Good Teachers Vital to the Good Life For All
by David Crane*
This article first appeared in THE TORONTO STAR Saturday, February 10, 2001, Section B2
There’s as close to universal agreement as you can get that education is the single most important determinant of how well individuals do in life, and how well their economies and societies do as well.
But Donald Johnston, the Canadian who heads the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based think-tank, has a question about that. When we look to the future, “where will the teachers come from?”
It’s an important question for anyone concerned about the future.
Without good teachers, the education system is in serious trouble. As Johnston sees it, pursuing a teaching career in primary and secondary schools today is much less attractive than in the past. At the same time, we face a wave of retirements over the next decade.
Many factors explain the loss of attractiveness of teaching as a career, officials at the think-tank suggest.
One is that teachers have lost status in the community. They are less respected as key figures and are often blamed for societal problems that really are due to family breakdown, poverty and other social difficulties.
Ontario faces an additional problem. The Mike Harris government has gone out of its way to vilify and denigrate the profession, and that has encouraged too many good teachers to retire early.
For many years, teaching was one of the few professions where women could progress. So the quality of teaching was sustained by highly qualified women. Today, however, women have many other options, many of them more financially rewarding, or less subject to the kind of pressures and stress that many teachers face.
After all, teaching is one of the most difficult jobs in society today, considering the stressed social environment, language difficulties, family problems, cultural conflict and many other pressures that exist in the classroom. So sustaining student interest in leaning and developing a love of learning is a monumental challenge.
Teaching also has an unusual system of compensation. Teachers are relatively well paid when they begin their careers, but receive no additional premium for experience after five to eight years in most countries.
These are not the only difficulties, to be sure. But the fundamental point, that quality of education is central to economic and social progress is beyond question. So it is critical that we find ways to attract good people to teaching.
Serious-minded business groups, such as chambers of commerce and boards of trade, should be among the first to recognize this and to support those who want to genuinely improve the education system. But it’s not just a matter of finding ways to attract some of our best young people to teaching.
It’s also important to give teachers and individual schools much more flexibility to pursue their own ideas. Ontario, however, faces a big problem in the government’s distrust of communities and insistence on micro-managing what goes on in the classroom.
Yet, as a recent analysis from the Paris think-tank states, “changing economic and social conditions have given knowledge and skills — human capital — an increasingly central role in the economic success of nations and individuals. Information and communications technology, globalization of economic activity and the trend toward greater personal responsibility and autonomy have all changed the demand for learning. The key role of competence and knowledge in stimulating economic growth has been widely recognized by economists and others.”
It has also been recognized by intelligence agencies. Look, for example, at a recent report from the National Intelligence Council and the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States on world developments between now and 2015.
The report argues that “education will be determinative of success in 2015 at both the individual and country levels. The globalizing economy and technological change inevitably place an increasing premium on a more highly skilled workforce.”
It’s evident better educated individuals are more likely to be employed, to earn more, to be healthier, to be better parents, to be happier people, to be more likely to participate in civic society, to be less inclined toward criminal activity or to use social benefits and to continue learning through their lives.
To achieve a society where the benefits of a good education are widely distributed, however, we need those good teachers, which is one of the great challenges we face over the next decade. This is why it will be on the agenda of the Paris think-tank’s April meeting of education ministers.
*A graduate of Victoria College (Vic 6T1), David Crane was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters by Wilfrid Laurier University in recognition of his writing on the impact of education technology on Canadian society. Since 1979, the author has been economics editor for the Toronto Star. David Crane can be reached at crane@interlog.com