The Advance

Issue date: 11/3/06 Section: Opinion

Public education in the United States was founded in order to teach children how to read so that they could read the Bible. Now, we see it as a secular institution that stirs up political bickering. Sometimes, the answer to such clawing and nitpicking among people who are trying to please their constituents ends in a complicated compromise.

When we speak of the issues with education, we must look to the source of the individual problems, like those problems of insufficient test scores, to find a potential answer to the issues. Basically, the public education system is flawed in that the focus of education funding seems to be on technology and material with an improper balance of paying the personnel.

If we are to accept the idea that teachers should be paid more, we should first ask ourselves why they are not more handsomely compensated in the first place. If you recall the opening sentence of this entry, public education was created to teach children to read [the Bible]. Teaching children to read does not require extra-special skills, especially when the interpretation of what they are reading is already widely accepted from a certain denominational perspective. Hence, the teaching profession in the public education systems of the United States was/is not seen as a highly respected field. In short, teachers are seen more as "dimes-a-dozen" than as tutors. Merely comparing the connotations of the words "teacher" and "tutor" should be a clue to the nature of how we think of teachers.

So, who are these tutors, and where did they go? Since tutoring is a specialized, often one-on-one, education that caters to the individual needs of the student to get the student to understand the concepts and make those concepts a part of his life, and our education system has shied away from that, tutors have left education. Perhaps many of those would-be tutor/teachers are working as social workers, family court judges, foster parents, "homemakers," and in that little room that we go when we have problems: the counseling room. Indeed, it is possible that all of those psychologists, people who appreciate the need for one-on-one attention or group therapy, are sitting in big, comfy chairs while the daughters and sons of the American education system sit across from them on overstuffed couches and tell their troubles that have come to occur because they don't know how to think through problems through properly. Are we, then, searching for the cure instead of promoting prevention?

Can we prevent it, then? Can we redirect funds that we would normally spend on publicly-funded social work, the medical insurance we buy for psychiatrists, or the money we spend for counselors to entice those people-skills people to teach America's children. In an advanced society such as the one we presume ours to be, we should not only update our computer programs and buy current textbooks, but we should place more emphasis on properly paying our teacher/babysitters and raise teacher pay levels to get more teachers. After all, teachers are, nationwide, paid less for their education in their field than others with the same level of education who go into the workforce. Now, one could say that the current pay levels are likely to hold teachers who only love the joy of teaching and don't do it for the money, but you might as well assume that everyone who teaches loves doing it. Dismissals such as that only distract us from the issue that something is wrong with teacher compensation.

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