting pressure from the public, the scholarly and scientific community, and the small minority of educationists who know better than anyone else what is wrong and who want to change it.