BE OUR GUEST

Ted Hirschfield is a member of the faculty in the Department of English at Southeast Missouri State University. This Cape resident has taught at the university since 1965.

Let those who can, teach.

The general, and almost humorous, disdain the real world has for academia must seemingly become contempt before true and lasting changes can be effected in La-La Land. After decades of floundering discussions and toothless proposals, the state of American education is still unacceptable and deficient in comparison to other developed nations.

The fault does not lie in underfunded education or lack of good will, but in ourselves, the teaching community, which has willingly surrendered and undermined its own authority and self-respect in favor of moonbeam causes and naive purposes of social engineering and a lack of essential toughness in teaching the disciplines. And far too many teachers are afraid of their students, afraid of causing offense, afraid of the real world and afraid of demanding excellence. The result is that they hide either behind puppy-eyed friendliness or cynicism.

There is also an odor of desperate shamelessness about teachers who are neither respected nor well-liked by their students; teachers who are barely mediocre and who cannot be dislodged from the podium with a crowbar, but who perversely defend to the death their turf, prerogatives and unearned salaries.

True enough, the monetary reward in teaching is small compared to other professions, but the inequities practiced with the teaching profession itself are greater than those practiced in the business world, which cannot survive without competition. I could easily name teachers here at SEMO who are paid 50 percent less than their less productive colleagues. I have seen inept teachers given easier classes to teach and who are thus effectively rewarded for failure. I have seen teachers deliberately avoid those courses where effectiveness can be statistically measured. Even teachers shuffled to different departments because they cannot profess their own area of specialization. Such injustice does not attract the best minds to the profession and, in truth, teaching does not attract the best minds by a long shot. Tenure protects them all: the slow, the dolts, and the tall.

And because the rewards are so small in teaching, the best energies of teachers are spent in learning how to become devout lounge lizards: politicking in the lounge, politicking in the hallways and politicking after hours. Compare the noise level, jocularity, bravura, fellow backscratching and enthusiasms of the lounge with the silence and agony of the tomb in classrooms.

More good energies are dissipated in supporting the unwieldy and tottering superstructure of the bureaucratic systems: committee work, committees on committees, overhauling programs that didn't work in the first place for equally ineffective and unpromising new programs, collecting for the flower fund, running for hollow offices, etc., etc. That is, anything except effective, measurable, objective teaching is predictably rewarded.

I will not mention publishing, the mountain of madness which produces a mousefart of footnotes on footnotes and of which perhaps five percent is worth more than the paper it is printed on. We need a bonfire of the vanities to burn the collapsing barn down, which once held all the wisdom of the West.

Herewith, without further anguishing, a few reasonable suggestions which might help right the foundering ship of academia:

1. Establish objective criteria to place effective teaching at the center of the academic enterprise again. And if the tired stonewalling, squabbling, backbiting and obfuscation continues among teachers, force the issue by having the state legislature suspend tenure until the stable is shoveled out. My experience tells me that teachers are too partisan, envious, myopic and ideologically politicized to establish objective standards for their own profession.

2. Upon graduation, survey the students as to who their best-remembered and effective teachers have been. Remember the students?

3. Make teacher productivity public. Nothing is more sensible and democratic for state universities who feed at the public trough. And parents have the right and obligation to gauge in advance how well their children might be expected to perform in any teacher's classroom.