The Irrelevance of Ideas to Education?

In my local newspaper, a columnist observed that tenure used to be a way to protect teachers from being fired for dangerous ideas but it has morphed into merely a way to secure a quasi-permant job.



I don't want to evaluate this claim whether it is true, although I suspect it may be the practical effect of most tenure decisions. Rather, I want to explore a potentially hidden assumption within this comment: Ideas either don't matter or have become irrelevant to teaching and learning. Now, the columnist (a former principal) does not actually make this case anywhere in his article. As is typical, his concern is about creating effective schools.



What confuses me is his sense that we could have good schools without an engagement with potentially controversial ideas. Or, in other words, tenure is no longer needed because teachers should simply teach skills and the fear of getting fired for holding, espousing, or exploring a controversial idea is just plain outdated. Given I live in a fairly conservative part of the country, there is plenty of local concern about governmental intrusions into individual freedoms, especially in terms of guns, religion, and the right to be entreprenurial (ok that last one is not in the Bill of Rights but lots of people think it ought to be). This would suggest to me that folks around here believe the government can and frequently does interfere with our lives but that intervention is just not a pressing issue for education.



All of this suggests that education, as popularly conceived, is no longer about ideas but about skill development and empolyment preparation. As long as education is framed in this way, the defense of tenure on the grounds of intellectual freedom and the need to explore controversial ideas will not be successful.



Perhaps more significantly, if education is "just" skill development and employment preparation (as opposed to training to become engaged and productive citizens), then the argument for public education and public funding for education seems diminished. If students and their families are merely investing in their personal financial futures, then why should society bear this cost?



Moreover, reframing education as vocational training begs the question of where society should debate what needs to be done with all that vocational training. If students are taught how to do things (from engineering to physical therapy to human resource management), where will they explore what they should do? What is their ethical obligations and the role of government, economics, personal responsibility, etc.?



The columnist persuaded me that defenses of tenure cannot rest on job security. Rather, they must emphasize the dangers of taking controversial ideas out of the classroom. Tenure is needed to help students engage dangerous ideas and develop their own ethical voice and their ability to become critical thinkers. Our country depends not only technical know-how about but the freedom to ask questions, especially questions about the nature of the good life and the good society.