Over the years, I have been writing about misconceptions regarding the schooling process. The purpose of these posts is to explain why I disagree with various comments that I have heard people make about schooling. These are meant as personal thoughts rather than conclusive proof, and I will admit that I'm not always the best at explaining my thoughts. Regardless, I have decided that I should be willing to share these posts when I encounter someone online who makes an argument that I have already discussed.
If you could imagine a world with just a few people dedicated to maximizing the quality of education for everyone and another world where such people were plentiful, which would likely result in a higher quality of education? I think we would all agree that it would be the world in which more people were involved in the educational process. This is likely a factor in why so many people believe strongly in the benefits of reducing the student-to-teacher ratio.
There are multiple problems with the widespread belief that smaller class sizes will fix our schools' problems. For starters, our resources are not unlimited, and there can be serious feasibility issues with our nonstop insistence that we should always look at hiring more teachers as the solution to all of society's ills. I'm not going to go into any depth in regards to feasibility. There's another issue that I am more interested in writing about.
The impact of student-to-teacher ratios is heavily reliant on the methods being used in the classroom. If teachers are educationally counterproductive, which is typical, increasing the number of teachers can backfire.
Most teachers establish a significant portion of their plans before they even know their students. This includes class layouts, prerequisites, expectations for what will be needed to know in order to pass, books that will be used, and other supplies. None of this is meant to maximize quality on an individual basis.
Even lesson-by-lesson planning typically fails to take individual needs into account. What if you split a class in half purely for the sake of improving student-to-teacher ratios? You could very well end up with two different teachers giving very similar lectures simultaneously. How exactly does that benefit the students?
A lot of arguments for adding teachers relates to one-on-one attention. What kind of attention do teachers provide? Usually, they try to push conformity so that students all adapt their learning styles to how the teachers teach. In many cases, they use shady tactics such as emotional abuse. These actions can have serious negative consequences such as neglect for personal strengths and damage to the natural desire to learn.
In my personal experiences, personal attention was always harmful. With the tactics that my teachers used, smaller class sizes would have been definitively detrimental to my education and my mental health. The idea that smaller student-to-teacher ratios necessarily results in better education is absolutely absurd. Let's try to address the serious problems first.
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