To would-be teachers
On the Tuskegee Institute, school funding, and what a campaign for a four-day teaching week communicates
A campaign in Great Britain is pressing for teachers to have a four-day teaching week, splitting the traditional fifth day of the work week off so that they can spend it doing lesson preparation and grading without students around. Every community has to reach its own conclusions about critical matters like education, of course, but something about the demand for a four-day teaching week seems like a colossal regression -- the kind of thing one might try to impose from the outside in a shadowy strategic campaign to permanently hobble an adversary, rather than what any people would rationally impose on themselves.
■ Some 125 years ago, Booker T. Washington sought to rally the students at his Tuskegee Institute. Many were being trained to become teachers in rural communities in the American South, still very much in the shadow of the evils of slavery. Washington emphatically believed in the usefulness of education as the primary pathway out of poverty and social oppression.
■ In one address, entitled “To Would-Be Teachers“, Washington implored his students: “Where it is possible, take a three or four months’ public school as a starting point, and work in co-operation with the school officers, but do not let the school close at the end of these three or four months, because if that is done it will amount to almost nothing.” He pleaded with them to take the meager funding allotted by the state (only enough for three months a year) and raise the funds to keep going longer.
■ In another address, he charged: “Take a three months school, and gradually impress upon the people of the community the need of having a longer school. Get them to add one month to three months, and then another month, until they get to the point where they will have six, seven or eight months of school in a year.” This was a man desperate to see futures turned for the better, and the thing he wanted most was to see more resources devoted to making school available longer.
■ Expectations of schools and teachers may be different now than what they were more than a century ago. But it’s hard to reconcile “reduce classroom time by 20%” with an authentic belief that children’s well-being is being put first. If you want to know what a community values, don’t watch their words -- watch the flow of resources.
