mathematicians, philosophers, historians, computer scientists, philologists, physicists, we have found ourselves throughout these months in the Master of Teacher Training (hereinafter, MFP) talking with enthusiasm about those subjects to which we dedicated ourselves until not so recently. And what can we say in the future about the year we took the MFP? That brought us together to talk about what we had studied and how much we hate the said “Master”. We will talk about what was one of the most humiliating and useless experiences we have ever known. We will talk about how that lost year almost discouraged us in our desire to be teachers.
Well, what about which in a year we will have nothing to say, is now intended to be expanded to two. That it lasts two years and, of course, is more expensive, more inaccessible. , that Master’s degree that, let us remember, is mandatory to practice as a teacher. However, it seems to us that everyone has missed something: consulting those who made it about the supposed necessity of this decision.
It’s understandable that they don’t want to do it. If we cross the available data on the evaluation of the MFP with that which can be found of the total Master’s degrees offered by the university system, we discover that it is among the worst evaluated. Some disastrous results that only improve slightly if we include in them the items referring to the assessment of teaching practices in institutes. That is, the only thing that is positively evaluated for their training as teachers is precisely what is not related to pedagogical theory.
Why is this happening? The edifice of pedagogy is built on a dichotomy: “you may know about things, but we know how things are taught.” However, this dichotomy is quite strange if we take it seriously. It is as if it were stated that firefighters need a meta-firefighter to explain to them how to put out a fire. No, we all know that the firefighter was taught how to put out fires by another firefighter. Can there be a manual on how to become a good doctor? Yes, it’s called learning from a good doctor. So can there be a manual on how to be a good math teacher? Yes, learn from a good math teacher. And, of course, graduates who have never taught classes will not know how to teach, but this is not due to a lack of knowledge of pedagogical theories but because they lack teaching practice. It is precisely within this practice where you will learn the essential didactics that all teaching requires. But he will do so from the reflection on his teaching practice and the deepening of the knowledge that must be made understandable to the student. Despite the pedagogical caricature of the authoritarian and dogmatic teacher, it is the committed praxis that has always characterized the good teacher, our teachers, those whom we want to be like, from whom we want to learn this difficult profession.
So no, this has nothing to do with arrogant smugness nor, certainly, with any authoritarianism. In fact, we rather have the suspicion that it has been precisely the entire pedagogical discourse, which covers the current competency model, that has been serving as an alibi for the reconversion of educational systems into nurseries for the training of labor. We believe that there lies the infantilization that we endure in their classes. Perhaps this way it will be easier for us to reproduce it later with a student body destined for a rubbish job future.
That’s why perhaps it would be time to assume that we “lead by example.” Perhaps the best way to train good teachers is to spend one more year learning from teachers who, according to the “professors” of the Master, are not good teachers. So if you really want to be serious about entering the teaching profession, your entry, like the judiciary or medicine, should not be done without having completed a seriously supervised and paid internship period.
Pedagogues often accuse positions like ours of making categorical statements without evidence. Well, what is proven is that every teacher knows better where the student fails, where he stops, where he does not reach, if they ask him bullying or not, when the ratios are 15 students instead of 30. It is something we have known since Plato, these were dialogues, the ratio was 1:1. Perhaps the missing Master of Teacher Training has a name: educational budget. We thus conclude with a question. If pedagogues had to choose between what is better for ESO students: 2 years of MFP or reducing the ratios from 30 to 10 students, what would they choose? They will surely respond: “but it is not incompatible.” However, no phrase of this type is incapable of overcoming a fundamental obstacle: why does it seem that our rulers have taken special interest in listening to pedagogues? What is it that ends up being defended for the school with that “but”?
