The teacher is the focus of the Axe Handle
Academy
Theodore Roethke, the poet, once said, 'A teacher is
one who carries on his education in public.' The curriculum of
the Axe Handle Academy is a curriculum for both students and
teachers. Our teachers are expected to exercise their
professional abilities as learners of new and complex materials as
they work together with students in developing their understanding and
knowledge.
But this is more than just an attempt to raise
teachers to their truly professional status. Our history tells
us that the best teachers have always carried on their learning in the
company and in dialogue with their students. This was the
practice of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Confucius.
Confucius used the poem above which was already old
in his time to teach his students how to teach. When you make an
axe handle you use the axe in your hand as a pattern. It is the
model. When you teach a student, you yourself are the model of
teaching and learning that the student studies.
And when you come down to it, this is really the
only way to teach someone how to learn. You have to show them by
your own action.
Teachers in American education are normally called
professionals but are rarely treated as if they were
professionals. One of the most important qualities of a true
professional education is not an accumulation of knowledge, it is an
education inlearning to learn. Doctors, lawyers, and other
professionals are expected to deal with extremely diverse kinds of
problems covering many fields of knowledge and life. They are
expected to work through the complexity, learn whatever needs to be
learned, and then to exercise their judgment in arriving at a decision
which can be the basis for action. A person who does not deal
constantly with new learning is a technician, not a professional.
Yet many people expect teachers to be more like
technicians. They are expected to know everything required of
them when they graduate as certified teachers. They are expected
to remain within their certified body of knowledge throughout their
careers. In our current system teachers are expected to take
further course work to 'upgrade' their education, as technicians would
be expected to return to school before being allowed to work in a new
area.
The curriculum of the Axe Handle Academy is as
varied, complex, and problematic as anything to be found by any
professiona. There are no courses at present that a teacher
could take in a bioregional perspective. There is no course or
even degree program that would prepare a teacher to teach in our
cultural studies program. Our communication studies component
would try the intelligence, knowledge, and learning ability of many
communications specialists.
If a student sees a teacher who is absorbed in the
problems and questions of our curriculum and actively learning, the
student comes to be absorbed in that curriculum as well. On the
other hand, if the student sees a teacher who is concerned primarily
with classroom management and the transmission of a static body of
knowledge, the student becomes manipulative on the model of the
teacher and considers learning as something that is static, rigid, and
of little relevance to his or her life.
By placing the focus of the Axe Handle Academy on
the learning of the teacher we want to provide a model of skills in
inquiry, discovery, and synthesis. We believe that the
professional teacher who is actually learning together with his or her
students is the only means of teaching this attitude toward life-long
learning. This is why we have called our model for education the
Axe Handle Academy.
