winter, this is a beautiful explanation of good teaching,
in my amateur opinion, and Thank You! . I had the chance
to tutor some smart youngsters, and watching the light
come on in their eyes was just glorious!!! -- j
.

In a way, I had shrugged my entire teaching career. I did get a teaching certificate, and I did do a nine-week sentence student teaching at a public school. But I spent my entire career teaching in a private very alternative school for brilliant students. We had a kid graduate first in his class from Stanford. We had a Fulbright Scholar. The woman and her husband who started the English school for girls in Africa, whose book is in the top 5 of the NYT bestseller list was one of our students. In fact, I taught all 3 of them Latin.
Here's an example of how you shrug and teach Latin. You have to know some vocabulary if you're going to be able to read anything in a reasonable time. So, I had a vocab test on every chapter in our book. "Passing" was a score of 85 [the students thought I was wimping out and fought for 100]. If you got a score of 85 on a quiz, you got a Hershey's kiss back with your quiz. If you didn't pass, you took it again - but on your own time, not class time: lunch time, recess, any free time that was yours. People learned and used their vocab. On nice days, we met outside on the lawn under a tree.
My example is to show that reasonable, effective education can be done. The difficulty is that the adults involved absolutely MUST relinquish as much control as possible. You can help any student learn specific skills, if you and he design that learning on a subject in which he is interested. There are innumerable difficult problems to solve, and the method we used did not look the same for all students, but the emphasis should not be on whether a kid knows a fact that some adult thinks he should know, but that he knows how to find, evaluate and use that fact to produce something - a paper? an architectural model? a poster? a speech? The point of education should not be to do what adults decided you and every other 12-year-old should do. The point is to learn how to learn.

I am confident that there are millions who are like the frog
in the hot water -- they know that something is wrong,
but they don't have a clue what it really is. -- j
.

She 'went galt' in the sense that she would no longer tolerate bureaucracy interfering with her career, teaching as she thought best. But I wonder if she realizes the extent of the bad ideas and educational philosophy, at least some of which she was passing along to her students, perhaps without realizing what is wrong.

it's a crying shame, because the kids really are the future,
and they are being so poorly served by the system. -- j
.

My mother is a teacher. My best friends are teachers. I hear a variation of this almost every day. It is all true, and it prevents them from being able to sleep most nights. The children are the only reason to stay, but that won't be true for much longer. There are many educators who hate what is happening but stay and try to fight the system from the inside. It is futile the vast majority of the time. Exhaustion is kicking in. Their passion is being drained. Many will be changing careers soon.

yessir, we are creating mind-numbed robots programmed
to respond to certain trigger-terms to buy or behave in
a certain way. . it's horrible. -- j
.

Jeez...that brought tears to my eyes...

What a f&^%ing mess...

Having worked as a sub, and been turned down as a military accession teacher, I can identify to a certain extent. My late mother was an elementary school teacher and loved her kids. Did her best to teach as she had been taught, and for the most part, succeeded. Hearing the comments of educators whom I knew in my previous city, and those of the kids (including my daughter), the problem is rampant. That said, I think it is part and parcel of creating a permanent helot class which can be controlled by an uber elite. After all, if you have no critical thinking skills, how can you know how bad you have it and what you can do about it?