SXSWEdu has known a new installment and in reaction I’ve seen a couple of blogposts such as this one and I’ve been to several educational meetups with one group being a minority: teachers and other educators. Often it is something that nobody even seem to notice.

Lately  education has received interest by a lot of entrepreneurs. The reasons are complex. Some from genuine philanthropic interest. Some because they have the feeling that education doesn’t deliver them the employees anymore they need. A lot lately because they recognize education as a potential grow market. With MOOC’s and other charter schools new business models are at hand and money to be won.

And for this last group, teachers for sure can be a burdon. They are the expensive ones, the difficult ones, the ones with an union (a theme in many charter school discussions)

But I want to dig a bit deeper to show a historical fault line between entrepreneurs and teachers. For this I lean heavy on the work by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (both from the University of Leuven).

They define school as a place for free time. Free time not as in time for hobbies, but free as being free from economical value. School is than a place in which young people are introduced to new worlds at a lower pace than society turn at. The lower pace makes room for learning and reflection.

Therefor you need people who aren’t part of the economical thinking. These people we call teachers. They don’t ‘produce’ anything. Oh, we do want the put the economical thinking on education, to check what they produce, hence the collective dream of many policymakers of standardized testing, put we than always are confronted with limitations because of this historical nature of education.

In this view entrepreneurs and teachers seem to be as different as they can be, which can be a good thing. We need entrepreneurs so people invest in technology, development,… but we also need teachers and ‘free time’ if we want education to be more than a grow market.