On the deconstruction of a wonderful profession
by Carl Bossard,* Switzerland
(28 June 2022) Switzerland is short of thousands of teachers, and this just before the summer holidays. The authorities express surprise. But how could it come to this? A search for clues.
Teachers have the “most wonderful, most difficult and hardest profession in the world”, writes Swiss author Thomas Hürlimann in his amusing and wise essay “Die pädagogische Provinz”.1 The most wonderful profession! But why are they running away from school in droves?2 Why do ever less teachers want to teach full time and escape to part-time jobs? In the canton of Lucerne, for example, two thirds of all teachers work less than 50 per cent. And only eleven per cent take on a workload of over 90 per cent.
It’s getting tight at school
Why this sudden shortage of teachers? A question that is as difficult as it is complex. There are many quick answers – especially superficial ones: retirement wave, more pupils, refugee children from Ukraine. All of this may be true; but there is much that those responsible could have anticipated. The motto “Gouverner c’est prévoir” (“To govern is to predict”) would oblige them to do so. But the question that goes beyond is not asked at all: why this exodus from school?
Perhaps the great escape from the classroom can be explained in part with a sentence by the Swiss philosopher Hans Saner. He wrote that it would probably be better to dare a conflict of freedom than to peacefully wither away in conformity.3 But whether a struggle against the system is worth it? Hardly. There is only leaving. And many are leaving. Quite a few of them speak of a lack of freedom, freedom as an antonym to the narrow guidelines and regulations in everyday teaching. This is one of the reasons for their departure from school.
Taking responsibility requires freedom
Those who work with pupils, who accompany young people on their learning and life paths, require freedom. They need it to teach as they need the air to breathe. Pedagogical freedom as an elixir. But it is not the unbound, uncontrolled freedom, the unbridled and unrestrained freedom, but the freedom from unnecessary pro forma regulations and formal requirements, from norms and narrow directives. This is the only way to respond adequately in the classroom.
It is the freedom to choose the méthodos, the path to the goal. It is the freedom to shape the school’s mission and to work pedagogically for the children and young people – for the benefit of the class for which teachers are responsible. And this sentence contains the decisive correlate to freedom: responsibility. Taking responsibility requires freedom. Human energy comes from freedom. That is why it must not be stifled in schools. School must remain a place of freedom. However, this freedom must be cleared of any sand again and again, otherwise it will remain nothing but a neglected reality.
Regulations upon regulations
Freedom, that little word, has few friends today, and it is far less popular in practice than political rhetoric suggests. This is probably why schools are becoming ever more rigidly standardised. This is wearing down many actors and damages the quality of teaching. Anyone who looks at schools knows that they have been restructured for years. One reform follows the other; and each reform brings new regulations and specifications, creates additional decrees and directives, produces paper and demands reports. Therein lies the paradox: the regulation that is being imposed everywhere is in contradiction to the requested and necessary pedagogical freedom. This puts schools in a tight spot and causes short of breath.
“Good pedagogy and administration are not compatible”
Whether teaching is successful, whether pupils enjoy going to school, depends on the person of the teacher, on their vital presence – their attitude. Not on the number of regulations or the volume of curricula. The density of current curricula tends to limit freedom. The Swiss Curriculum 21, for example, prescribes more than 2300 small-parcelled competence levels. Too many directives, however, paralyse the mind and inhibit action. Too many regulations strangle spontaneity and stifle creativity. Many teachers therefore feel trapped in the tentacles of administrative fetters with their paralysing effect. They complain about the corset of artificially constructed complexity of today’s school environments. “School in chains” is how an experienced teacher sums up his years of teaching.
This is probably what Chantal Galladé, former member of the Zurich National Council and president of a Winterthur district school board, means when she says: “Good pedagogy and administration are not compatible. Educators should be creative and be able to shape things. That requires freedom. The administration, on the other hand, wants to standardise, organise and regulate things. That doesn’t go together."4 And this does has consequences, I might add.
What is called for is the rehabilitation of teaching and teachers
There is something else: the role of the teacher, the task of the teacher has changed; it has been deconstructed. The ominous motto the “shift from teaching to learning”, resulted in the dominance of self-regulated learning. It is postulated that the responsibility for learning lies with the individual child. But any form of unambiguity negates the other side. Thus, the teacher had changed from being a “sage on the stage” to a “guide at the side” and then to a mere “peer in the rear” – degraded to a coach on the sidelines and a learning companion.5 No lesser person than the renowned philosopher and educationalist Gert Biesta deplores this. What young person merely wants to accompany children – as a “peer in the rear”, as a colleague in the rear?
Responsible educational science has therefore long been pleading for a rediscovery and rebuilding of teaching, for a “re(dis)covery of teaching”6 – in vital human presence. “Teaching and the teacher must be rehabilitated”, Biesta demands. And resolutely he adds: it takes a teacher “who can draw students out of their current, respectively limited subjectivity and situatedness".
“He was a wonderful teacher”
Whether this is the limes against the rampant escape from the classroom is impossible to say. But such a view at least rehabilitates the role of the teacher as educator, as paid-agogue, guiding children and young people. Perhaps this is a first step against the ominous deconstruction of this demanding and wonderful vocation, and a counter to the exodus from the profession.
Once more Swiss writer Thomas Hürlimann. He writes about his music teacher Father Daniel Meier in the Einsiedeln monastery school: “he was a wonderful teacher; he was on fire for music and inspired us boys with his fire.”7 And there is something else we know about Thomas Hürlimann: Father Daniel was able to work in freedom.
| * Carl Bossard, 1949, former principle of the cantonal college in Nidwalden, director of the cantonal college in Lucerne, founding principle of the college of education Zug (PH Zug), lecturer at the college of education in Zug. Today he is active as a course instructor, speaker and school councillor. Carl Bossard regularly comments on education policies and pedagogy. |
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
1 Thomas Hürlimann (2008), Der Sprung in den Papierkorb. Geschichten, Gedanken und Notizen am Rand. Zürich: Ammann Verlag, p. 108f.
2 Alessandra Paone, Es fehlen Tausende Lehrerinnen und Lehrer. in: Tages-Anzeiger, 7 June 2022, p. 5.
3 Hans Saner (1979): Zwischen Politik und Getto. Über das Verhältnis des Lehrers zur Gesellschaft. 2nd edition Basel, p. 27.
4 Rico Bandle, «Ich weiss, was die Integration eines Flüchtlingskindes bedeutet», in: SonntagsZeitung, 22 August 2021, S. 15.
5 Ewald Terhart (2018), Eine neo-existenzialistische Konzeption von Unterricht und Lehrerhandeln? Zu Gert Biestas Wiederentdeckung und Rehabilitation des Lehrens und des Lehrers, in: Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 94 (2018) 3, p. 479.
6 Gert J.J. Biesta (2017), The Rediscovery of Teaching. New York: Routledge, p. 1.
7 Thomas Hürlimann, Bringen wir den Ton zum Klingen! in: NZZaS, 25 October 2015, p. 71.