Glorious Dreams and Harsh Realities: The Roles and Responsibilities of the Teacher from a Deweyan Perspective

Everything the teacher does, as well as the manner in which he does i~ incites the child to respond in some way or other, and response tends to set the child's attitude in some way or other.(HWT, 59) . . . the fundamental issue is not of new versus old education nor of progressive against traditional education but a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education.(EE, 90) One thing which characterizes education in the last decade or so is a widespread but not new belief that it must be reformed.New are the extent of discontent and disagreement among parents, voters, board members, administrators, and teachers and the range of proposals for reform.A recent Royal Commission found an ''unexpected lack of consensus . . . in Ontario on just about every aspect of the education system ... about what the major problems were and ... about what the solutions were" even though "there is no serious evidence that our schools are failing our kids any more or less than they ever have'' (For the Love of Learning, 1994, xii, 3).Popular disenchantment is expressed in endless discussion, publications, and legislation concerning the desirable characteristics of classrooms, schools, districts, and programs.Proposals range from Charter Schools based on the Paideia program to customer-oriented models from business. 1 What is discouraging is their fragmented, incoherent, and often contradictory conception of education and its problems and their identification of single causes and simple panaceas-for example, site-based management, national testing, a common curriculum, privatization, skills for employment and national economic advantage, and cooperative learning styles.Intuitively, but also from experience, we know that all this is wrong.2 Education is embedded in a multiplicity of complex and seemingly conflicting contexts.The problems, then, are not simple, and so, a comprehensive conception of them and of the activities of education is needed.Reflecting this insight is widespread interest in dramatic, radical, sweeping but equally single reconceptualizations-for instance, rethinking the roles of educational technology, the nature of knowledge, our conception of intelligence, the changed nature of society, the relationship of schools to parents and the community, the responsibilities of principals and supervisory staff, possibilities for alternative licensing programs and accrediting associations, and new roles for teachers as reflective practitioners, researchers, and professionals.Sometimes the single panaceas and radical rethinking go hand-in-hand: the information age and the learning society, for example, requiring a computer for every child.Surprisingly, very little attention is given to the roles and responsibilities of teachers whose everyday activities ultimately determine whether any reform in education is effective.Except for research on effective teaching and classroom processes (Buchmann & Floden,

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