[tau5210]

I agree. We seem to enjoy getting excited about ways of improving education in our heads, but somehow keep forgetting or think lightly about the actual teachers in reality.

Teachers are always going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks: no matter what fancy perfect education method people come up with, it's still not going to be any better than what an average teacher can teach. Or equivalently, what an average teacher understands herself. And in fact, the greater the discrepancy between the theory and the teachers, the worse the actual outcome will probably be...

If we still want to introduce some new fancy ways, at the very least, we have to begin by teaching the teachers, not the students. I think this is true even if we suppose that all the teachers are "gifted" so to speak. Otherwise, teaching isn't a science so each teacher will just do things their own way, which again will probably be a mess. Even gifted people are not all the same. Or if we say that's ok, then we wouldn't need an education system to begin with: just let each teacher teach in their own way and the world should still be great a place-- but I doubt it.

On a side note, I've come to see textbooks as a great invention in that sense: the students can learn a bare minimum even from the dumbest teacher as long as you make sure they follow the text book. Put another way, the textbook is like a baseline meta-teacher teaching the teacher along with the students.. I'm not a teacher myself but I have a lot of teachers around me including family members from whom I've heard this.