Bridging the Divide Between Amateurs and Professionals

Benjamin Spock

For a while now, I've been writing about home education, online resources, and creative learning experiences. However, a few weeks ago, I saw a post in a Google+ forum that unnerved me—I haven't written anything on this blog since then.

Was the post hostile? offensive? obnoxious? No, it was polite and vaguely solicitous, written by a professional educator who mentioned she had a PhD as she wrote about her desire to instruct home educators. Although she had no experience with homeschooling, she was about to start homeschooling her daughter, and she was enthusiastic about the idea of helping other homeschoolers learn how to become better teachers.

I like to think I would have been open and receptive to this woman's kind and charitable intentions on a better day, but my immediate, less admirable reaction was anger and annoyance. "What makes her think she can start dishing out advice to home educators when she has no experience with homeschooling?" I thought to myself. I then became painfully aware of the hypocrisy in that question, because for quite some time I had been imagining that I (an amateur, home educator) might have something worthwhile to add to the ongoing conversation among professional educators about how to make teaching more effective.

Ye Without Training, Proceed No Further

Disheartened, I began to scrutinize everything I'd said or written about education while wondering how a professional educator might view my attempts to contribute. During this period of intense self-doubt, I began to question the entire premise of this blog and my tentative plans for working in partnership with faculty and students to create effective online content.

I was disillusioned even more when I read a post by respected author and consultant Tony Bates, who questioned the effectiveness of faculty who have received no training in teaching methods ("Online Learning, Faculty Development and Academic Freedom"). He writes:

" . . . [W]e don’t allow pilots to fly commercial aircraft without training, we place very high standards on doctors before they are allowed to practice medicine, and we wouldn’t tolerate engineers building roads, tunnels or bridges without very high levels of training. Then why is it OK for faculty to spend 40% or more of their time doing something for which they have had no or minimal training, and which for most students is the most important thing they are paying tuition fees for?" 

Now, of course, I don't imagine Dr. Bates was aiming his question directly at me—most likely, he wasn't thinking about home educators at all—but as I read his words I started to construct a rebuttal. I recalled the talented professors I've known who had become insightful instructors without explicit teacher training; the trained, certified teachers I've met who were uninspiring; and all the non-professional educators (like me) who have no formal training but who somehow do a decent job of nurturing learning in others.

Enter, the Power of Participation

All of these thoughts about what it means to be "qualified" were on my mind as I spent the past few months exploring articles and TED Talks about "cognitive surplus" (to use Clay Shirky's term) and the power of online participation. Initially, my focus was on preparing for upcoming classes (Thriving in the Digital Age), so I hadn't planned to connect what I was learning about collective intelligence to my concerns about being an amateur in a professional field (i.e., education). Fortunately, as I continued to read and browse, the connections were impossible to ignore.

One of the major concerns addressed by Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson and others, is whether amateur participation is a good thing. "Won't all those lesser contributions to online content," the reasoning goes, "merely add to the already overwhelming volume of information without improving the overall quality?" Put another way, aren't we amateurs just adding to the noise and making it harder for people to find the truly useful content?

It's a valid question. What makes Jane Average think her blog is worth reading? Why should people regard a news report tweeted by the guy next door as noteworthy? Or, getting back to my original quandary: What makes a home educator think her experiences and curated content might be valuable to those who already have years of training and experience as professional educators?

Shirky et al argue that the benefits of expanded participation more than make up for the "noise." So, even if my naive reflections and nascent thoughts about education aren't revolutionary, perhaps what I share will help someone else make an important connection. As Matt Ridley explains in his TED Talk ("When Ideas Have Sex"):

"What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. [. . .] It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. [. . .] Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation."

In Conclusion

I began this post with a photo of Dr. Spock intentionally, because he was a professional who advised parents to trust themselves. His book, Baby and Child Care, came out at a time when people seemed to have stopped believing in their own ability to be good parents.

"Before [Dr. Spock] came along, advice to parents was very didactic. He opened the whole area of empowered parenting. He gave parents choices and encouraged them to think things out for themselves" (T. Berry Brazelton, quoted in the New York Times).

Giving people choices and encouraging them to think for themselves is what I believe education is all about, too.

I don't care whether you're an amateur or a professional. If you're passionate about learning and helping others to learn, then we already have something in common. Let's exchange ideas and work towards making the world a better place. If any of my writings are useful to you as we learn and grow together, I hope you'll let me know.

Thank you.