> Of all the debates we could possibly be having, playing the "We're professionals" card is least suitable here. We've all been school professionals.
No, we haven't. Having gone to school does not make you a professional. That would be like saying anyone who has used a computer is a computer professional.
Honestly, think about what you're arguing there; 12 years or more in an environment, one ostensibly teaching critical thinking, but you still don't have enough experience to apply critical thinking to that process itself? If that's the case, why did we bother with the schooling process in the first place if it's so incapable of being applied to the thing you've spent the largest part of your life doing up to that point? That's ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure one of the major points of successfully building software is "Talk to the customer/user".
On another place on the Internet, I participate in discussions about military budgets, and there are a certain group of people who insist that since they are soldiers they have the ultimate call on how much funding it should receive. (Spoiler: the answer is "more.")
I agree with the article that we should value the teacher’s input to the debate and that it’s way easier to tell teachers they are doing their job wrong than to do it better yourself, but that doesn’t mean other people cannot have a valid, meaningful opinion on schooling.
Whether or not the "we're professionals" card is valid, I think it should be pretty damned obvious that eating paste in kindergarten does not give you equivalent experience to teaching kindergarten.
It's entirely different on the other side of the podium. Shockingly different, actually. Horrifically, shockingly, terrifying different.
/former freshman-level TA
Gad, the essay rambled quite a bit and confused its own argument. I can understand your concern. These two ideas are conflated. I have no clue as to whether this was deliberate or not. But to me at least the gist was clear: if you're not doing my job, stay out of the business of judging me.
[Insert long discussion about whether the community as a whole has a right to delegate people to tell teachers how to do their jobs. I think this is a no-brainer, "yes", but there are a lot of side issues, most of which boil down to what my initial comment was: we've created educational systems of people which are monstrosities to understand, manage, and make work.]
Then again, maybe that's close-minded of me. For all I know, the next billion dollar software company might have all of its technical decisions vetted by a panel of soccer moms.
There's a big difference between judging others based on the objectively observable results of their actions and ordering others to do things a certain way. If a non-programmer complains about slow or buggy software from a vendor, that's fair, but if he tries to tell the vendor how to write it, it's a completely different matter.