School needs new Socrates

School needs new Socrates

A teacher can change the life of a pupil…..Teaching is a profession but not only: it is a vocation.

Arne Duncan, responsible of education in the USA, launches the alarm: «Nowadays a class of motivated and gifted professors is wanting»

by Arne Duncan*

In the field of instruction America has to face three grave challenges which impose an improvement of programs of didactic formation more than ever urgent. First of all, the instruction which has been imparted to millions of Americans in the past no more keeps pace with time. In global competitive economies, even those who have achieved a superior licence, do not have but limited possibilities, if they do not follow university courses.

Secondly, today more than ever before we have to recognize the need - and the duty for a public school – that enables all the students to obtain every possible potential from teaching. Actually, however, we are far away from having reached the strongly desired objective of equal education opportunities.

At present almost 30% of our students abandon school or do not succeed in terminating the superior studies in time. Hardly a 60% of the Afro-American and Spanish students succeed in achieving a diploma within the regular years of courses. If we have at heart the desire of offering possibilities, reducing inequalities, promoting civic conscience and participation, it is the school class to be the point of departure.

The third challenge is the mass exodus from the teachers board of the persons born in the years of the baby boom foreseen for the coming decade.

At the moment we count 3,2 million teachers working in about 95.000 schools. During the coming four years we may lose a third of our teachers and school officials with greater experience as a consequence of retirement and prostration. Our capacity to attracting and, even more, of retaining the great talents in the years to come will have a deep impact on public instruction. Really, this is an opportunity that occurs only once in the course of a generation. In order to keep America competitive, and to make true the American dream of warranting equal instruction to all, we are obliged to recruit, reward, form, hear and respect a new generation of gifted teachers. In order to achieve this it is, however, essential to raise the standard of didactic formation programs, since nowadays we demand much more from teachers than only a ten years ago.

Indeed, President Obama has set the ambitious goal of regaining, within 2020, America’s primate of the nation that counts proportionally the highest number of doctorates in the world. On order to reach this goal, however, both our school system and the didactic formation programs have to improve sensibly.

The pledge is immense and the time to hold tight to the past is over. There is a reason why many of us always remember their favourite teacher. A good teacher can really change the course of a student’s life. Teachers excite a curiosity that lasts lifelong, they rouse the desire of participating in democracy and instil the thirst of knowledge. It is not surprising that all the studies repeat affirming how the quality of the teacher responsible of the class, not the socio-economic conditions or the family milieu, is the decisive factor for the intellectual growth of a student.

Recruiting and training this army of new and great teachers depend strongly of our pedagogic faculties. They will have the task of forming more than half of our future teachers.

The humanistic and scientific faculties play an absolutely essential role in consolidating the cultural luggage of the future teacher. I find it difficult to understand the rectors and deans of the humanistic and scientific faculties who neglect the pedagogic programs of their universities. The fact is that States, regions and federal governments are equally responsible for the constant weakness of didactic formation programs of pedagogic faculties. Numerous member States approve ex officio the faculty programs, usually based on evaluating criteria of students’ written tests, which lack a real evaluation of their effective preparation for teaching in a class. Only an exiguous number of States and regions carefully control teachers’ work, evaluating whether and which didactic formation programs have created well prepared teachers and which, on the other hand, have proved to be of scarce profit. We will have, on one side, to study and reproduce the practice which has shown to be efficacious and, on the other side, admonish less efficient teachers to revise their way of acting or else to renounce this profession.

It is frequently stated that the great teachers are heroes whose actions are not chanted, but I feel that this obvious truth owns a profound meaning. Teaching is of the few professions which are not only a work or even an extemporary adventure: it is a vocation. The good teachers strive helping every student to free his/her own potential and to develop a mental attitude that will serve lifelong. They act convinced that all students are gifted, though they may doubt of themselves. The challenges our school and education systems have to cope with, are enormous. But equalli immense is the opportunity to serve to the best of one’s knowledge and belief our children and common good.

* State Secretary for Education of the United States

From Avvenire, June 2^nd, 2010, p. 27