Teachers Left Behind
The Dutch parliament recently debated the government’s future plans for education, which include a mind-blowing 2 billion euro cutback. Alongside this financial freefall, the education sector faces another challenge: a shortage of active teachers. Not a shortage of qualified educators, mind you, but a lack of those who hold educational degrees and continue to actively teach. The pool of qualified teachers is big enough to have one teacher available per ten students, but many have left the profession over the last few years.
The absolute worst proposal of the day came from one of the government parties. They suggested putting individuals without an educational degree, but with some degree of professional (but, more importantly, non-pedagogical) knowledge, in front of classrooms. To make matters worse, these individuals would be unsupervised by an authorized and competent teacher.
This is alarming. Even a child could reveal this proposal's flaws. Consider comparisons to other professional fields: would you let a first-year medical student perform a specialized open-heart surgery? Or allow a casual flight simulator gamer to pilot a transatlantic flight? Or: would you trust the design of a real rollercoaster by someone whose experience is limited to building one in a video game? These scenarios sound absurd, but they’re actually very similar to what’s being suggested for our classrooms.
The proposal to place non-teachers in classrooms (again, without supervision) demonstrates a disregard for the teaching profession. It undermines the value of educators and sends a clear message that teaching apparently requires no specialized skill or training. Ironically, this comes at a time when the goal should be to make teaching more attractive, to recruit passionate and qualified individuals (back) into this valuable profession. Instead, these policies only diminish its importance.
Like I said, it's horrible, but there’s still hope. The education sector can still recover. We can only hope that this government falls sooner rather than later, so that the knowledge economy that we were once praised for will rise again.