Deciding Who Is Qualified to Teach Our Children

From time to time in New Hampshire, questions arise about the efficacy of allowing parents with no formal teaching qualifications to instruct their own children. Some demand an increase in the regulation of homeschoolers, and it's no idle threat: As recently as 2008, court battles were being fought in California over the constitutionality of teacher certification requirements for homeschooling parents (see Conard's 2009 article in the Drexel Law Review).

Although there is no evidence that parents with teaching credentials would be better at homeschooling (see "The Myth of Teacher Qualifications"), the assumption that children cannot learn unless they are taught by an expert is still pervasive. In "Chapter 7: Instructionism vs. Constructionism" of The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer (1994), Seymour Papert points out that this assumption about the causal relationship between teacher quality and student learning leads to a faulty conclusion:

". . . the route to better learning must be the improvement of instruction—if School is less than perfect, why then, you know what to do: Teach better" (p. 139).

Papert claims that, in practice, "If children really want to learn something, and have the opportunity to learn it in use, they do so even if the teaching is poor" (p. 140). He goes on to cite as one example the way kids learn how to play video games.

There are other, more stunning examples of children learning without formal instruction. In his TED Talk, "The Child-Driven Education," Sugata Mitra demonstrates experimentally how, in the absence of any teacher whatsoever, "an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge":



Now, just to be clear: I am not arguing against having high-quality teachers in our schools. There are plenty of examples of the ways in which talented, caring teachers have made a huge difference in the lives of children—we've even made movies about them (Stand and Deliver, Take the Lead, Freedom Writers). What I want to question is our concept of what is meant by "better teaching." As Papert writes:

"The conclusion to be drawn [from these examples] is not that people manage anyway and so do not need help, but rather that this informal learning points to a natural form of rich learning that goes against the grain of School's methods and needs a different kind of support" (p. 141).

The fight to preserve homeschooling as a genuine alternative to school (rather than as an imitation of school that happens to be conducted at home) is an ongoing battle in many states. My hope is that the work of people like Papert and Mitra will encourage everyone to think more carefully about what types of teaching are truly effective.