PETER’S well-known Principle was obviously discovered by a man who knew nothing at all about schools.

In schools it just isn’t true that the people who can actually do their jobs get promoted until they find themselves, at last and forever, in the jobs they can’t do. This is because the most difficult and demanding jobs in education are what industry calls “entry-level positions,” teaching in classrooms. That’s the bottom rung of the school ladder, and there are many people who just can’t do that work.

It isn’t, in itself, very difficult work; all it takes is   intelligence, diligence, talent, and a little bit of luck. Those who have some of the first three, however, often run clean out of the fourth when they start taking education courses and start worrying more about enhancing their personological variables than about collecting more knowledge.

(Furthermore, teaching obviously has to be done in a school, and many of our schools, after decades of eschewing “mere information” in the cause of “worthy citizenship,” have turned into lawless encampments of armed barbarians where no one can teach and no one can learn.)

Those who are short on intelligence, diligence, and talent, however, find their luck much improved by the fact that the teachers’ colleges are designed for just such people.

Thus, partly because so many have incompetence thrust upon them, and partly because so many are born to incompetence, in every faculty there will be people who just can’t handle the entry-level position. In industry, or even in a fast-food restaurant, they would be washed out; but we don’t doPETER’S well-known Principle was obviously discovered by a man who knew nothing at all about schools.

In schools it just isn’t true that the people who can actually do their jobs get promoted until they find themselves, at last and forever, in the jobs they can’t do. This is because the most difficult and demanding jobs in education are what industry calls “entry-level positions,” teaching in classrooms. That’s the bottom rung of the school ladder, and there are many people who just can’t do that work.

It isn’t, in itself, very difficult work; all it takes is   intelligence, diligence, talent, and a little bit of luck.

Those who have some of the first three, however, often run clean out of the fourth when they start taking education courses and start worrying more about enhancing their personological variables than about collecting more knowledge.

Those who are short on intelligence, diligence, and talent, however, find their luck much improved by the fact that the teachers’ colleges are designed for just such people.

In those realms where the Peter Principle prevails, it is often true that higher rank and higher pay do go along with harder work. In the schools, where there is no harder work than teaching in a classroom, exactly the opposite is true.

In fact, it is not at all absurd to imagine a perfectly splendid school in which there are only teachers and one clever and industrious handyman who can also type.

On the other hand, think for a moment about the school toward which, as all the statistics suggest, we might be moving, a school made up almost entirely of administrators and their own “support services.” (They usually call them that.) In such a school we would see clearly what we now can see only darkly, through the frosted glass of governmental mandate and educationistic dogma: that almost all of the work done by those above the rank of teacher is contrived so that there may be more workers. Thus it is that so much of the administrative work done in schools is intended not to do work, as a physicist would use the term, but to occupy time and justify the existence of some administrative post.

It turns out, not surprisingly therefore, that the mindless and inflated jargon, superbly suited to the darkening of logic and the interminable belaboring of the obvious, is exactly the language that an educationistic administrator needs in order to conceal the fact that the work he does simply doesn’t need doing. If you want to rise in the school business, you have to master the lingo.

This is another reason why good teachers don’t become principals and superintendents: The very attributes that make them good teachers also make it impossible for them to talk about experiential remediation enhancement strategies with straight faces. And if there is one attribute a principal or superintendent needs, it’s a perfectly straight face. You have to believe. Solemnly.

Thank you - “graves of academe”

Momniponent - I went on a little venture today on the quest to find the meaning of ’ personological variables’. It turned into more than what I was willing to put the time in, and so I leaved the link of the creator of personological theory, Henry Murray. ” Murray developed a theory of personality called Personology, based on “need” and “press””  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Murray

Along the way, I stumbled into Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell. http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/graves-of-academe/06.htm

The website - http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/

And the Wikipedia bio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mitchell

Fascinating reading, that left the personology in the dust. Although I did learn currently personology is still in great use by the educationalists regarding students, but not so much for the teachers, unless the teachers are moving up into administration and other leadership roles.