Some additional thoughts on teacher self-regulation

Friday I mentioned Bill Bennett's suggestion that teachers in a building know who the meritorious teachers are. My own sense that teachers would not self-regulate comes from discussions I have had with individuals and groups of teachers in schools and in ed classes. My sense in a discussion of teacher conduct and classroom discipline in a philosophy of ed class was that teachers wanted clear unambiguous rules which might cover every contingency. Bennett was rightly skeptical that this evasion of responsibility could ever be achieved. The very notion that it could is an example of the hold which positivism has on the teaching profession. A case of what Virginia Postrel coins as "the one best way." Positivists believe that by application of a positive method, one best way can be discovered. What Postrel's book, The Future and its Enemies argues, is that no such best way exists.

Tenure is, in its theoretical ends, just such a institution. Its purpose is to remove responsibilty from individuals and transfer it to a system of positive judgement. Rather than giving building administrators or teachers as a body of self-regulators the role of judging their peers' quality on a day by day or year by year basis, tenure abandons judgement.

Certainly its neccesary to protect unpopular ideas, but tenure as its practiced today seems to be a blanket protection for professors and teachers, rather than a protection limited to unpopular ideas. One should further note that by unpopular ideas, what is meant are ideas that meet the normal criteria for scholarly acceptance, being rigorous, methodical, and judged by scholarly peers as scholarly, but are also unpopular. What are not meant are ideas that are unpopular because they are nutty, unscholarly, or politics dressed up as scholarship.

For teachers in public schools, this issue is complicated because where scholars might search for truth regardless of its popularity, many views of the role of school have no place for such contraversy. Teachers are often seen as being objective sources fo facts, or obligated to transmit the views of the community as surrugates for parents. On the other hand, deep in the Western tradition is the notion that education itself has at least a componant of the subversive. Plato's discussion of Socrates reminds us how truth and community can conflict. The Christian Gospels also conclude with such a conflict between truth and community. Neither Socrates nor Jesus had tenure. Are the demands of truth something that society should delay for higher education or adulthood, or is there a place for scholarly contraversy in the high school?

I'm of two minds on this subject and am not able to resolve this issue. If the community establishes a school, whether as a public school, or as a private school, and the parents pay to hire teachers, don't the teachers have an obligation to teach what and how the community decides? Yet how can a teacher claim any authority of learning if he doesn't also owe an obligation to truth?

The right answer probably involves acceptance of the tension between these competing goods, and the search for an Aristolean middle path, avoiding excesses of either obediance to parental will or disputatious truth telling.