It's even worse. The teachers many of us had in the 50's and 60's were mostly very smart women with fewer options than today. So, we had the best and brightest teaching us from Kindergarten on up. These women are now out of the teaching corps.

I am involved with Teacher preparation now (undergrad and grad) and the students entering the teaching field, while still mostly women, are no longer as smart and curious as in the old days. In addition, with the de-professionalization of teaching (here's the curriculum, don't deviate) and the requirements of No Child Left Behind (endless testing of often meaningless trivia), many of the remaining inspired teachers are simply getting out of the field. Helicopter parents, incompetent administrators, and parents with lawyers second-guessing everything that happens in the classroom finishes off the rest of the good teachers.

What this really means is that the "generalists" in the gradeschool classrooms who need to know a little about a LOT of things, or at least how to show students HOW to learn, or simply model curiosity, - are simply not there. The students I run into in teacher prep are rarely curious about anything more than might be on the next exam. I don't think this is unique to teacher prep but since these students have potentially 30-40 years in front of THEIR students, this incurious installed learning infrastructure will potentially be with us for a very, very long time. Of course we know that half of all new teachers leave the field within 5 years. Guess which teachers stay, and which ones leave.

As the great Mogambo says, "We are all freakin' doomed!"

Rev Karl