ARE BAD TEACHERS GOOD FOR YOU?

ARE BAD TEACHERS GOOD FOR YOU? The witty Lucy Kellaway called attention in yesterday’s Financial Times (July 19) to a controversy in the United Kingdom over comments by the head of Ofsted. (According to wikipedia, “The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) is the non-ministerial government department of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools In England.” As described in this article, The issue arose after a disclosure by the General Teaching Council that although it had estimated that there were 17,000 “substandard” teachers in the country, in the last decade, it had “struck off” only 18 teachers for incompetence. On this subject, the head of Ofsted “argued that poor teachers should not be sacked, as schools ‘need to reflect society'”. She contended that having an incompetent teacher is helpful because because “every grown-up in a workplace needs to learn to deal with the moron who sits four desks down …and to deal with authority that’s useless.” Lucy Kellaway, who is an astute observer of the business world, agrees with this argument, and adds that she was lucky to have had bad teaching in the early grades because it prepared her for Oxford, “where bad teaching was taken to a whole new level.”