Teachers, in my opinion, are born, not made. The good ones have a servant’s heart. But how they hone the skills of becoming effective is a valid point to discuss. Rick Hess used to write about the added cost of a college experience that the extra year getting a credential meant. It raises the college cost to 125% more than necessary.

I witnessed firsthand the quality of the to-be-teachers when I was in college. As an English major, I was scrambling around for classes after completing all the core requirements and enrolled in “Kiddie” lit. The education majors couldn’t write papers. It was astounding. (I loved that course and its illumination of the major themes in children’s stories.)

This advanced degree stuff all started in the late 1950s with California’s Fisher bill. The idea that a master’s degree gets you more money is ludicrous. Learning should be for learning’s sake. That’s what we want the kids to believe, isn’t it?

During my experience with Catholic school education, one of the saddest occurrences was when a valued, effective teacher was let go because he or she hadn’t a credential and lacked the energy to go back to school. Such an incredible waste of a person’s talent.

The same errors of judgment occurred when parents of Catholic schools demanded that class size be reduced because the public schools were doing it. This in a parochial system that had based its model on 30-35 per class, and had seen that regimen graduate the most prepared and headed-to-success students in our country.