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Those who can, do….
When I first heard the phrase “Those who can do, those who can’t teach”, I was an impressionable teenager, and in all likelihood I swallowed it whole, with no questions asked, because it came from the lips of a person I’d always been impressed by and always hoped to impress.
Very recently, I heard that phrase again, from the same person, who I’ve given up trying to impress, and it sounded like the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. I know he had a bad experience with his teachers in his formative years, and I know he is terribly disdainful of state schooling, but he attended one of the world’s best universities despite being state schooled himself.
Too many people believe our educators are failures who simply can’t hack the real world. Ironically, most of those people have achieved lofty and well remunerated positions largely thanks to a good education, and they narrowly define success as the accumulation of money. Most of the teacher haters I’ve met have been from three professions; lawyers, investments bankers and surgeons. Their disdain seems partly engendered by their professions and partly by a personality construct. They all seem to look down on anyone with less money or education, and hate anybody with more. All three professions score higher than the general public on tests measuring psychopathy.
