The United States’ education system faces many challenges as the influence that teachers hold over the educational system continues to wane, education expert John Merrow said during a presentation at Harvard University on Wednesday.
Merrow, author of “The Influence of Teachers,” education correspondent for PBS NewsHour and president of Learning Matters, said the United States education system is facing many problems, such as increasing student debt, high numbers of high school dropouts and a surplus of public high school teachers.
To build a more successful education system, Merrow argued school principals need to exercise greater authority, take advantage of teacher evaluations, improve the clarity of contracts and increase wages.
Merrow said that schools need to also address the difference between knowledge and information when teaching students, with an emphasis on figuring out how to channel information received into wisdom.
“The knowledge, the information, was where school was, but that’s not true anymore,” Merrow said. “We are surrounded by information but that’s not necessarily knowledge. If you don’t see the difference, here is an example – you know that a tomato is a fruit – that’s knowledge. But you don’t put the tomato in a fruit salad – that’s wisdom.”
The influence of technology, he said, has influenced the American teaching culture and it has changed the way children are being educated intellectually and socially.
“The second reason we used to go to school was for socializing. But these days with all the social media, we don’t even need school anymore,” Merrow said. “Kids are surrounded by social media, which makes it easier for them to socialize anyway. It’s like pen pals on steroids.”
Merrow said he agreed with the vision of teachers presented during President Barak Obama’s State of the Union address.
“The president said, ‘teachers are nation builders,’ but can this army build a nation? To build things, whether a tree house or a nation, you need raw material, tools, working conditions, know-how and blueprints. Do our teachers have raw material, tools, working conditions, know-how and blueprints? They don’t have the tools, because we don’t give them the tools,” Merrow said.
He also said that many teachers are now forced to spend more money on supplies for their classrooms, even as wages decrease.
“Teachers today spend more on school appliances and make less than they did 20 to 30 years ago,” Merrow said.
Merrow added that further discussions on education are necessary in order to develop a plan to reform the system.
“Do we have a blueprint for education? With micromanagement, there’s a lot of telling people what to do,” he said. “Do we know what we want out children to do? We haven’t had that conversation yet.”