Yes, but where are your credits in Recess Management 101?

• Author: Ohanian, Susan
• Position: The Culture of Institutions

The Monthly hasn't just dispatched reporter/anthropologists to cover bureaucratic culture-we've asked the natives to tell their stories. This piece ran in 1984.

We've all heard about the sorry state of the teaching profession. No fewer than a half-dozen national commissions have given their assessments of our public schools within the past year, and the poor training and the quality of our teachers have figured prominently in their criticisms.

I do not agree with the emphasis many of my colleagues put on the usual culprits when they try to explain why talented people shun the profession and why the best teachers are usually the first to leave. Low pay, burnout, pushy parents, incompetent administrators, and apathetic kids are certainly problems. But something else has driven me to distraction-more specifically, a group I'll call the High Priests of Certification.

Who are the High Priests? They come in many guises-as school administrators, state government bureaucrats, even union officials. They mouth a common goal: to protect the citizenry from unqualified, incompetent teachers. It's a noble purpose. But having experienced firsthand the High Priests' obsession with enforcing irrelevant regulations and their zeal for bureaucratic pettifoggery, I've reached an opposite conclusion. The High Priests' activities seem to be one of the major reasons such teachers never get near a classroom-or decide to leave the profession altogether.

My acquaintance with them goes back a long way. In the mid-1960s, I answered a newspaper plea for high school English teachers. The ad used the word "crisis," but I soon discovered that New York City's Board of Education was not so desperate as to think that my master's degree in English literature qualified me to teach. The examiner acted annoyed that I was wasting his time; don't come back, he told me, until I had the 13 units in education required to get an emergency teaching certificate.

I began the classes. For one year, four nights a week, I listened to such discussions as an overview of American education up to 1914, taught by a professor who poured his energy into constructing multiple-choice exams. One professor instructed us in the psychology of the adolescent-without once mentioning sex. In another class, we spent the term rewriting Greek myths.

Perhaps my most memorable class taught me how to pass out paper. To my professor, mismanaged paper distribution was apparently the first step toward anarchy, and...