> Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse.

This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit.

Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools, inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck?

The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans.

I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the current political equilibrium of these goals.

[3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard to make change from within such an organizational structure.

The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech. If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches, but that's for another post.

Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two.

[1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study.
[2] Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81.
[3] Callahan, R. E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press.
[4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.