Posted on 01/30/2007 5:45:59 AM PST by wintertime
(snip)
1. The practitioners know and can do things the public in general cannot do. They have a specialized body of knowledge.
2. The specialized body of knowledge practitioners have takes an extended period of time to learn.
3. The educators who prepare the practitioners are experts who agree upon the specialized body of knowledge practitioners must have.
4. Admission to a professional training program is highly selective.( snip).
6. Only members of the profession set the standards for licensure and certification.
7. The primary responsibility and loyalty of a professional is to serve the client and not simply the institution or governmental agency in which the practitioner may be employed.
8. Neither the public at large nor an employing institution may control the way in which professionals relate to their clients, or the treatments, methods or procedures they use.
9. Neither the public at large nor an employing institution may set the purpose, goals or objectives for the practitioner’s practice with clients.
10. The public at large does not decide how to evaluate professionals.
11. Only members of the profession can determine malpractice and dismiss or disbar practitioners.
12. Professionals determine the cost of their services.
19. Professionals are trained to serve clients with problems. By definition “professionals” do not seek to perform services to clients without problems.
21. Professionals share a code of ethics to which they commit and adhere. They cannot be directed to perform or not perform services for clients which conflict with their professional code.
The case that teaching does not meet any of these twenty one criteria can be readily made.
(Excerpt) Read more at ednews.org ...
You could put Journalists up against that list as well.
Scientists and engineers too.
Yes, I am very much in favour of homeschooling -- at home, in Ontario, the 'homeschool' network is very strong and the students lack for nothing. I should have done it with my own children, and, in fact, the youngest completed the last half of her high school doing online and extension courses, schooled by me. Yes, it's a viable alternative. But at the same time, I think we could do so much within the infrastructure of the 'public' system. Now, havind said that, I am beginning to realize that the US and Canada are two different entities as far as public schooling is concerned. The US seems to have lots of support for private schools, whereas relatively very few kids go to private in Canada. It may be that 'public' in the US has degraded beyond the same in Canada.
professionIt's a simple, and deceptive, thing to make up your own definition of a word, then show how another does or doesn't meet that definition.
-noun
(From www.dictionary.com : profession)
- a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or science: the profession of teaching. Compare "learned profession".
- any vocation or business.
- the body of persons engaged in an occupation or calling: to be respected by the medical profession.
Leftists love to play this game by calling GWB a "failure" and a "liar". They also regularly claim that we are "losing" the war in Iraq. If they are allowed to define the words "failure", "liar" and "losing", then they will always be right.
How about agreeing to use the actual definitions of words, to ensure that we all understand what we're talking about?
Teaching is a profession, according to the dictionary. That's good enough for me. The doctors and lawyers can go throw a tantrum somewhere else.
I agree with you totally, and I'm not a teacher.
Parents are the ultimate responsible party when it comes to educating their children, regardless of the route they choose, be it homeschooling, public school or private school.
"Enough that the teachers' unions feel pressure, apparently, since they constantly spew hate speech at homeschoolers."
This is true most of the time....most homeschool families do an excellent job with their kids.
There is a small minority however who are incompetent at best and downright negligent at worst.
There are even some who claim to be homeschooling, but actually leave their kid home alone to take care of the house, or in some sad situations - to monitor the meth lab.
My wife, who ran screaming from the teaching profession after only one year "in country", has always railed against her mandatory 3-credit "Educational Methods" course. Out of a 14 week semester, two weeks were spent teaching the prospective teachers how to write with chalk. A substantial part of the remaining weeks was spent on photocopying, mimeographing, and the proper use of film and filmstrip projectors.
My wife was a teacher at the elementary level for 11 years. She was a professional at it. One of the best and highly recommended by parents whose kids were in her classes. It's a tough job and, yeah, it has many drawbacks. But I don't buy into this "teachers are NOT professionals" BS you've proposed.
A bit free with your associations, aren't you? You couldn't possibly know my beliefs and they are certainly not as simple as you seem to assume people are. The same is true of everyone who pays taxes, but I suggest that you pay them unless you want to spend some time where there is little sunlight.
I bet there are 100 or so teachers in the US that are good.
That's just too ignorant an belief to waste time arguing with.
"We are teaching kids to milk the system in junior high, and wonder why they don't amount to anything, learn how to do simple math or conjugate a verb. That is not the teacher's fault, that is the congress, president, state bureaucrats who continue to throw good money after bad, all in the name of making themselves feel better because they can say in their campaign that they got more funding (read "free" money for people who don't earn it. The entitlement mentality is alive, well and VOTING for more of their "fair" share."
Yes - this isn't ALL the lefty liberals' fault.
Plenty of republicans are throwing money in just to get the votes as well.
Not every kid who is doing badly in school has low class crack head parents.
Any illusions that anyone had about the value of an MBA should have been dispelled the first time New Orlean mayor Ray Nagin -- who has an MBA from Tulane University -- got up in front of a camera after Hurricane Katrina.
"My friend and I got up and left about that time. We found that we had lost of appetites"
now you know how my husband often feels.
That's too bad. That was an excellent course when I took it. My professor was a chemistry professor who had taught in the secondary school system for many years. Then he went and got his doctorate in eduation and became chair of the ed department. He always taught at least one chemistry course a semester to keep current in real teaching. We had to write lesson plans and teach them. I was surprised at the excellent feedback we got and how much we still needed to learn about good classroom instruction.
"There are plenty of "experts" in history with great knowledge but don't have a clue as to how to relate to kids - how to speak to them - how to motivate them - and how to keep them in line."
Yeah, this is why I took my teacher's degree, my 'ed' courses. But there is very little support for 'keeping them in line' in the high school, so I moved onwards and upwards. Now, the same issue that I loathed in high school has hit the university class -- if you aren't an 'actor' or a stage presence, you risk having your class walk out at break. Everything you do needs to be tied to a mark. There are too many students, and too few of them are there for the learning. Whatever happened to the concept of 'reading' for a degree? When seminars were meant to be a forum of ideas instead of listening to one person drone? At the university, people are afraid to express opinions, because they might get flamed for being politically incorrect. Sigh.
Of course not, and I didn't mean for it to sound that way. My point is that children can suffer because of the choices of their parents, and that's unfair to them. That, to me, is the strongest argument for the existance of the public school system in the first place - that kids who would otherwise have no chance in life may get one. That's why even a staunch libertarian such as myself is not ready to completely banish the concept of public education. There is of course a need for serious reform, including charter schools, vouchers, union busting, etc. I believe I mentioned this in another post. For better or worse, public schools are not going anywhere, so we have a duty to fix them.
I agree with what you suggested, except government should be left out of it. There is nothing about education that requires any government involvement at all -- except perhaps in terms of regulating building safety, etc. just as it would do for any other institutional or commercial use.
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