We’ve been talking in the homeschooling thread below about the perceived wrong of state schoolteachers having to receive by law a high degree of training in their field, but homeschool teachers having to have exactly nothing. Isn’t that wrong? is the complaint. It’s a reasonable objection. A couple of remarks now.

I was in the first class of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a public school for advanced high school juniors and seniors that opened in 1983. LSMSA was the only state school exempted from state requirements mandating an education degree and the usual certification process for teaching. This was visionary, and it couldn’t have been easy to have pulled off politically back in the day, given the power of the teachers union. One of my best professors there was a lawyer who loved history, and discovered he had both a passion and a gift for teaching. He never went through a day of official training. Many of the teachers were academics by training and disposition, but none had to do the state certification routine. I don’t think that hurt our education one bit. In fact, I would argue that it helped it, because the school was free to hire the best teachers it could find, unshackled by guild-like requirements. Just as a journalism degree doesn’t make you a great journalist, an education degree doesn’t make you a great teacher. More on this in a moment.

To be perfectly clear, I don’t think that anybody can teach. I, for one, would be a terrible teacher. I don’t have the temperament for it, or the organizational skills. Plus, I find public speaking, no matter how small the group, to be exhausting. If my children depended on me to be their home instructor … well, we wouldn’t homeschool. No question about it. I would fail them, and fail in my duty to educate them.

My wife, on the other hand, has never taken an education class, but she discovered she has a true gift for it when circumstances resulted in her teaching grammar in our homeschooled co-op. I’ve never actually seen her teach, but a friend of ours, a college professor who is an excellent teacher, told me privately that he’d observed her doing it, and  told me that she’s genuinely gifted. I can see in my children’s academic progress that their mother knows what she’s doing. But if she had my lack of capability, we certainly wouldn’t homeschool. The day may come when she can no longer do for the children what they require, or find and hire someone who can do it (I’m looking at you, calculus), and should that day come, we’ll make the shift. We aren’t ideologues about this.

I think one thing that bothers professionally trained teachers about homeschooling is similar to what irritates professionally trained journalists, such as Your Working Boy, about blogging. True, journalism school can give you the professional training that you need to be a competent journalist, but can’t guarantee that you’ll be good at it. So too with professional training in teaching. Still, the “anybody can do it” attitude that you see among partisans of blogging (and homeschooling) deeply bothers those who have been professionally trained. Part of it is no doubt irrational resentment and fear. If it’s true that you don’t have to have professional training to excel at journalism or elementary and secondary education, then what does that say to we who have spent all that time and money being professionally trained in those fields? Doesn’t it undermine our status, our authority, even our ability to make a living? You can see where the anxiety comes from.

But the justifiable part, I think, is that the average Joe often doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. I read some news-oriented blogs written by non-professional journalists and wonder why on earth you never see writing and analysis that good in newspapers. But I read other blogs and am grateful for the methodical training and temperament that go into the craft of journalism. I can easily imagine this is true for the teaching profession as well. The problem is professional journalists (like me) and professional teachers often have a guild-like mentality that regards our professions as quasi-sacramental, in the sense that ordination is required for effective service. It’s just not true. On the other hand, it is manifestly not the case that anybody who thinks they can do what we do really can. This is why it’s unwise to make blanket statements about both journalism and teaching, and the kind of people who should be allowed (“allowed”) to practice either.

To repeat my point, because I want to be perfectly clear: One blanket statement I do think accurate is that the conferring of a university degree does not make a true journalist, or a true teacher, and it doesn’t serve journalism, or teaching, or society, to live by this shibboleth. But, balance: it’s not true either that just anybody can do these things, and it’s foolish and self-aggrandizing to think so. It demeans both vocation of journalism and the vocation of teaching, and the importance of both to society, to take either mistaken view as truth. That’s a statement that will satisfy passionate folks on either side of the issue, but I think it’s true all the same.