Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think educational institutions shouldn’t exist; surely smart people need a place to go and do things and get together and work. The point to me is that, whatever it is that smart people are doing, they’d mostly do that anyway no matter what kind of education they’re getting.
Whenever I bring it up with colleagues, I usually get into heated arguments where I become the 1 in an invariably N-to-1 aggressive debate. Plus, my wife is a primary school teacher with a Master degree in Education who loves teaching, so obviously that is a very delicate subject to bring up at home. I have noticed that people like her, who love teaching, usually have a very emotional attachment to it from their own personal experiences and how they see education as transformative, and that makes any kind of objective research on teaching become very hard to do. It’s almost like teaching is such a holy subject that any teaching has to be good, and criticizing it is like defending imperialism or capitalism or rich people or something like that (it doesn’t help that my wife came from a very poor background and got out of that through education practice, and has teached most of her career in poor neighborhoods; that makes a delicate subject even more touchy).
My personal opinion is that I am only human and seeing myself as some kind of ”savior through teaching” is unfair, to me and to others (yes, I do some teaching too). Most of the time I focus on trying to give smart students a platform to grow, and while I also try to motivate the other students as much as I can (I do believe you can ”fish” some of them out of the pool), I don’t usually pull my hair or lose sleep over them. One, because I don’t feel like I have the right to keep patronizing people as if I know what’s objectively better for them; lots of people out there are doing much better than me without formal education. Second, because I do not have the illusion that I (or most other teachers) know a really good teaching method that can make a significant difference. It would be like losing sleep because a glass of holy water that I blessed did not save a cancer patient.
