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    Teaching - The Most Important Profession

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    Johnjohn Mateo
    Teaching is a specialized profession that applies knowledge and skills to meet the educational needs of individuals and society. Teachers are responsible for choosing learning activities that help achieve educational goals in schools. A politician in 1945 argued that teaching is the most important secular profession, as it helps create good citizens, but that it enjoys the least social recognition and is the worst paid compared to other professions like law, engineering, and medicine. The speaker notes their organization, the Education Council, aims to elevate the status of teaching to be on par with these other professions in terms of perception and pay.

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    Teaching - The Most Important Profession

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    Johnjohn Mateo
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    Teaching is a specialized profession that applies knowledge and skills to meet the educational needs of individuals and society. Teachers are responsible for choosing learning activities that help achieve educational goals in schools. A politician in 1945 argued that teaching is the most important secular profession, as it helps create good citizens, but that it enjoys the least social recognition and is the worst paid compared to other professions like law, engineering, and medicine. The speaker notes their organization, the Education Council, aims to elevate the status of teaching to be on par with these other professions in terms of perception and pay.

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    Teaching

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    Teaching is a specialized profession that applies knowledge and skills to meet the educational needs of individuals and society. Teachers are responsible for choosing learning activities that help achieve educational goals in schools. A politician in 1945 argued that teaching is the most important secular profession, as it helps create good citizens, but that it enjoys the least social recognition and is the worst paid compared to other professions like law, engineering, and medicine. The speaker notes their organization, the Education Council, aims to elevate the status of teaching to be on par with these other professions in terms of perception and pay.

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    50 views3 pages

    Teaching - The Most Important Profession

    Uploaded by

    Johnjohn Mateo
    Teaching is a specialized profession that applies knowledge and skills to meet the educational needs of individuals and society. Teachers are responsible for choosing learning activities that help achieve educational goals in schools. A politician in 1945 argued that teaching is the most important secular profession, as it helps create good citizens, but that it enjoys the least social recognition and is the worst paid compared to other professions like law, engineering, and medicine. The speaker notes their organization, the Education Council, aims to elevate the status of teaching to be on par with these other professions in terms of perception and pay.

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    Teaching is the specialized application of knowledge, skills and attributes designed to provide

    unique service to meet the educational needs of the individual and of society. The choice of
    learning activities whereby the goals of education are realized in the school is the responsibility
    of the teaching profession.

    Teaching – the Most Important Profession


    “IT APPEARS, THEREFORE, THAT OF ALL SECULAR PROFESSIONS,
    TEACHING IS THE MOST PROFOUNDLY IMPORTANT…” “OF ALL
    THESE PROFESSIONS TEACHING IS THE WORSE PAID.”
    You might be surprised to find the person who said that wasn’t a teacher or indeed a union member.
    He was, in fact, a politician.You might be even more surprised to find these words were spoken in
    July 1945 by the Leader of the Opposition, Robert Menzies, to the Australian House of
    Representatives. Menzies was to become Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 and became Prime
    Minister again from 1949 to 1966. Of course, 1945 is a long time ago, and Australia is not New
    Zealand, but his comments are surprisingly prescient.

    What struck me about his wide-ranging speech was what he said about the qualifications, status and
    remuneration of teachers.

    The task of teachers, Menzies said, is one which brings them into close contact with students for
    hours each day during the most formative years of their lives. It is a task, he remarked, that if
    performed well, can do more to produce good citizens “than all of the acts of Parliament ever
    passed”. Menzies compared the role of the teacher to the roles performed by doctors and engineers
    and lawyers. And because the teacher helps make good citizens, he elevated the role of the
    teacher. “It appears, therefore, that of all secular professions, teaching is the most profoundly
    important”, he concluded. Menzies went on to observe, though, that teachers enjoyed “the least
    recognition in a social sense” and that “of all these professions, that of teaching is the worst paid”.

    He then set out a case for insisting on high qualifications for teachers and argued that a community
    that was aware of the supreme importance of its educational system would insist upon the highest
    qualifications for teaching, and would reward those qualifications with adequate remuneration and
    proper recognition. These sentiments are strikingly similar to the actual role the Education Council is
    playing some 70 years later.

    Our function is to elevate the status of teachers so that in time our profession will be perceived as on
    a par with lawyers, engineers and doctors and remunerated accordingly. I believe teaching can be
    both a vocation and a profession and that these two concepts are not mutually exclusive, indeed
    they are interdependent.So just how is the Education Council going about achieving this goal? I’ll
    outline three fundamental areas we’re working on right now.

    Getting the Basics Right


    First, we’re working on getting the basics right. We’re starting from the ground up and asking a
    fundamental question: what does a future-focussed initial teacher education system look like? What
    do teachers need to be equipped to meet the challenges of the modern world of teaching and
    learning? Our understanding of how people learn best is changing. So how will our training of
    teachers reflect this new understanding? Teaching is much more complex than it has ever been and
    educators need to understand the social nature of learning, diversity and difference, the role
    emotions play and the role the way we live plays in the way we learn.

    We need to redesign how we recruit, select and educate the profession as we prepare for our future
    of learning. Society needs to have greater confidence about the quality of our graduates. So we
    need to re-evaluate assessment, approval and monitoring of programmes alongside appropriate
    entry requirements. We must make sure the right people enter the profession.

    Developing Leadership
    Leadership is another key plank for the Education Council. We need a “profession led system that
    doesn’t just reproduce the status quo.” 1We are developing a Centre for Leadership Excellence to
    enable leadership for ongoing improvement, innovation and transformation. We want to open up new
    ways for our profession to support and enhance learning. We want to build capability across our
    sector and our education system. We want to build a connected, cohesive and adaptive leadership
    cohort – first through Communities of Learning but later on across our profession.
    The centre will enable and strengthen a professional leadership community to develop its own
    leadership needs and priorities. Importantly it will be professionally led – and ground-breaking. We
    will enable and support the development of a leadership community of practice, and advocate for the
    kind of professional learning needed by our leaders.The centre will support leadership across our
    profession – it will be the sum of the parts for work already done by building on that work. It will be
    more than cluster based.

    Speaking Up and Out


    Our profession needs championing and the Education Council’s role is to do that. We’re doing this
    by presenting strong and cogent positions on issues affecting teachers and our sector. Advocating
    on behalf of teachers on government policy, submitting on bills and lobbying with key influencers to
    ensure the critical issues affecting our profession are well understood.We all know teachers – we’ve
    all been taught. Parents are teachers and teachers are parents. We are inter-related and inter-
    connected. We are the community. We want society to place more value on the role we play and to
    recognise that role through seeing our profession as one of high-status and not a solely a
    vocation.We can’t do this alone. Our profession must also champion itself. It must demand the
    highest of standards and behaviours. It must set a high bar for itself and stick to it, and sometimes
    push the bar higher.

    The Education Council’s role is to catalyse. We can’t do it alone and we should all be working hard
    to elevate the status of our profession.I’m glad to come across Menzies’ speech. It got me thinking. I
    hope it gets you thinking too.

    (1 Jan Robertson University of Waikato 2015)

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