Amazing: Wittgenstein’s brutal, disastrous self-experiment in teaching primary kids http://www.openculture.com/2015/05/ludwig-wittgensteins-short-strange-brutal-stint-as-an-elementary-school-teacher.html

Never mind your fancy ‘get into teaching’ adverts. If you want to attract the galaxy-brain ennui-addled-intellectual demographic into the profession, get Tolstoy to run your campaign

Pretty soon, he runs into a problem faced by many teachers: actual, rather than fictional, children

But was he any good? Hard to tell, given that he and his sister appear to be the primary sources of his performance management data. How great if everyone could write their own reviews. ‘Mr Bennett was inspiring,’ by Mr Bennett

Have you ever enjoyed teaching anyone so much you wanted to adopt them? No, me neither.

If you ever sanction a student so viciously it gets its own Wikipedia page, you should probably walk yourself into the police station.

Even for its time, his behaviour was extraordinarily cruel towards children. Romantic notions of how children should be, combined with an inability to see them as anything more than objects of our own ends, opens the door to this brutality.

It’s a fascinating study in apathy rather than empathy, pedagogical cluelessness, and amateurism over professionalism. And the Curse of Expertise https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_curse_of_expertise