Yeesh, indeed.

Dan (if you’re still out there), you wrote that you are “interested in developing a standard of care for teachers, which, even if not legally actionable, could be used by a peer-review board (a la the AMA) to disbar the right teachers from the classroom.” I would submit that a standard does not exist precisely because it would open the doors to legal action. A lawyer who does not uphold the standard of “zealous advocacy” is open to being disbarred and being sued (see e.g. Mike Nifong in the Duke lax case). The ed. mal. cases I’ve read have fallen short, in large part, because judges can’t find any standard of care to which teachers are generally held.

You can try to convince schooled teenagers of whatever authenticity you choose, but they’ll still know that they’re enschooled—that they’re schoolhoused—by force of law. By force. So whatever line you want to play out to them, in the end won’t change the fact that you begin with lying about the power differential in which you have all, and they have nothing but the food pellets you measure out to them.

You may not believe it, but I’m on your side. My point is that the system is not. The system may flatter you, but it’s as hostile to you as it is to its ostensible, principal clientele.

Though I’m not yet ready to leap straight to 21st-century paradigms, though. There are lower infractions which need redress first — use data to inform decisions; create a culture in which students feel their interests are actualized through attendance; don’t be boring; etc.

A lot of pretty hypotheticals in this thread, no matter what comes of them.

Schoolteachers believe they are a self-selected group of professionals, but they’re neither self-selected nor members of a profession. Long before they decided to take up the chalk, they had spent years in the front row demonstrating, for example, the kind of extreme credulity required to commit to a system that ritually stigmatizes and even expunges more than a third of its clientele—of CHILDREN. The office of Keeper of the Chalk is reserved to those who prove, again and again, their assumption that such is the natural order of things—that things somehow would come apart were this ritual child sacrifice cease to occur. At the very least, it would mean a betrayal of the idol “excellence”, as a thing can excel only in relation to another thing: in this case, the rejected schoolchildren.

Of course this formulation (or characterization) is arch, but so is schooling. And the formulation does take you to the origin of human law: the advent of prohibition resulting from intimations of the divine. Freud postulated that religion began in collective murder, probably a regicide or a clan patricide. He didn’t live to see the repeated anthropological discoveries, in digs around the world, of the underpinnings of the sacred sites of the oldest known human cultures: the bones of ritually sacrificed children, bones quite often used as lath in the temple foundations. “Religio” as the binding element. Sacrificed children as that which, by propitiating the Prohibitor, allow human beings, under law, to live among one another without devouring each other.

The system is a sacrificial system, and its functionaries—in this case teachers who select those for sacrifice—are not to blame.

I never wanted to propound something radical, but American schoolteachers today are so tragically enschooled in their systems-thinking that they’re inured to the routinized “wastage” (an agricultural term) of children, and to what Jefferson called schooling’s “asportation” (arch.–kidnapping) of the children of the Republic. The systems-assumptions for which teachers are selected blind them, for example, to the facial absurdity of “zero tolerance” policies, through which a well-oiled human management system is capable of licensing the absolute (zero), perfect intolerance of an adult toward a child acting as a child. This systematized (I use that word advisedly) callousness is, to me, deeply tragic. So I hardly know how to continue with the drafting of a notional Socratic Oath.

Simply to say what it ought to be—to say it deadpan and artlessly—is to engage in that literary device which is satire-by-comparison; that is, to make a mockery of what teaching has become in our society. And I don’t wish to be a part of making pariahs out of teachers, the way we have done with attorneys (or they to themselves).

In my middle age I still bring apples to teachers. They are sensei to me.