The Master of Arts Degree In Teaching

Note: the author has taught education courses both at the undergraduate and graduate level.

The MA in Teaching, required for permanent teacher certification in grades K-12 in most, if not all American states, is misguided requirement, at least as it is now generally designed. The degree is based on the premise that the craft of teaching can be transmitted through formal study, when in truth it can probably best be acquired through experience and guided practice. The Master's is meant to give professional as well as a kind of intellectual status, but only succeeds in conferring the former -- and this only because diplomas do, after all, foster respect, but also because the degree itself is a prerequisite for permanent teacher licensure. If you don't have a Master's in Education, you simply can't have a career as a teacher.

The body of knowledge acquired in the Master's in Education course of study is oftentimes lightweight. Graduate schools of education expose prospective teachers mainly to theories about how children think and learn; these theories tend to reflect educational fashion and are often pseudo-scientific in that they are can’t be proven (leaving aside that many of them have been shown to be ineffective or even deleterious over time). Other coursework tends to center around 'issues' in education: addressing the different 'learning styles' of children, 'teacher-centered' (old-fashioned teacher-led) instruction versus 'student-centered' (in which teacher acts more as an enlightened guide) instruction, and the like.

Oftentimes, graduate education course material can verge on the silly and irresponsible. For example, students may be asked to read a set of articles representing different points of view on the topic of giving homework (some will be for it, though it is also likely that many of these articles would be against giving homework). All will cite research that supports their positions. However, when teachers arrive at their first teaching job, it is almost certain that they will have to follow school and district mandates regarding homework. Teachers may rightly question the usefulness of an intellectual debate in an area that really isn't debatable in actual practice.

I am not suggesting the study of education theory should be done away with altogether. Any seriously-intended theory of education is worthy of study. Teachers should be exposed to all ideas current in educational thought, especially given the complex teaching environment we find today. But entire courses and units should not be dedicated to many of the topics that are considered the most important in education theory; they should be condensed, and approached from a more common-sense point of view*. Additionally, knowledge not only of one's core subject area, but general knowledge should be placed at greater value in teaching schools than it now is. I don't want to be lectured ad nauseum on the different 'learning styles' I will encounter in my classroom. Must I constantly distinguish between 'visual' and 'kinesthetic' learners**, and be obliged to come up with ways of engaging them at all times? Or might I just be trusted to come up with a common sense approach on my own or in collaboration with fellow teachers? As a graduate student, I was appalled at the lack of emphasis on learning how to instruct properly in the actual subject area you would be teaching. I was forced instead to learn about the aforementioned 'learning styles', 'democratic classrooms', the umpteen different ways of arranging one's classroom, the pros and cons of having students contribute to making classroom rules, and other soul-deadening material -- never once was I taught how to, say, teach a substantive American history lesson to an elementary school class.

*The writing quality of the contemporary educational education theorist also needs to be addressed. I wince when recalling all the polemical literature I had to endure both as a graduate student and later as a professor who had actually to teach it. Education writers seem not to believe that their audience is capable of making an inference. I should mention that a good deal of the education-related reading material of recent authorship is much in need of editing for style and form.

**visual learners learn best through pictures, graphs, films, etc.; kinesthetic learners apparently learn best in ways that allow them to move about freely (!); 'tactile' learners must handle objects that represent geometric shapes (if they are learning geometry), etc.

Education theory is seemingly willfully separated from classroom experience, particularly from the experience of teachers in low-income schools. For example, the aspect of teaching that most bedevils teachers, particularly new teachers -- classroom discipline -- is rarely treated with the proper urgency in teacher-education courses. Though the topic is covered over several different courses in the typical graduate education program, it is rare to see a course solely devoted to classroom management.

Let's take this matter of teaching discipline in graduate education programs separately for a moment. Classroom discipline problems are the main reason new teachers become frustrated with the teaching profession. And the problem of classroom discipline is seldom approached honestly. In the public schools, the regulations governing discipline are fairly weak -- they are usually an inadequate deterrent to the student who misbehaves chronically. In all teaching settings, the teacher is and must be the primary disciplinarian. But teachers must also receive the unequivocal, firm backing of their school administration and their community to give the proper weight to their own disciplinary actions.

Regrettably, teachers do not always receive proper support in matters of discipline. To digress for a moment, this is ultimately a reflection of contemporary society's ambivalence about controlling the will of the individual; it also reflects our collective view that the rights of the few should be considered on an equal basis with the welfare of the many. At any rate, many teachers, particularly (but not exclusively) in disadvantaged areas, are left to get along as best they can with the most challenging students. Many teachers with disadvantaged student populations find themselves overwhelmed, and leave the profession within a few years.

Teacher education programs idealize the classroom setting, and would have us believe that there is no such thing as the classroom where a program of behavioral modification would not be sufficient to control an unruly student. I have taught graduate students who are working in challenging urban schools, and the difference between the largely middle-class school settings profiled in the course readings and those where my grad students have to work is truly galling. In their coursework, education students are taught how to deal with students who possess some sense of remorse, who have 'internalized' the norms and expectations of society, at least to a degree; they are not taught what they really need to know: how to deal with students with overwhelming behavioral and social problems.

II.

So, far too often, graduate education courses are intellectually stultifying and, worse, do not do a good job of preparing teachers to lead classrooms. The teachers who do succeed are the ones who somehow manage to survive their first years in the profession, finding the toughness and possessing the dedication to weather challenges that very often have to be experienced to be truly believed. Their master's degrees are decidedly not what give them the resources to be successful.

Yet dispensing with formal training altogether is not the solution. Instead, we ought to restructure the training to make it both more intellectually invigorating as well as more practically oriented. We should keep what I believe was the original intent of the master's in education (training people to teach), but revise and shorten the degree course, combining it with a more rigorous apprenticeship than we generally have had prospective teachers undergo up to now.

Teaching is not a science or an 'art' but a craft. Master's degree courses are taught as if education were a kind of applied social science -- through readings, lectures, and discussions, though without the enjoyment of getting to do experiments. It would be better instead to have the students watch videos of actual classes, for example -- not as a special feature but as a regular element of class. Instructors could select readings that support (or refute) the practices that the graduate students witness in these videos. Any papers the students write could be in response to the teacher practice that is observed, using the theory to comment on the practice. Other creative teaching methods should be freely employed: student dramatization of discipline problems, instructional films made by the graduate students that illustrate educational theory, debates, mock trials, and so forth.

Aside from one or two courses on classroom discipline and behavior management, I wish I'd had one on managing paperwork, record-keeping, and other administrative tasks. Like the class discipline course, it would be practical in nature. Class time could be spent grading sample homework assignments, learning to enter grades, do report cards, etc. Videos could again be used to show how teachers can best manage classroom routines.

I'll say again that it would be unwise to dispense with educational theory classes altogether. Students should be able to choose from among courses that emphasize different educational philosophies. A useful (and interesting) course would be on the problems and history of urban education since World War II (ideally, the course should be as free as possible of an ideological slant), with an emphasis on the recent innovations that are showing so much promise in inner-city settings.

In order to allow these or any other suggestions for change in the teaching master's program to work, the teaching quality at schools of education simply must improve. Teachers are incessantly reminded that they must be 'engaging' in their own classrooms by education professors who are anything but engaging themselves. While there is a minority of professors who strive to engage their students, to connect the (at times) disconnected or abstruse theory to classroom reality, many (intentionally or not) treat their graduate students with condescension, believing that Gardiner's theory of intelligences or Piaget's stages of development are sufficiently interesting on their own to stimulate graduate student interest. No educational theories have any real interest save when they are thoughtfully connected with real teaching and learning experiences. We need more professors of education who can teach educational theory creatively and with a more practical aim.

I am not as familiar with student teaching internships as I am with graduate education courses. I'm sure some student teaching experiences are invaluable to prospective teachers. However, if we could follow the principle that greater rigor in teacher training should always be the goal, we might create apprenticeship experiences that demand more of participants. I'm not sure if serving as a teacher assistant for a semester is adequate preparation for taking on the responsibilities of a classroom single-handed. Graduate teaching programs should be leading the way in devising internships that give a realistic experience of working with children, especially the kind of challenging student teachers are ever more likely to encounter, and that allow one to handle, in some small way, the many demands of teaching (paperwork, lesson planning, parent contacts, etc.).

Some graduate programs probably are not in need of any alteration. Institutions such as the Bank Street College of Education are philosophically perfectly attuned to the kinds of learning environments to which they send so many of their graduates. The preparation they offer is probably more than adequate for the teacher at the 'progressive' school. However, many schools are (sadly) too overwhelmed to be progressive, and the only way for teachers to do well in such schools is to be as well prepared as they possibly can be before entering the classroom. If they are teaching and getting their Master's at the same time, they should not be made to suffer through coursework that has little connection to their everyday teaching experience -- that will make them cynical, and ultimately disheartened. The Master's in Education should be looked at just as closely as all the other elements of public education that are currently being subject to revision and reform.

Cultural Poverty of the United States

In recent times, some of our political candidates have spoken up against 'poverty'. I wonder if this is the right term to use. If what is being referred to is poverty and the destitution that goes with it, then the priority should be to eliminate it. Without denying that poverty still can be found in the United States, I think what people are more often referring to is not true poverty, but income inequality, lack of access to health care and good schools, lack of well-paying jobs, and other impediments to getting and maintaining secure wealth: in other words, economic insecurity. My observation tells me that economic insecurity is much more often the problem than true poverty, as I understand the term. It threatens our national way of life.

There is no question that we are vulnerable economically at this time in our history, and that some kind of decisive action needs to be taken to forestall long-term decline. Unfortunately, the kinds of decisive actions we would need would go against the grain of not just our political, but our social culture. And when I mention social culture, I feel I should also add that we do suffer, as a nation, a kind of poverty that would drag down any effort towards national improvement in any arena of life; I am referring to cultural poverty.

America used to possess a vital 'vernacular' or folk culture (another term would be popular culture, but the common meaning of that term has changed so much as to make it misleading in this instance). In our country, folk culture could be found in many locales: the immigrant enclaves of our cities, our rural areas, particularly in the South; threads of a distinct American everyday culture could actually be found anywhere that had a distinct regional character (which was, at one time, most areas of the country). Our folk culture had many wonderful manifestations: regional folk music styles, certain sports, ways of life, crafts, customs, foods.

Nowadays, most of these products of regional American culture require conscious preservation for them to survive in any form. It is obvious to everyone that we have become homogenized; we have lost our regional folkways (the ones which have produced some unique cultural products, from blues music to stickball*). Consumerism, mass communications and entertainment are some of the powerful agents of conformity that have caused this. The only cultural sub-groups that exist authentically outside of the mainstream are the ones primarily guided by their religion.

*though the effort is self-conscious, some vernacular arts, such as bluegrass music, are actually thriving as the result of a massive effort of cultivation and preservation.

Independent creative folk culture is seemingly on the wane. The hope is that through thoughtful preservation, the folk arts can somehow remain vital. They may not be integrated into our daily lives as intimately as they once were, but at least they won't die out altogether, and could even continue developing.

However, the decline of traditional folkways is not the primary cause of the cultural poverty I was referring to earlier; it is a symptom of it. In discussing this, let us switch over to a second definition of 'culture': the local and national norms, customs, rituals, conventions etc. that shape our behavior, sometimes inhibiting and regimenting it, at all times giving our lives some kind of order, if not value and meaning.

This aspect of culture has never been as strong in the United States as in the older nations. We may have social classes, but no class system. We may practice politeness, but decorum seems more than what is necessary. There is no institution we do not alter in order to give ourselves more freedom, when possible and practical: law, religion, marriage, family, school. Our personal ideal is to be open and free with one another; social reserve makes us suspicious. The hauteur we perceive in some foreigners is repellent to Americans.

Many people have observed these things about us. And I am only repeating what we have all heard already when I say that another tendency of ours is to make convenience and practicality the measure of a thing's value. This is especially true of food, to give just one example. I'm pretty sure that breakfast cereal, fast food, pre-packaged snacks, and other ways of making eating less troublesome were American innovations.

I know all these are banal observations. But while our love of personal freedom, convenience, choice, and so forth have been enduring parts of our character, they have never been as unfettered as during the last two to three generations. We have become more convinced of our entitlement to absolute freedom of action, while doing away with any central guiding principles for our personal and civic lives; the effect on our society has been confusing, and even damaging in some cases.

What 'guiding principles' could I be referring to? Not 'decency' or 'morals', or anything like them. As it is with our folk culture, any decline in the sense of right and wrong that one may perceive is not a cause, but a symptom of something else that is larger but less visible.

Ours has never been as hierarchical a society as some others, nor has it been especially authoritarian. But there was a time when we shared a greater faith that authority would be used for a benevolent purpose. We once believed, more so than now, that authority properly lay with government, with family, with school, and other institutions of society; we did not question it because it would not have occurred to us to to do so. We believed in the accumulated wisdom of these institutions. We also had a passive belief, but a belief all the same, that society's natural order was indeed hierarchical. Parents, school administrations, police, the military, government representatives, etc. were above the rest of society, and it was our natural place to follow and obey them.

One can't go any further without acknowledging that in a hierarchical society, certain groups are held in an inferior position unfairly and against their will. We know this has been true in our society no less than in any other; we have also learned that it is unwise to follow authority unquestioningly. Those who have fought, often heroically, against hierarchies of race, class, and sex have bettered our society immeasurably; the same may be said about those who have fought against the unwise or unfair use of the official instruments of authority.

Perhaps in order to ensure that we would suffer the least possible injustice at the hands of societal, governmental, or familial authorities, we have weakened them, and given them an excess of oversight. The school, the policeman, the parent, the government, and so forth all hold less power over us than they formerly did. This is not entirely unwelcome -- individuals should not be totally powerless in the face of an arbitrary instrument of authority. And we need to have continuing vigilance to make sure that the power of authority is wielded fairly.

I would offer that the dilution of authority in our society has been a double-edged sword. It has made every action, every decision that would have an impact on others frought with ramifications; as a result, we are often paralyzed. One can easily find examples of large-scale projects that would have been undertaken decisively by earlier generations lying half-finished, or languishing in the beginning stages. Specifically, I would argue that the stalled effort to rebuild New Orleans, the decision about how to build on the World Trade Center site, the search for alternative fuels and modes of transportation are but three examples of how our ambivalence towards authority has led not to more enlightened decisions, but simple inaction.

Our thoughtless rejection of authority on principle has done as much harm in the private as it has in the public sphere. While we may agree, if asked, that parental authority, for example, should be final, the broad culture undermines parental authority. In the popular culture, parents are often shown as well-meaning dolts, self-absorbed, or simply incompetent. And if many parents heave off the burden of having to wield authority over their children, it is because the 'culture' (or, what is 'in the air'), gives them tacit permission to do so. Certainly, parents who try to be strict go well against the grain of contemporary thinking. I can't say for certain whether kids are any less well-mannered than in earlier generations -- every generation complains about its children's manners -- but I'm pretty sure that children are no longer expected to present themselves with any amount of formality, in private or in public.

The authority of the teacher and the school is also greatly diminished by our rejection of authority as an abstract principle. For as much lip-service as we pay to the importance of education, the teaching profession itself is not respected; the decisions handed down by the teacher or administration are seen as provisional, if they go against the wishes of dissatisfied parents or of other parties. The multifarious cures being offered for our underachieving schools would be unnecessary if the incivility, slatternly personal self-presentation, and watered-down thought and intellectual content that are tolerated in the broader society could somehow be kept away from the classroom.

In the domain of the arts, it is seen as stodgy to maintain that there is a body of visual art, literature, history, and so forth that is deserving of preservation and study more than the rest. With the abandonment of a hierarchy, as it were, of culture, we have allowed almost every cultural product to have its day. This is not an entirely bad development. Leaving aside that any set of criteria for judging the worth of art is biased and myopic, obviously some of the art that once would have been considered 'low' deserves attention on its own terms. But in (rightly) recognizing that standards of 'quality' are arbitrary, we have then allowed ourselves to think it is better to have no standard at all. This attitude, combined with our faith that technological progress should always be embraced, is causing society to be altered in unpredictable ways.

I would love to have it demonstrated that our everyday culture is as strong as it once was. But by almost every measure I can think of, American culture is has become progressively weaker, across the social spectrum. Families in which there is strong, intact structure have become the exception; with the decline of family life there has also been the gradual disappearance of handed-down cultural traditions: foods, crafts, rituals. People increasingly live in communities that, either by accident or by design, are culture-free, in that they have no ties to any kind of shared past. In most households, what culture there is to be found is of the instantaneous, electronic kind. Though some would have us believe that the new electronic media are allowing the mind to develop in new, possibly beneficial ways, time may show that they have a spiritual cost we cannot measure.

I won't try to convince anyone that our country is a coarser place than it was before. But it is a less interesting place than it used to be. The negative social effects that stem from a lack of a strong, agreed-upon culture apparently can be withstood; it is almost harder, somehow, to live where there is little sense of place.

The Decline of Everyday Photography

Photographs may confound the viewer as much as they reveal, and if I'm not mistaken, that is at least some of the allure of photography, and is a justification for calling it one of the fine arts. I love the ambiguity of photographs; the best photographers (not including nature photographers), it seems to me, are the ones who can expertly blend the chance and mystery that are intrinsic to captured images with their own artistic intention.

Ordinary snapshots, yearbook pictures, portraits and so forth don't have that kind of "intentionality", but to me they reveal something about the personae, if not the actual characters, of their subjects. Go through any collection of American family snapshots from the 1930's to the present, and you will probably see some striking trends. Up until the early 1970's, people seem more restrained in photographs. The range of behavior that was captured on camera was quite limited: usually the people are posing; occasionally they may be sitting in an automobile, or swimming or engaged in some other leisure or sport activity. Nowadays almost every aspect of life seems a worthy subject for a snapshot.

Prior to about 1973, you would seldom have found anyone making a face deliberately at the camera, or being otherwise provocative (the exception might have been pictures taken in photo booths). There is nothing inherently good or bad about this in itself; it is just something that one notes in looking at family photographs across the decades. However, there is a troubling feature of snapshot photography that one can't as easily dismiss (beginning, again, around 1973 and continuing on up to the present) : at a certain point, people generally began to look awful in photographs.

This generalization is as broad as they come, but I can defend it easily if you show me your family pictures (if they span at least forty years). The pictures up to 1970 or so will have a restraint about them. The human subjects will be well-, if more conservatively and uniformly clothed -- their hair-styles will be old-fashioned, but not displeasing. Most of all, the people in them will present themselves with a noticeable reserve, one for which one nowadays might be nostalgic. For to look at your family pictures, from the early '70's onwards, would cause one, in many cases, to blush and to cringe.

Part of the problem was technical advances in quick photography that made colors more lifelike and the visual sense of the picture much more immediate. Of course, one can't discount the hair and clothing styles that seem so laughable with a little hindsight. But these aesthetic landmarks are not the real cause of what I believe is a terrible decline in everyday photographs.

I am convinced that we are the ones who ruin, however innocently, most of the photographs that are taken of us. We feel obliged to show a whole set of emotions all at once when the shot is taken; this often gives us a distorted or vulgar appearance in the resulting picture. We think it is not worth our trouble to maintain our dignity before a camera; it should not then surprise us that we appear undignified in most of our pictures. Our clothing is of generally low quality, with too many garish colors and designs -- our clothes don't come out well in pictures. We also never seem to mind being photographed, no matter the time of day, the setting, our physical state, our frame of mind; we could be much more discriminating in permitting others to take our picture. We don't pose as often, or as well as we should for our pictures; we are happy to be captured in a state that we would consider more 'normal', not considering that our normal, moment-to-moment actions come out appearing very ordinary when caught in an instantaneous moment in time. Our photographers themselves are not blameless either: they take their shots at awkward angles; they surprise us, and they take too many pictures of us for more than a few of them to be any good.

While we might, on an individual basis, do more to ensure that the ever-expanding photographic record of our lives should become more bearable for others to look at, the problem and the responsibility are beyond the reach of our own decision-making. Our culture allows us to show ourselves in public in practically any state whatsoever without anyone's disapprobation (let's admit that we have all benefitted from the convenience offered by this lax attitude at one time or another). But your family's picture collection is diminished by the many images it contains of you and your loved ones in a more or less disheveled state. I might have trouble convincing you that public places are harder to bear now than they used to be, merely because of peoples' appearance; but I believe I would have a better chance of convincing you of it by showing you your photograph.

Education Reform

For about 30 years, American public education has been seen as ‘failing’. To combat the low performance of so many of our public schools, efforts of reform have been mounted, though usually only at the local level. There is disagreement about how well these reforms have worked, though some have clearly performed quite well, and deserve wider implementation.

Public schools are, by and large, still administered by and are answerable to state and local communities and governments; for this reason school reform has been piecemeal. A thorough re-doing of the public school system has not been attempted on the national level. The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act has many mandates that local systems are obliged to obey – these have apparently forced schools to use more instructional time on standardized test readiness, and have (more happily) required that teachers be licensed in their subject area. Some schools have even been forced to close or reorganize for failing to meet the performance criteria set forth by the NCLB Act.

However, in this country, no national effort has been undertaken to change the basic character of our schools. Though some reform efforts have (to their immense credit), been directed at demanding higher performance from students, often in poor rural and inner-city school districts, the average school is still not extremely demanding of students academically.

Some very influential thinkers have become impatient with the pace of school reform, and with the general condition of our schools. I agree that there are, in certain cases, vested interests that may be overly wary of changing schools too radically, and that these interests sometimes interfere with school improvements. I also believe that teachers, for example, should have a high level of general education (higher than is generally the case now), and should also be exposed to a more practical, common-sense training program than is offered in most college and university education departments. But there is often a striking omission in the ongoing (the less charitable person might term it ‘unending’) debate on education reform. I am referring to the low demands placed on the students themselves in the majority of American public schools. We are unwilling to make students work harder, and at a higher level. We condemn low student performance generally (we profess to be aghast at our middling to low ranking in student performance vis a vis other nations), but seem to have a failure of nerve when it comes to making school curricula more challenging.

I agree that some of the resistance comes from our national unwillingness to invest properly in public education. Take science education as an example. Teacher salaries are too low to attract candidates with backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, and so forth; they can find more lucrative (and higher-status) employment in other fields. And what if we were to increase the number of periods of science by two a week on the national level? We would have to hire teachers, purchase equipment, and build or renovate classrooms. The money to these things would not be forthcoming.

However, a good deal of the resistance is also cultural. As a twenty-year educator, I can say with assurance that some aspects of learning that are inherently difficult or dull (however necessary), have, over time, been minimized or taken out of school curricula altogether. Ancient languages are no longer studied, except in elite institutions. Literature selections have become more ‘readable’ – i.e., easier. Poetry memorization is seen as anachronistic. Personal essays are in; research papers are out. Mathematics is more ‘engaging’ perhaps, than it used to be, but I have found that since students do not master multiplication tables and other basic computational skills, the ‘engaging’ qualities of today’s math lessons are lost on many of them.

The notion that children are fragile, that they may be permanently harmed by pushing them too hard, has become a guiding principle both among some parents as well as with educators. This school of thought, now a couple of generations into being, is, I believe, cowardly at its root; it shows a misunderstanding of the basic nature of children. We take the inner feelings of children more seriously than children themselves naturally would wish us to do; and we show a misplaced solicitude by protecting them from failure and other kinds of consequences, both in and out of school.

Influences On Social Behavior

Aside from the people who are around us most consistently, there is another impersonal influence on our behavior that is almost as strong. Some would use the word 'culture' to describe this influence. For purposes of this discussion, I would define culture as follows: a set of well-defined norms for personal comportment, for family relations, for the taking of meals and other routines, for what constitutes 'decency' and 'indecency', for what behavior is tolerable and for what behavior is not.

Whenever there is a distinctive, well-formed social culture of the type I have just outlined, there is a consequence for violating these and other of the culture's norms (most frequently, this would be some form of ostracism). There is also a tendency towards conformity which, to our way of thinking, might appear quaint. In this country, as well as in many other places, we have freed ourselves from the restraints of the old-fashioned social culture, consciously in some ways, unwittingly in others. The result has been mixed.

A strong social culture does impose rigid precepts regarding our place in the world. Such a culture would demand a certain uniformity of dress, and prescribe what clothing to wear for certain occasions (comfort would not be the foremost consideration in each case, but rather, appearance). All of our interpersonal dealings would be far more formal. Incivility, or even mere breaches of etiquette would be seen as more shocking (and possibly less likely to occur). Families would arrange their daily schedule around shared meals, and not the other way around. Sexual and other kinds of morality would be more or less absolute, not relative. Social relations would be predetermined in more cases; the relationships between parents and children, for example, might well be more authoritarian. Social contracts of both the legal (marriage) and the unspoken (filial duty) kind would be seen as more or less unbreakable, etc., etc.

There might well be more hypocrisy, as the ideals of society would be much more difficult to attain in individual cases. There could be greater prejudice even than at present, because highly structured societies can be more exclusionary, and we would inevitably make the criteria for inclusion into society more rigidly based (even than is now the case) on inherited or received attributes (race and social class, for example). Compared to the kind of society we have now, the ordered, heirarchical society that used to be prevalent would be experienced as stifling by the majority of the populace. Most people would see no advantage to having so many unspoken rules governing their behavior.

There could also be benefits. The probability of having a respectful interaction with a stranger would increase. People would have to set aside their momentary desires more frequently and pay greater heed to the demands of the larger group of which they were part -- in the case of the family, setting aside time for meals and other rituals could strengthen the bond between members. It would make being in public places more pleasant, because the behavior one would encounter would be more predictable, and therefore probably more civil. Ambiguity and impossible arrays of moral choices would not bedevil relationships -- marriages, parent-child bonds, etc. -- any more than could inherently be expected.

Only the tiniest handful of figures in history have been influential enough to alter the social characteristics of large groupings of people -- and even they can have an impact only on selected (if important) aspects of the self: religious belief, tolerance, attitudes towards authority, etc. Changes in technology, wars, and other impersonal developments may be seen to have equal or greater impact on how we think and behave in the world than the conscious effort of any person or group of persons. In any case, social rules can not be enacted, as if they were laws; they can only evolve. It is not possible (as desirable and beneficial as it may seem) to 'turn back the clock' to a time when we imagined people behaved more virtuously.

However, I do think we could benefit from re-imagining a world in which we acted with more general restraint than we do now. I am grateful to live in a society as fluid as ours. I am ambivalent, though, about the freedom of personal action that is tolerated in such a society. If we have lowered or removed altogether our standards of private as well as public behavior -- one could easily make the case that this is indeed what has happened -- we have also exposed ourselves to a great deal more in the way of unsavory and even harmful actions on the part of others (and from ourselves!). We have made life easier to live, while making the it at the same time more unpleasant, even treacherous, to navigate.

A Childhood Recollection

There is a species of ant -- the fire ant -- that has moved up from the tropics and established itself in the South. When I was a child I had heard the fire ant was a pest, so I resolved to search the property for fire ant nests and eradicate them. I believed I had seen the fire ants before, but I could not distinguish them in my imagination from other harmless kinds of ants. I believed the only way of becoming familiar with fire ants was getting bitten by one. They could kill animals with their stings; this frightened me, but also attracted me to them.

There was a number of small dirt mounds scattered around the yard. I could see tiny red ants going in and out of holes at the tops of these mounds. Surely these were the ones. Only wicked, fearless insects would have established themselves so conspicuously and so near human habitation.

In appearance they were not fearsome creatures, but something in their comportment was unsettling. Their movements seemed deliberate, even measured. I believed they were conspiring in some way, and would accumulate in numbers until they became invincible.

The only appropriate way to kill them would be in a duel of wits. I wanted to challenge them on their own level, test their defenses, find and exploit their weaknesses. I hoped for circumstances that would require me to devise ingenious and bizarre weapons against the ants.

I first chose a certain ant nest off the side of the house. Once I had destroyed it, I would move on to the others.

The fire ant is very tough, and can withstand a blow. The only way of destroying one by force alone is by rubbing a stone or some other hard object over it repeatedly. At first I thought of digging the nest out of the ground with a shovel, then crushing the ants with my shoe. But this would have been too hazardous. Then the idea occurred to me of burning the ants to death with a magnifying glass.

I found this weapon worked well on isolated ants that were simply minding their business about the mound, if they were moving slowly enough. Surprise was necessary to get the beam of sunlight squarely upon them. If they detected the heat, they scurried away before the light could do harm. After a time I realized I was not killing enough of them to affect the life of the nest. They had to be drawn out and killed in numbers.

The ants were sensitive to disturbances around the nest. When I pulled on a blade of grass that was on the mound, or pushed a stick into an entrance hole, ants would stream out, ready to attack. In this defensive mode they were very agitated. But as soon as they sensed there was no intruder they began merely to mill around, and then they were easy to pick off with the magnifying glass. In this manner I increased the number of ants killed by two- or three-fold.

My methods of drawing out the ants were very damaging to the mound itself. Soon it was completely razed. The ants began to come out in smaller and smaller numbers. I assumed this was because I had killed most of the worker and warrior ants. The next step was to get at the higher castes, and eventually, the queen ant.

(Eventually, I did get get stung by some of the ants. The sting felt like a violent pinch, although it did not leave a welt. The stinger is in the abdomen, and the ant applies it by raising the rear of its body up, then pushing the stinger down into the skin.)

To reach the lower levels of the colony, I set off firecrackers in the gound. The explosions drew swarms of angry ants. After the smoke cleared I would light a second firecracker and drop it on the ants themselves. They would swarm over the firecrackers and sting them -- apparently thinking them living creatures -- and scurry away just before they exploded. Afterwards all the ants would be gone.

I began to see ants of other castes. There was a type with a larger abdomen that looked very fierce. There were also puny winged ants that were less aggressive than the others.

I could not tell how deep the nest went underground. I had made a crater about four inches deep with the firecrackers, but each explosion revealed new tunnels. Moreover, the ants seemed to be getting used to my attacks. I jammed sticks deep down into the tunnels and exploded quantities of firecrackers to draw them out, but they reacted less and less angrily each time. After a while, I felt they were ignoring me.

Finally, I decided to destroy the nest in one quick blow. I boiled water and poured it slowly over the nest, allowing time for the water to sink in. It was satisfying to know that the ants would be destroyed in the lower reaches of the colony, where I had not been able to reach. I left, expecting that when I returned I would find the nest completely lifeless.

When I came back some time later there was a neat pile of ant carcasses and destroyed larvae in the middle of a crater. The surviving ants were bringing more dead from underground and adding them to this pile. They went about their work with what seemed a horrible patience. Now and again a winged ant crawled to the surface and flew away -- later I surmised that these flying ants would begin new nests elsewhere. After that time I did not kill any more of the ants.

Education and Idealism

The field of education, particularly elementary education, would seem a natural harbor for idealists. The child's openness, natural hunger for guidance and for a meaningful connection with adults are, in principle, an opportunity for people with creative spark and the urge to give of themselves. The guilelessness of children should moreover make teaching a perfect fit for those who wish to avoid the worldly perils encountered in most workplaces. Surely, there is one profession where purity of intention is not a liability, but is instead a thing that that can fuel one's sense of purpose, and lead to eventual success.

I should say straight away that many creative and thoughtful people are successful career teachers. But I have seen many idealists founder in education, and the reasons for their failure are not always so simple as they may appear.

Actually, part of it is glaringly simple. The insurmountable discipline problems of many schools would be daunting even to the most hardened veteran teacher. It does not speak well of our society that for generations certain groups of students have been left to languish in schools that have been wholly unwilling or unable to establish student discipline sufficient for basic learning. In practice, the perceived rights of a student who chronically misbehaves are seen as equal to the right of other students to learn free of distraction. In many instances, schools offer endless due process to misbehaving students and are loath to bring meaningful punishment upon them -- regardless of how the classroom climate may suffer because of this chronic misbehavior. I would guess that if there were one reason above all others for so many teachers leaving the profession within 5 years of starting out, it would be because of their school's equivocal (and I think often cowardly) treatment of students who, for whatever reason, consistently frustrate the educational enterprise.

It is in a way tragic that many of the schools that could most use idealistic people can only be endured, in the long term, by teachers who are able to abandon their exalted notions for the sake of survival. To teach successfully in some our most challenging schools, what is required is frank and unbending realism about the enterprise at hand, combined also with uncommon mental toughness, a tolerant view of one's own failures, and lastly, an unbreakable kernel of belief in what one is doing. These combined qualities are relatively rare in one person, which is why, unfortunately, teachers do not often last in our toughest schools long enough to have a significant impact on the educational life of their students.

Those deceptive beings -- children -- have intrinsic qualities that in themselves might both inspire, but also challenge any idealist. These qualities are to some degree common among all children, regardless of background. I feel I have developed a profound sense of connection with the children I teach. I enjoy working with them immensely, even more so than when I started in my profession. But I will say, with the greatest affection, that children are ridden with contradictions, ones with which one should be prepared to contend, humanely but firmly, if one wishes to teach successfully.

Children, when in a group setting, may attempt to engender chaos while at the same time they hunger for order and safety. They will try, in many cases, to frustrate your efforts to provide a rational structure to their setting; at the same time, they unconsciously hope that you will succeed in those efforts. They will often be contemptuous if you let them prevail over you. If you strike a familiar attitude with children, you are committing an error. Yet it is to your advantage as a teacher to convey a certain amount of tolerance and ease to your students.

Many successful teachers learn to convey warmth and even humor while maintaining their authority. But this is a skill, and it takes time and may be difficult to learn. Maintaining one's authority over a group of students requires a significant expenditure of social energy. Many teachers don't realize how difficult, and at times distasteful, it is to maintain authority in a classroom, and in fact never become comfortable with it. The need to be an authority figure seems at odds with the 'innocence' of children; it seems a contradiction, and to some it is an unpleasant one.

What is required to manage a classroom full of kids successfully and humanely is very often at odds with the notions one may have had at the outset of one's career. The popular notion that you have to be a tyrant to survive in the contemporary classroom is misleading. But the public suffers from a certain naïveté about the characteristics of children in a group setting; their behavior in groups becomes radically altered from what you would encounter individually (as any teacher will tell you, children, once grouped into sufficient numbers, can take on unexpected characteristics -- not all of them by any means negative, but certainly distinct and challenging ones).

Another thing that might, over the long term, work against the idealist in the education field is the sheer hard work of the job. The work hours of the teacher are not the ones most people would naturally set for themselves: the workday starts early, and time must be put in before and after the school day in order to complete the many different tasks demanded of the teacher. The pace of the job itself is unrelenting. Teaching requires constant planning, strategizing, improvising, reevaluating. Inevitably, most teachers are saddled with clerical work; they have to grade assignments, fill out forms, communicate with parents, arrange class trips. The sheer amount and diversity of what a teacher must accomplish may make it difficult in many cases to lead a life outside of the job, or for that matter be successful in the job itself.

Romantic notions can not long survive in many educational settings. But there is more than a sentimental satisfaction gained from the practice of helping children acquire knowledge. Teachers can bring as much knowledge and experience to bear on their lessons as their imaginations and resourcefulness will allow. I often compare a class to a kaleidoscope, because the minutest action on the part the teacher can vastly increase or decrease the receptiveness of that class to learning. A small action on the part of one or more students can also radically change the tone of the class. A classroom is highly sensitive to very small disturbances, and the actions of the students themselves, as I mentioned earlier, may tend (though usually not maliciously) towards chaos; it takes exceptional, even inordinate skill and practice to influence your students' actions so as to have the most beneficial result.

It can be terrifically gratifying when one has been successful in helping students attain a goal, however modest. I feel fortunate also that I am able to experience a great deal of satisfaction from even the routine aspects of teaching a class. But I recognize that the overall demands of the profession can be overwhelming. The authority of the teacher, like authority everywhere, has been brought into question; the social status and remuneration of teachers is not as high as it ought to be (this keeps some who might be effective teachers from entering the profession, or having entered it, from committing to it). While I believe that my own idealism had to be tempered in order to be successful as a teacher, I wish that teachers as a whole did not have to be disabused of their idealism as violently as they too frequently are.