Turning the Teaching World

Imagine a stately home, with Lord and Lady Tosseur upstairs and skivvies beneath. One can’t blame the Tosseur’s or the skivvies for spending their childhood years learning to cope with whatever slings and arrows got thrown at them. While the Tosseurs were learning about inheritance tax evasion the skivvies learnt making soup, keeping warm and where their forelock was. Critics of the upper classes forget both sides need to learn their survival skills. It’s just that the Tosseurs skill set is different to the skivvies. Having acquired their skills they move into adulthood with their own particular view of how the world turns, and their position in it. And exactly the same can be said of the skivvies. Now a friend of ours is a teacher and her school is in disarray. Amidst the chaos the teachers are trying to maintain some sort of order in an assortment of temporary buildings and condemned portacabins. When our friend assembled her class in a cold damp cabin with the floor swimming in water she walked out and went home. Our friend is an English Miss Rosa, the woman who sat on a bus and changed America. 

Teachers these days are skivvies; part educator, part parent, part police, part social worker, with several stories of Tosseurs above them each with a particular view of how the world turns and their place in it. The Tosseurs are focused on the state and inheritance potential of their increasingly shabby stately home while the skivvies job grows and grows as they try to bridge the increasing gap between the rat infested kitchen and providing an elegant porcelain-cupped afternoon tea. When the latter finally do give up and go home taking the skills that really do turn the world with them the skills of the upper floors will prove to be as useless as a daydream. They may have the pompous posture, the pusillanimous pomp, the rhetorical powers and an inbred unawareness of reality, and the ready excuse that they were never trained to do manual work, but it won’t stop their uselessness being plain to see. Education is at this point. Teachers are not skivvies, they’re the educators of our next generation. They don’t need Lord and Lady Tosseur, just a decent kitchen. Either that or it's time to go home.