More Money Than Brains by Laura Penny Page A

and five approving minutes on the CBC . There is one exception to this rule. Illustrious foreigners, especially Brits and Americans, who choose to live in Canada have much more leeway to pontificate and greater licence to make pompous pronouncements. They’re kind enough to grace this global backwater with their presence, so they can puff and brag a bit.
    Americans are more inclined to emphasize the goods an education can get you, treating school as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Consequently, the people who stay in school because they love the things they are studying have failed to reach the end, and are merely delaying the inevitable real world. American admiration of the self-made man or the rugged individualist means that scholastic success will always be a consolation prize at best, less worthy than starting your own company or inventing something. You can achieve the latter goals on your own, and the market determines whether or not they are successful, not some hoity-toity coterie of experts. It’s hardly surprising that a culture that routinely derides academic prowess – as opposed to fiscal and physical expertise, the objects of collective worship – produces middling, bored students.
    I’m not quite cynical enough to conclude that standardized testing is a deliberate dumbing down, a way to snuff brains out before they become perilously critical. I don’t think that the people who come up with these accountability schemes are trying to make that Kurt Vonnegut story come true,consciously creating Harrison Bergeron–esque Community Handicappers. It’s just another instance of the more-money-than-brains mindset at work, of our fondness for technical reason and rejection of other ways of thinking. Business lobby groups like Chambers of Commerce remain staunch supporters of accountability measures such as standardized tests. The exclusive focus on basic English and math suggests that the ultimate goal of school is training people to work, not teaching them to read and write and think and argue. All we really need to do is learn ‘em so they don’t frig up the cash register or offend the customers.
    The other shitty thing about accountability schemes is that they drive a lot of teachers out of the profession. The Web teems with complaints from former instructors who tired of teaching to the test. This only exacerbates one of the real problems affecting public schools on both sides of the border: it’s very difficult to recruit, train, and retain good teachers. Teaching has one of the highest attrition rates of any profession, with many leaving within five years. Some bitch about the mediocre pay, others complain about discipline problems in the classroom, but the most commonly cited reason for leaving the profession is intransigent and ineffectual administrators who undermine or overrule the teachers they are supposed to support.
    Again, part of the problem is attitudinal. Teaching is treated, at best, as a default career, something middle class-ish but not as good as real moneymaking professions such as doctoring or lawyering. Teaching still suffers from being a feminized profession, a girl job, part of the pink-collar ghetto.This is a hangover from the days when teaching was one of the few professions open to women. But a lot of those old lady teachers were tough birds and battle-axes, strict disciplinarians with high standards. Christ, my own grandmother once sent me to detention for accidentally calling her Nanny in class. She ruled the third grade with an iron fist.
    Such discipline is no longer permitted by many school boards. Teachers now have much less autonomy than my Nanny did. The idea that teachers are simply glorified babysitters – and the old saw “Those who can’t do, teach” – says a lot about the way we really value the profession that is the gateway to all the professions. This lack of status means that the best and the brightest, the really hardcore nerds, often avoid