Would Einstein Be Qualified to Teach High School Physics?

If Shakespeare were applying for a job teaching high school English, he would be turned down.  Einstein wouldn’t be qualified to share his passion for physics either.  Neither had the credentials acquired in college education training programs, the ultimate in top-down approaches.  No wonder that common core comes out of the federal Department of Education.

      So now hiring teachers is all about the money.  Finding the person with the “correct” credentials is increasingly difficult, isn’t it?  But Shakespeare and Einstein belong to a different pool of teachers whose enthusiasm is based on personal pursuit of knowledge, almost for its own sake.  Find the person whose leisure time is filled with reading more and more about what’s interesting in a subject.

       Hiring good teachers should be easy.  Einstein didn’t need to take pedagogy classes.  He could figure out how to teach and what students would find compelling.  His own interest would spill over to the students.  Education degrees seem a surefire path to mediocrity, a recent post here suggested.

      Everyone knows that in the arcane world of fixing computer problems, you forget about college credentials to find the person who can get the job done with speed and confidence.  The IT community is largely self-educated through hands-on exploration and apprenticeship.  In the same way, engineers were “can do” in the early days.   Hiring good teachers might indeed require a paradigm shift.