ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 8, 1996 TAG: 9605080010
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MARLOWE
IN HIS letter to the editor (April 15, ``Education is too important to be left to the amateurs'') in response to my March 28 letter (``Raze entry barriers for teachers''), Peter S. Willis indicates I said in my letter things I didn't say.
He says, ``I agree that certification is a grueling and difficult process.'' Agrees with whom? I merely said certification is ``a time-consuming, costly, counterproductive barrier.'' He also says, the ``road to certification, as Marlowe notes, is arduous and demanding.'' Where did I say that? Is this how he'll train his students - to misrepresent the views of those by whose views they feel threatened?
Willis claims that ``many professions expect or demand that prospective members undergo intensive and extensive training before they're considered capable of performing their duties.'' He fails to note this is often because ``professions'' (bodies of persons in specific occupations) are self-protective from competition. What's best for a given profession isn't necessarily what's best for those who constitute the market for their services.
Unlike Willis, I believe education is far too important to be left entirely to certified professionals. Perhaps this is because I don't accept certain key fallacies in his thinking.
He says, ``Marlowe fails to realize that teacher-certification programs exist to train individuals as professional members of a highly skilled, highly demanding field.'' I thought degree programs at colleges and universities did that. I believe certification programs exist primarily to force colleges offering those degree programs to conform to one and only one conception of professionalism.
I suggest state certification sets up barriers against natural kinds and degrees of competition among colleges with varied conceptions of what constitutes sufficient and appropriate teacher training. I also suggest such barriers are counterproductive.
I am by no means opposed to teacher training by colleges and universities. I'm simply opposed to the state certifying individuals as worthy or unworthy to teach. By doing so, the state forces college departments of education to conform to a single pattern if they are to provide programs leading reliably to state certification as well as simply to a degree in education. In doing so, the state also greatly constricts the pool of candidates within which school principals may hope to find teachers worthy of their students.
The decision of whether an individual can ably teach a given subject should be decentralized - left to principals, school superintendents or school boards, not to state legislators and state agencies.
Children deserve the best teachers school principals can provide, not just the best teachers state certifiers will allow. I suggest that, in the future, Willis value his training, experience, creativity and dedication to his chosen profession more, and his state certification considerably less.
Mike Marlowe of Blacksburg has a bachelor's degree in management, and is writing a novel.
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