World Teacher's Day - October 5th

The joy of teaching, Lake Country Calendar, Tue Sep 29 2009. (Jim Taylor)

Next Monday, October 5, will be World Teachers' Day.

The United Nations launched the first World Teachers' Day October 5, 1994. It has been largely ignored on the same date every year since then.

And that's tragic. Because if our worldwide civilizations are ever going to drag themselves out of the slough of ignorance, prejudice, bigotry, and general incompetence they're mired in, it will only be through education.

The most stupid thing the Campbell government in B.C. has done, in my opinion, was to pinch pennies on education funding. A school, remarked author Lon Watters, "is a building that has four walls, with tomorrow inside."

Or as business consultant Andy McIntyre put it, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!"

(Confession: I filched several of these quotations from Education International, a federation representing 30 million teachers in 172 countries and territories.)

In the explosion of knowledge that has come in the last century, we are increasingly dependent on teachers. Few parents can adequately prepare their children for the modern world. The best that we parents, and grandparents, can do is to foster an attitude towards this mushroom cloud of information. But teaching how to make sense of that cloud, how to sift relevant information from irrelevant, requires professional skills.

Author John Holt - ironically, a proponent of home schooling - commented, "Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned."

Good teachers instill that love of learning. Bad teachers destroy it. I'm astonished how many people tell me they can't sing, because their Grade One teacher told them to stand at the back and just move their mouths.

They also learn not to raise their hands, not to volunteer, for fear of ridicule - either from the teacher directly, or indirectly from classmates.

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton has been often ridiculed for opening a novel with the cliché, "It was a dark and stormy night..." But he suggests wisely, "The best teacher is the one who inspires a listener with the wish to teach himself."

Bad teachers tend to value order and discipline, believing themselves to be in control. Mark Twain famously described a classroom as "trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time."

Good teachers, on the other hand, revel in the chaos that often accompanies spontaneous discovery.

I know I'm coming close to treading on a landmine here, but our current pre- occupation with healthcare strikes me as a lesser concern. As American educator Ernest Leroy Boyer noted, "A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts thirty."

One final quotation, this one from Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, The Third Wave, and Powershift: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."