Quite often education is being compared to health care, e.g. Larry Cuban does this once and a while and there are indeed similarities. But to me there is one thing that is very different: how we regard how professional doctors versus teachers are.

Yesterday I read this piece on The Atlantic how Americans love to blame teachers for over 200 years. From my own classes on the history of education, I know this wasn’t the case in many parts of Europe and still isn’t the case in some parts of the world, still teachers e.g. in Belgium hold in previous decades a strange place in society. They weren’t rich or elite, sometimes not even rich enough to be middle class, still they were often regarded as a kind of ‘noble’ because of their knowledge and cultural know-how.

Nowadays trust in teachers in many countries is, euphemistically put,  in peril. We doubt our teachers, where we can have doubts in our medical care, we don’t mistrust the professionalism of our doctors. One of the reasons for this difference is probably we all seem to think we know how to teach or know something about schools as we’ve all been students once. So, we turn to tests and other kinds of quality checks. Which can have some good effects. Regular small tests do help learning. Countries and people invest a lot of money in education, so quality has to high and needs to be evaluated. But there are many different ways to deal with this. And there can be bad consequences too.

The both funny and sad thing is that our quest for transparency to help us with our distrust in teachers and schools, in fact only feeds our distrust.

I think there are other ways to help us with our distrust, some are described in this report.