Knowledge and the crisis in teacher education

16 Apr, 2023 at 14:21 | Posted in Education & School | 4 Comments

In Sweden, the standard of living measured by per capita income has increased by a factor of over 50 since the mid-1800s. Overall, people in the Western world today are more than twenty times richer than they were a century and a half ago. Its population has a life expectancy that is almost twice as high as its ancestors. What has caused this increase in prosperity and living standards?

At the same time, why do per capita income and growth rates differ more than ever in different countries today? Why has the difference between rich and poor countries increased? How can it be that the world’s richest countries in the early twenty-first century have a per capita income that is more than thirty times greater than that of the poorest countries?

“A truly good explanation is practically seamless,” wrote Adam Smith in his famous Wealth of Nations. Is there such an explanation for the most important problem area of ​​social sciences and humanity — economic growth? The American economist Paul Romer’s theory of endogenous growth — where knowledge is made the most important driving force of growth — is according to many economists probably the closest we can come at present.

The theory makes a significant distinction between ordinary objects (cars, refrigerators, computers) and knowledge (formulas, recipes, patents). According to the theory, knowledge is a kind of instruction or recipe that tells us how we can use our resources to produce utilities. With better knowledge, growth can increase even if material resources are limited. Knowledge is non-rivalrous in that one person’s use of knowledge does not reduce others’ ability to use the same knowledge. Unlike people (with their special skills and education) and things (stocks, machines, natural resources), knowledge is governed by increasing returns. An object (a portion of food) can only be consumed by a single person at a time, while knowledge (the recipe for the food) can be used by as many people as possible, anytime.

The theory of endogenous growth has convincingly demonstrated the importance of knowledge production for the creation of nations’ welfare. And if ideas and knowledge play such a crucial role in long-term growth and prosperity, much more of the debate should be about educational strategies, research investments, and teacher salaries instead of interest rates and tax rates.

Knowledge is power. This also applies to economics. And perhaps even more importantly, knowledge is what underlies our ability to create long-term prosperity.

Against this background, it is somewhat surprising to see how politicians in Sweden treat those who may be the most important mediators of knowledge — teachers.

For a long time, it has been known and pointed out that many of the education programs currently conducted at the country’s colleges and universities have a meager budget to live on. The result is therefore fewer teacher-led lectures in record-large student groups.

In addition to this, there has been an explosion of new student groups going on to university studies. In a way, this is clearly pleasing. Today we have as many doctoral students in our education system as we had high school students in the 1950s! But this educational expansion has largely taken place at the expense of deteriorating opportunities for students to meet the competence requirements of higher education. Many have succumbed and lowered their standards.

Unfortunately, the students we receive at universities and colleges today are also not always well-equipped for their studies. The restructuring of the school system in the form of decentralization, deregulation, and target management has not delivered as promised by politicians. The imposed professionalization of the teaching profession has rather resulted in de-professionalization as resources have decreased and non-teaching tasks and responsibilities have increased.

In line with the post-secondary education expansion, a corresponding contraction of knowledge among large student groups has taken place. The education policy that has led to this situation hits hardest against those it claims to protect — those with little or no ‘cultural capital’ in their background.

Perhaps these trends and problems are especially evident in the part of our university and college education system that focuses on teacher education.

Today, an increasing number of teacher education students are recruited from households with little or no experience of higher education. Teacher students’ grades and results on college entrance exams have also decreased for a long time. At the same time as the recruitment of teacher education students with high study results has thus become more difficult, there has been an increasing demand for the academic level of teacher education. How we can solve the dilemma of higher demands on a merit-based education with increasingly weak-performing students with tighter resource frames is difficult to see.

The relative salaries of teachers have decreased for a long time. 60 years ago, an elementary school teacher on average earned almost as much as an engineer. Today, an elementary school teacher’s salary is on average 65 percent of a civil engineer’s salary. 60 years ago, a high school teacher on average earned 35 percent more than an engineer. Today, a high school teacher’s salary on average is 75 percent of a civil engineer’s salary.

The general level of teacher salaries must increase. But this is only possible if the municipalities’ accountant attitude towards schools becomes a thing of the past and the state is also willing to invest in what ultimately provides higher growth and prosperity in a knowledge society — knowledge! No one can access modern educational research without realizing how headless the last decades’ school policy has been when it comes to these fundamentals. The school’s problems cannot be solved without raising teachers’ relative salaries and giving them decent working conditions.

In fact, it is remarkable that the teacher salary gap has been allowed to continue unchecked for so long. Few measures are likely to have greater long-term returns than investing in getting skilled teachers who can impart knowledge to future generations.

Here we clearly have one of the main reasons for the problems that the Swedish school is struggling with today. Why would high-performing students, other than exceptionally, choose to pursue an education that leads to a profession characterized today by low pay and almost non-existent status?

In this situation, strong remedies are needed. Unfortunately, measures such as the introduction of teacher licensing and more high school lecturers are simply not enough. The reason is simply that these measures — which I mostly support — do not address the fundamental problems that I have addressed here.

What we can see today of the consequences of municipalization and for-profit ‘free schools’ should lead us to seriously consider whether the state should take greater responsibility for the Swedish school.

The chariot of fate certainly does not run on rails. But knowledge is still the locomotive that drives economic growth and people’s welfare forward. From that perspective, nothing can be more important today than investing in our teachers and ensuring that in the future we can get the best, most competent, and most talented individuals to want to educate themselves as teachers.