A Teacher's Life Course and their Core Competency & Peripheral Literacy

School laborers are to perform various types of educational tasks. The tasks are carried out with appropriate techniques. Some techniques can be derived from the competency the laborers have; while other techniques can be copied from those of other laborers as literacies.

1 Demanding Students
This quarter a century has witnessed the progress of the commodification of education, and the desires and requires by students and their parents have toned up. Today's school systems including high schools are not meeting their individualized and toned up desires and requires. The frustration from the unmet desires and requires makes some parents even so called “monster parents.”
Even in the field of English education, needs to the practical English language usage have witnessed significant rise even among high school students and their parents in this quarter a century. Their needs to the English ability for college entrance examinations have been deep-rooted and still are making its major comeback.
School systems are supposed to provide diversified and sophisticated educational services to meet the desires and requires. Meanwhile, the market principle has been introduced into school systems. Because of the educational reform in recent years, the education has come to be regarded as a service. An inter-school competition has been promoted. The influence of the individualization has overwhelmed school cultures. That, as a result, has effected the way of the labor process and the development process of an individual school laborer as well as the way of cooperation and the division of labor in school systems.
The sophistication and diversification of educational services needs the development of teaching techniques. “The reform” has externalized the cost of their development significantly, and so, under the market principle, teachers are supposed to develop their teaching techniques on their own.

2 The Influence on the Life Course of School Laborers
The desires and requires of students and their parents have been individualized and leveled up, and that has caused the educational services provided at school to come to be diversified and sophisticated. That, of course, has forced an individual school laborer to develop her/his own workforce to meet the diversification and sophistication. On the other hand, the suppliance of such diversified and sophisticated educational services needs systematic organization of educational labor process. Either the development of individual school laborer or the diversification and sophistication of the suppliance of educational services at school are not automatically achieved by thoroughly pursuing one of the two. A solution to one problem would not automatically lead to a solution to the other. An school laborer must meet both kinds of the needs at the same time. It is not easy to achieve these two goals at the same time.
The current educational reform seems to have an idea that if teachers are given a proper motivation they will try to improve their teaching techniques in competition with others. The idea surely belongs to the main stream of the society. Isn't it, however, too naive to believe that the diversification and sophistication of teaching techniques can be accomplished only by the competition?
If the considerable amount of working hour were invested, it might be possible for each school laborer to voluntarily develop their teaching competencies, from which new teaching techniques might be derived. Any school laborer have received the higher education, and, in that sense, they developed certain research ability in a certain academic area. They might be able to do some research on educational problems and develop some teaching techniques. In other words, they might do some education-related research and development on their own. However, the individualization and level-up of the desires and requires of students and their parents has made school laborers ever busier. In addition, the students and their parents monitor more severely and intensely how school laborers carry out their jobs and how their working hour is spent. That makes the workers hard to allocate their working hour to the development of their teaching competency. Their working hour is thought to be spent directly to supply educational services. The tendency, along with the longer working hour caused by the individualized and leveled up desires and requires, makes it almost impossible for school laborers to develop their educational competency during their work day fully enough to meet the desires and requires themselves. How can we solve the contradiction? Can we solve it with competitive measure only?

3 The Resolution of the Contradiction and the School Laborers' Life Courses
An individual school laborer should overcome this contradiction to meet the desires and requires which students and their parents have by promoting the diversification and sophistication of their teaching techniques. It seems that it is necessary to break down their teaching techniques into core ones and other peripheral ones. The former should and can be upgraded independently from their research and development competencies, and the latter should be upgraded passively, acquired as teaching literacies. The former can be called the core educational competencies, and the latter can be called the peripheral educational literacies. An school laborer in the future should develop their core educational competencies as a brand labor commodity in an educational labor market, while they need their peripheral literacies to carry out their everyday routine effectively in an educational school system, as a member of the organization. In other words, they need a strategy to walk on their life course along school education.
The strategy includes how to develop and maintain the core educational competencies in the longer term and how to pick up (and abandon) the peripheral literacies.
An school laborer, having studied in a higher education system, can develop their core educational competencies independently only by productively consuming spin-offs from universities and research laboratories. Consuming the spin-offs can reduce the cost of their OJT radically. If they were to consume training services which are end products, the cost could be sky high or sky rocketing. Their ability to conduct basic research and development enables them to absorb the spin-offs in the form of a semi-finished product. Such production-consumption relation in educational OJT can decrease the relating expenditure, no matter it is provided either publicly or privately.
Can school laborers upgrade all the teaching competencies by productively consuming the spin-offs in a form of raw study results? It is difficult to acquire and maintain the research and development abilities in so many fields as to meet all the desires and requires. Provided the restriction and limit of the work day which can be allocated to OJT, the school laborers could develop only a handful of competencies in the manner. The number of teaching techniques the competencies can turn out is, therefore, limited. The techniques which can not derived independently from the teachers' research and development ability should be learned from others as literacies.
Then, what method could be employed to enhance the development of the peripheral literacies? Of course, we can obtain the literacies by purchasing services which will be provided by the concerned universities and organizations for certain amount of fees, but that causes a great rise of the cost; no matter the cost is met either personally or socially.
Forming OJT networks of school laborers in schools might reduce the costs. The OJT network in one field will have an school laborer with related core competency at the nod of it and school laborers who need the concerned peripheral literacy around the nod. In other words, the “core” laborer and “peripheral” ones form a network. The school laborer with the concerned core competency productively consumes the concerned spin-offs from the universities and research laboratories, so that they can maintain and develop their own core competency. They, in turn, trickle-down what they have developed through their productive consumption of spin-offs to wider school laborers in the network.
A network with a “core” laborer and “peripheral” ones could meet only a certain require and desire of students and their parents. Another network, then, should be formed to meet another require and desire. We need numbers of such networks to meet the individualized and toned up desires and requires. Such networks, in a kind of a form of a hyper network, would be able to provide diversified and sophisticated educational services.

4 Effective Management
Obviously, one school needs certain numbers of networks to meet the desires and requires of the students and their parents of the school. To form a certain number of networks, the school needs exactly the number of school laborers with corresponding core competencies. A school might happen to have several school laborers who could make a nod with their competency, but that is a fluke, which the management should not depend on.
Some incentives are necessary to realize the best allocation of school laborers with the corresponding core competency.
A market principle incentive looks a trendy incentive at the time. However, an excessive competition over acquisition and exposition of the core competencies could make the networks unstable. An economy for one may lead to external diseconomy on the other hand. The balance between competing incentive and non-competing ones, market oriented measure and network friendly one, is what is requested now.