The seventh myth of education The teachers tasks

The seventh myth:        The task of the teacher is to bring to the pupils what´s in the plans for the education and to make them master it.

7                   The tasks for the teacher in the classroom will change with the demands of the society and content of the education and how it´s performed.

The education in the society must be for the society today, not yesterday. It also has to be planned to meet the society of tomorrow. Today this means, that we shall work with methods and content developed for the society of information and already now plan for the coming society of robot technic.

The teacher´s task was once in the caves defined through the kind of oral telling of wisdom. This form still is used in some societies, where no writing or reading is used for knowledge or culture.

The agricultural society and society of small villages had their need of education, the society of industrialization came with others. Some hundred years back, and still in many societies, the church played the role to get people to obey.

As the society developed towards democracy and equal value, there also was a demand for initiatives from the individual.

Most people, including all Western countries, live in the society of information and communication. Here must the work of the school, and through that are the tasks of the teachers defined, be adapted to the certain demands this society has to the education. But the politicians and the administrators of education in Sweden have sadly enough put rules for the school, which are contradictory. The teachers training school go for one version, mainly close to the plans, in reality the teachers got other tasks from above, and schools are as usually mostly behind in the demands of yesterday.

This is of course frustrating for the teachers.

The tasks of the school are defined in a plan. A document describing what is supposed to be studied by the pupils and how it shall be studied and should normally also contain some basic defining of the teacher’s role. Sometimes it is, sometimes it´s hard to see, how they want the teachers to work.

Most teacher training schools are still believing in the method Plato and the disciples (see myth 1). Most plans the world over falters and are trying to get somewhere else. But they are actually fifty years behind. Soon it´s time to reorder and to adopt the ideas to the society of robot technic, which is on its way in. And the new education methods with a lot of individual studies among other changes.

It´s not at all only a technical change or paradigm change, where we just have to be careful with planning to get enough educated personal for the change. It will more than ever before change the whole society. If we don´t manage to control the development, it will mean an enormous unemployment. People will be left out and they will feel unnecessary.

Unemployment is always a form of catastrophe, even if politicians and media love to comment it as something naturally and discuss it in forms of percentages. We all get our value from what we do, this is so all over the ages and will stay that way, probably. If you are outside the working society, the one forced to leave or if you are considered insane, you are defenceless.

The society of solidarity, a bit based in the old Roman Empire’s attempt to avoid up rises, shall take care of that everyone get some place to live and eat other necessary things. But it can never repair the social and psychological loss for them.

If again the people behind the decisions all over the world miss another fifty years in their planning with the adaption of the work of the school and other even more needed actions of the society, to a coming robot technic society and we lose control and get a mass unemployment all over the world, then the risk for world wars and other catastrophes are impending. The plan was to be ready already yesterday.

The role of the teacher seems to depend on what we study. A language teacher maybe is no good as teacher in music. Sure, but there are much more important factors.

The way we look at the pupil and the way the pupil work is very important. This goes with the way the society define children and young people.

A hundred years’ sago you were absolutely grown up by fifteen. Almost in the age for a marriage. You moved out from home to give space to more children, but also to serve in your start of some working life as employed. You were not allowed to vote, earned very little money, but you had all the responsibilities.

Some fifty years’ ago, we were still many of us rather grown up, but very few left home before the twenty. The responsibilities were less, but they listen to you more today. The school was quite authoritarian, but there were some student Councils, they sometimes talked about democracy.

All of us did the same in school and at the same time, the method of Plato and disciples was dominating, but other ideas were discussed. Impulses from south of Europe. In the middle of all this came the explosion of the personal computers and the development of the information society. None had clue.

Today children and the youth are treated in a curious way in relation to the development. Children have never ever been showing such a high intelligence and power to take care of things as now. On the other hand, they have got a protection in law that define them as rather dependent and defenceless.

We drive and curl them, like they got less intelligence and less power to manage things. We try to educate them, although they better and faster learn on their own. As a matter of fact, they also do that, but not in the way the school intend them to do. There are a lot of parallel activities, instead of letting the children work more freely in school.

The pupils practice less with their hands today. A lot of skills that are needed to be clever in the information society, is never trained in most schools. Theoretical knowledge is to be built on practical skills and knowledge. Understanding must be placed into the muscle memory of the hands.

The pupils don´t know why a soap functions. They don´t know how to take away some kind of stain. But they have some idea of the periodic system. Knowledge and skills must be built together.

If the school adopt to the demands of the communication society and train the skills the pupils need for media with presentations in the classroom supported by slide shows and videos, internet sites of their own and Webb TV, and all this goes from what they already manage, will great work exist from them.

Actually, the pupils are rather loyal to activities of adults. But a change would bring up less yawning from them. Stop underestimating the children and give the teachers free hands to put the full responsibility for the education in the hands of the children. They will manage it.

The day the society clear defines that it´s the pupil’s total responsibility for the studies, there also is a request of the power to control it. You can never take responsibility for something that you don´t believe in.

In the future, probably rather soon in the robot technic society, many things with education will be changed compared to today.

Individual studies, maybe without any fellows, will increase. The studies will be more of the kind here and now. Exactly when I need it. In some cases, there will be no teacher at all.

Studies on the internet will be most normal. By watching, and maybe repeating, videos in advance, like in the studies in the last paragraph, will take you into mass lectures live with maybe millions of others from all over the world. They already exist in the USA. But only a few invited can talk.

The same type of lectures is given in Sweden, but the groups are more normal.

These lectures, produced in much better way than is usual today, can be video recorded and be used indefinitely times from the internet.

We have a need for that the Swedish school authorities and politicians construct bases on internet for educational purpose instead of giving away all the rights to multinational private companies like YouTube. Put all the resources in an international net independent of private money. The cost is negligible in a bigger perspective.

All these developments above will for certain change the tasks of the teachers and the needs of our teachers. Plans are to be started now. In my favourite Indian paper a researcher said: If a teacher is possible to replaced by a robot, they will do it. I hope that not goes for the children!

Goa the 13th of February 2017              Lennart Warenius