August 23, 2009

The inanity of teacher training

The main positive finding of the comprehensive Coleman Report of 1966 (funded by LBJ's the 1964 Civil Rights Act) was that after all the differences in student backgrounds were accounted for, the one thing that schools could do to help students was give them higher IQ teachers. (Coleman, as he admitted in 1991, downplayed this finding in his report because black teachers averaged lower IQs than white teachers.)

Unfortunately, the teacher training establishment works assiduously to drive intelligent would-be teachers away screaming at the mind-destroying stupidity of Ed School courses. Here's part of a 1998 City Journal article by Heather Mac Donald, "Why Johnny's Teacher Can't Teach:"

Americans’ nearly last place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores—things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. "Let’s be honest," darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. "What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?" It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their Handbooks of Multicultural Education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.

The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over 80 years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)—self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity—but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one’s own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.

...The course in "Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education" that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.

As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson’s course doesn’t give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn’t either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by "building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing." On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be "getting the students to develop the subtext of what they’re doing." I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.

"Developing the subtext" turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. ... Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light "texts," both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions: "What excites me about teaching?" "What concerns me about teaching?" and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: "What was it like to do this writing?"

This last question triggers a quickening volley of self-reflexive turns. After the students read aloud their predictable reflections on teaching, Professor Nelson asks: "What are you hearing?" A young man states the obvious: "Everyone seems to be reflecting on what their anxieties are." This is too straightforward an answer. Professor Nelson translates into ed-speak: "So writing gave you permission to think on paper about what’s there." Ed-speak dresses up the most mundane processes in dramatic terminology—one doesn’t just write, one is "given permission to think on the paper"; one doesn’t converse, one "negotiates meaning." Then, like a champion tennis player finishing off a set, Nelson reaches for the ultimate level of self-reflexivity and drives it home: "What was it like to listen to each other’s responses?"

The self-reflection isn’t over yet, however. The class next moves into small groups—along with in-class writing, the most pervasive gimmick in progressive classrooms today—to discuss a set of student-teaching guidelines. After ten minutes, Nelson interrupts the by-now lively and largely off-topic conversations, and asks: "Let’s talk about how you felt in these small groups." The students are picking up ed-speak. "It shifted the comfort zone," reveals one. "It was just acceptance; I felt the vibe going through the group." Another adds: "I felt really comfortable; I had trust there." Nelson senses a "teachable moment." "Let’s talk about that," she interjects. "We are building trust in this class; we are learning how to work with each other."

Now, let us note what this class was not: it was not about how to keep the attention of eight-year-olds or plan a lesson or make the Pilgrims real to first-graders. It did not, in other words, contain any material (with the exception of the student-teacher guidelines) from the outside world. Instead, it continuously spun its own subject matter out of itself. Like a relationship that consists of obsessively analyzing the relationship, the only content of the course was the course itself.

How did such navel-gazing come to be central to teacher education? It is the almost inevitable consequence of the Anything But Knowledge doctrine, born in a burst of quintessentially American anti-intellectual fervor in the wake of World War I. Educators within the federal government and at Columbia’s Teachers College issued a clarion call to schools: cast off the traditional academic curriculum and start preparing young people for the demands of modern life. America is a forward-looking country, they boasted; what need have we for such impractical disciplines as Greek, Latin, and higher math? Instead, let the students then flooding the schools take such useful courses as family membership, hygiene, and the worthy use of leisure time. "Life adjustment," not wisdom or learning, was to be the goal of education.

The early decades of this century forged the central educational fallacy of our time: that one can think without having anything to think about. Knowledge is changing too fast to be transmitted usefully to students, argued William Heard Kilpatrick of Teachers College, the most influential American educator of the century; instead of teaching children dead facts and figures, schools should teach them "critical thinking," he wrote in 1925. What matters is not what you know, but whether you know how to look it up, so that you can be a "lifelong learner."

Heather's exactly right that progressive education wasn't an invention of the 1960s. This pre-Sputnik style of Life Adjustment education fashionable in fashionable high schools was satirized in a couple of novels published in America in 1958: Nabokov's Lolita and Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader working out which author wrote which of the following excerpts:

I felt shocked. "Why, Dad, Center is a swell school." I remembered things they had told us in P.T.A. Auxiliary. "It's run along the latest, most scientific lines, approved by psychologists and --"

"-- and paying excellent salaries," he interrupted, "for a staff highly trained in modern pedagogy. Study projects emphasize practical human problems to orient the child in democratic social living, to fit him for the vital meaningful tests of adult life in our complex modern culture. Excuse me, son; I've talked with Mr. Hanley. Mr. Hanley is sincere -- and to achieve these noble purposes we are spending more per student than is any other state save California and New Yor."

"Well ... what's wrong with that?"

"What's a dangling participle?"

I didn't answer. He went on, "Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?"

Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. "If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book."

Similarly:

At my first interview with headmistress Pratt, ... she wrinkled her brow in a kind of recuillement and said:

"We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals off Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. That is why we stress the four D's: Dramatics, Dance, Debating, and Dating. ... We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. We think, Dr. Humburg, in organismal and organizational terms. We have done away with the mass of irrelevant topics that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, in former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will need in managing their lives and -- as the cynic might add -- the lives of their husbands."

And here's a recent blog post by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post about how the Stanford Education school relentlessly persecuted one of their few students who really is good at "critical thinking" (especially thinking about test data), Michele Kerr, known around the Internet as "Cal Lanier." (An old boyfriend who was a fan of 1960s utility infielder Hal Lanier gave her that pseudonym.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

49 comments:

Anonymous said...

There should be no Schools of Education, no education degrees. High school teachers should be expected to be degreed in subject or in an allied subject, or have a professional degree relevant to the subject.

Department heads should be expected to have a graduate degree in subject and both teaching and real world experience.

Elementary school teachers did better when they were normal school graduates.

Anonymous said...

Well, can you blame them? American society has a genuine horror of what you term knowledge- that is the understanding of facts and ideas. This is not confined to liberal institutions, by no means, it is prominent in conservative ones such as the Marines. People who know stuff are "nerds", "eggheads", possibly even "geeks", which despite the self-appropriation of compute people is *not* a good thing to be called.

Since American society is so repulsed by knowledge, unless schools can come up with something else to teach, they have no reason to exist.

Anonymous said...

This is stupid stuff for sure.

But, I thought the deal here is that NAM's can't really learn much anyway. In which case, what does it matter what they are taught?

kudzu bob said...

>But, I thought the deal here is that NAM's can't really learn much anyway. In which case, what does it matter what they are taught?<

You really thought that that's "the deal here," did you? Then perhaps your elementary school teacher was in the faculty lounge scarfing down Krispy Kreme doughnuts when she should have been giving you lessons in basic reading comprehension.

agnostic said...

Tutoring centers are a booming business in part due to the ease of being able to teach. If you want to tutor high school math, you take a decently long test, and if you know your stuff, you can teach it. How simple is that?

Still, for most students, it is pointless to try to give them knowledge -- it won't stick. For some, it's incapable of sticking. For others, it's only a brief time before it slips away. Remember: Harvard alumni couldn't even tell you what causes the seasons.

We see this even with non-science/math knowledge. Apropos of Heather MacDonald's article, even recent US history doesn't stick. How much were we taught in high school or college history class about the strikes of the late 1800s, the Progressives, the muckrackers, the Palmer Raids, anarchist bomb-lobbers, John Dewey, etc.?

And yet everyone today thinks that it was The Sixties that started all of that. It doesn't matter what -- hard drug use, radical activists, violent crime, etc. -- compared to the fin-de-siecle and the Roaring Twenties, the 1960s were for pussies.

Robert said...

It is sad that slavery was abolished. The only sensible place to put the faculties of departments and colleges of education is in long lines of peaple chained together and carrying heavy objects up and down steep hills. Since this option is not permitted, I suggest that they be shot.
I have thirty years experience in mandatory education courses and workshops.

jfruser said...

I thought about double-majoring in Physics and Secondary Education. One education course was enough to convince me that my time was too valuable to waste on ed courses.

Instead, I double-majored in physics & history and went into the service.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps what we should do is have every student take an IQ test around the 6th grade. The test would be confidential and only the parents and a small group of school administrators would know the scores. This information could be used as a baseline to judge the effectiveness of the teachers and curriculum. The teachers would not know the scores.

The data could be used to judge each individual performance and also the schools performance. It would become very easy to figure out which schools had the worst material to work with and which schools had the best.

Anonymous said...

Teacher training has got out of hand (as we all know). It has even found its way into community colleges. Some (maybe all) community colleges now give preference to applicants with teaching certificates. There are many ways to test fitness to teach that don't involve teacher's college.

Bret Ludwig said...

The primary problem is that majority students get the shaft royally because education is deoptimized (to put it mildly) for them. Secondarily the problem is that (the majority of) NAMs are not learning what they _can_ learn, because again the education is not geared to them.

Bright students of whatever group need one school, average whites need another (with some NAMs in there OK if they are right of bell curve and well behaved), and the average black, and mestizo/indio/Arab kids in others.

The Wobbly Guy said...

I haven't read the book you mentioned but I am quite sure it's Heinlein who wrote that.

He's one of the few authors who really stress the importance of knowledge, of history, language, and maths. All evidenced in the extract.

It was the 'dangling participle' that clinched it.

Anonymous said...

Check out E.D. Hirsch's The Knowledge Deficit

Thursday said...

I took my education degree at ultra PC York University in Toronto. It was the most mind numbing, idiotic exercise I have ever gone through. Fortunately the program was only 8 months long (and interspersed with practicums), as I don't think I could have taken anything longer.

Interestingly, women seem to have a much higher tolerance for this kind of thing, so it tends to repel men from becoming teachers of any sort. Interestingly, most of the guys in our program ended up seated at one particular table in our university classroom. By the end of the year almost every male in the program was scrunched in around that one table. We had formed a pack and it was us against the (mostly female, ultra PC) instructors. We did the most terribly politically correct things, such as rank every female in the room by attractiveness and then by body part. We got regularly reprimanded by the instructors for bad behaviour. It was nuts.

Anonymous said...

I just saw Tavis Smiley on public television a few minutes back.

I remember Smiley looking for reasons there were "a disparity in these test scores" a couple of years ago, and of course I (a Sailer-reader) knew the answer to that, but Smiley seemingly *would not* see the answer to that.


I know its painful, but just as I admit West African Blacks can (the healthy males) usually outrun me, and that certain Mexican Indian Tribes can out distance run me, and that quite a few North East Asians are better at mathematics than me, I think it would be wise for some minorities (like Smiley) to fess up to what their own lying eyes see.......Asians, Jews, and Europeans are a little bit brighter than Africans and Hispanics on average.

We should concoct an education policy based on these realities. Asking a white kid who isn't athletically gifted or particularily sturdily built not to try and achieve in school so he can pursue an intellectual profession is like asking a squatly-built lad to forgo football and attempt to compete in gymnastics. He needs to play to the strengths he has. I get called cruel for mentioning things like this in certain company.

Anonymous said...

Some places haven't been corrupted.

http://www.cafepress.com/fabercollege

"Knowledge is Good"

Anonymous said...

Everyone knows that inside every shiftless, idiotic student body, there is an inventor of peanut butter or air conditioning waiting to get out. District 9 proves this, haven't you seen it?

C. Van Carter said...

Schools once again stressing the four D's would be an improvement over what is taught now.

eh said...

It's mostly a racket with sinecures run by those lowest on the totem pole of academia. Which is not to say that people who want to be teachers couldn't use help and guidance with that, even some training.

Anonymous said...

I never took any undergrad teaching courses and then got a M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction. 90% of the students were bottom of the barrel. To get into the program, you only had to get a 36 on the Miller Analogies Test, aka, the world's easiest admissions test. My score was more than double that. Since I was young, I wondered if it was just me, or were the classes and texts nonsensical.

The only class that made any real sense was the Educational Measurement class, which was a very watered down statistics class that explained standardized tests and made students calculate reliability and validity of items on a test they created. That's right. Essentially all you had to do was one story problem to get three hours of graduate credit. The classes were painfully easy once you got past the fog of, "am I missing something because I can't figure out the point of any of this." The low calibre of student thinking was stunning. Fortunately I only had to take a few "education" classes. Just as high schools now graciously "allow" students to get high school credit for college classes at local community colleges, the Education College would "allow" students to take content area classes to fulfill some degree requirements. That is they actually "allowed" you to learn something useful in place of the usually required drivel.

RWF said...

These figures are quite interesting:

"In 2001, the National Center for Education Statistics reported the average SAT score for intended education majors to be 481 math and 483 verbal. Only those interested in vocational school, home economics and public affairs scored lower.

......

Examining an SAT-to-IQ conversion chart calculated from Mensa entrance criteria, a combined 854 indicates that the average IQ of those pursuing an education major is 91, nine points lower than the average IQ of 100. In other words, those who can't read teach whole language. "


http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42742

Most countries either have highly paid and intelligent teachers or lowly paid and unintelligent teachers. The American system is unique in that it encourages highly paid dunderheads to teach. Which is why the US is such an outlier when graphs of educational attainment versus teacher training are plotted.

Anonymous said...

The link to the Jay Mathews article on Kerr says she got a GRE of 780 V, 800 Q. As anyone has applied to grad school knows, that is pretty damn good for any field, let alone education.

l said...

In the nineteenth century a person was thought 'educated' if he had a broad fund of knowledge.

In the early to mid 20th century memorizing facts came to be considered less important than inculcating an ability for critically analyzing information.

Now facts and critical thinking skills are felt to be racist, sexist and homophobic. Let us strive for a consensus of proper feeling, in the context of a teachable moment.

sabril said...

In theory, I don't have a problem with teaching stuff like "critical thought."

The trouble is that once you wander away from stuff which can be taught and evaluated objectively, there is a huge opening for SWPLs to inject huge amounts of BS. It also becomes much easier for the stupidity of stupid people to be concealed.

Basically these subjects are a huge magnet for race hustlers and other con-men.

Didn't Constantine Madonna (the noose lady) teach at Columbia teachers' college?

Anonymous said...

Grat post. What is very interesting in the Washinton POst Blog are the reader comments to the story. It seems that in the mind of many of our fellow americans we can discern several marked tendencies.

1.) They view any dissent as a product of unprofessionalism and or mental illness.

2.) To criticize any institution as in this case stanford you have to be perfect. Since Ms. Kerr is human and passionate and dare say has opinions at odds with the mainstream her views do not count and she is probably a racist.

3.) People do not like smart independent people as a rule--only if the smart independent people pander to them or hold up whatever the archetype of the age---I suspect the archetype of the numerical majority is a spaish peaking multiracial lesbian with two boys with a degree in urban planning and is passionate about fighting racism and working toward amnesty of the undocumented--now that is the kind of smarts, independence we want.

3.) If you are in education, government or the arts and do not tow the line and incoprporate party line with current political myths inot yur worka nd converstion you will have a rough time of it.

4.) Aside from Steves Blog most blog commenters are imbeciles.

Anonymous said...

I think McDonald missed the point. See a term coined by Roger Scruton, oikophobia.

RGH said...

From Evelyn Waugh:

[Headmaster:]"Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any more.
They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world.
You can hardly blame them, can you?”
“Oh yes,” said Scott-King. “I can and do....
I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

Melykin said...

"Americans’ nearly last place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation..."

I don't know about America, but in Canada they often have people who don't know a damn thing about math teaching math in high school.

In Canada, to teach high school, you would get a B.A. or B.Sc. degree first, with a major in two "teachable" subjects. Then you spend a year getting an B.Ed. degree after that. I've heard that the courses for a B.Ed. are completely inane and very easy. Some of the people who get a B.Ed. would have majored in math. The trouble is once people start teaching they often get assigned to teach things they know very little about, just because of convenience or whatever. So you end up with a phys ed teacher teaching math, and so on.

Anonymous said...

Leftism appears to be a culturally transmitted mental illness for which there is a congenital pre-disposition. Living in the current Western World is like being the good guy in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's not fun.

Anonymous said...

That should be 'recueillement', n'est pas?

Dutch Boy said...

Nothing new here, folks. Back in the day I regularly corrected my junior high geography/history teacher's bloopers (and earned his hatred for the indiscrete way in which I did it!). There isn't a whole lot of money in teaching so you won't get the brighter bulbs involved, in general. In the olden days before wimmins' lib [sic], intelligent women would seek teaching jobs they would keep until married. Those days are looong gone.

Anonymous said...

Critical thinking means using the facts at hand to synthesize new ideas. At some point we stopped teaching the facts and the critical thinking stopped as well.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The theory behind this knowledge avoidance makes superficial sense until you observe it in action and see it doesn't work. It is more important to learn critical thinking, abstract thinking, so the educators thought it would be best to get on that as early as possible. But it turns out that you have to have some considerable store of knowledge - boring old facts and processes - to work from to develop the higher skills. That part can't be skipped.

Interestingly, those individual bits of knowledge become less important once the higher processes are developed. The templates of thought can then be applied to any number of data sets. You might forget most of the periodic table, but you can get it back quickly once you've learned it once, and once you have grasped the principles behind it, can use that in discerning patterns elsewhere.

But you have to start with little lumps of knowledge, aggregated over time. It doesn't have to be state capitals and dates of battles - but it has to be something real.

Anonymous said...

Doesn't anyone think of schools as semi-jails for kids for under-supervised youth?

I do.

The real problem is that they can't get meaningful jobs that will keep them occupied and productive.

A young kid who manages to finagle a productive apprenticeship as an electrician, plumber, etc, that kid has got his ducks in a row. Doesn't matter if he reads Shakespeare or not. Actually, probably better he not. Like we need anymore hyper-literate bums.

PhysicistDave said...

Steve,

I’ve just opened a blog, ”The Homeschooling Physicist” on the experience of being a physicist who is also a stay-at-home homeschooling dad, and have linked to your post in my second posting.

Anyone who wishes to pursue all this in greater historical detail, shoould get hold of Kliebard's classic The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, which manages to be both scholarly and surprisingly readable.

I think the rot today goes deeper than just the inane teacher training. A century ago parents in general rejected the “content-free” approach to education, but, in my experience, this is actually what many American parents today really want.

If the choice is between a kid who is a “nerd” or an ignoramus, many parents will settle for an ignoramus.

I look forward to linking to many future posts by you on education.

Dave Miller in Sacramento

Evil Sandmich said...

Reminds me of when my mom got her Masters in Education. She said the course content was 100% bull that had no home in any world in this universe.

Doesn't anyone think of schools as semi-jails for kids for under-supervised youth?

I completely agree. Various students in our area get out of high school completely and attend the local community college instead. Mores the pity for the poor souls still trapped in the ageing high schools.

Anonymous said...

Teaching is a collective. You cannot be fired but you cannot earn a lot more than your peers. The position has relativly low pay but good benefits such as retirement and health insurance. In one sense it is also like a guild. You have to have your teaching credentials which are a barrier to allow more intelligent people in from other professions.

albertosaurus said...

When I was a TA in graduate school I taught calculus, statistics, and quantitative methods. But then one day one of the regular faculty got drunk (again) and they asked me to teach his class - "Bureaucracy in the Federal Government". Starting right now.

I objected that I had never taken that course or indeed ever worked for the federal government.

I was assured that none of that mattered. I was told to just break the class into groups and have them discuss something.

Yes, one student did walk out in disgust at a substitute teacher who obviously knew nothing about the nominal class subject. But most of the students accepted me and my lesson plan.

That was my first exposure to educational theory. Some years later I was in a class of managers who were being "trained" how to do training. We were taught that you didn't need to know anything about the subject matter. This theory said that the class always knew everything already. All the instructor had to do was ask the class some questions and the answers would be revealed.

By this time I had taught part time for at least ten years (computers, math, and management subjects). I could lecture without notes for hours - but I couldn't do that sort of teaching. I froze up, totally befuddled.

Anonymous said...

Many of the problem have to do with the duel role of schools.

1. education
2. testing/grading

A separation of education and testing might help.

Anonymous said...

"You really thought that that's "the deal here," did you? Then perhaps your elementary school teacher was in the faculty lounge scarfing down Krispy Kreme doughnuts when she should have been giving you lessons in basic reading comprehension."

I find the smugness here unwarrented. (And lame.)

As Steve pointed out previously - http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/10/are-they-nuts-state-of-californias.html

"In the Los Angeles Unified School District, less than one out of ten students will score 500 or higher on the SAT math test. What about the other 90+%? "

What indeed? Do you think that if the best math teachers teach these guys it will make much difference? If not, then why complain about the lack of proficiency in those that do?

What is the proposition -
Great teachers can get everyone working at AP Calculus level?

If yes, then there is a reason to complain about bad teaching methodology. If not, why does it matter?

Extra credit to those who answer without ad-homninem! (Please see your own teachers to understand why if you don't already!)

SF said...

My daughter's program at San Jose State was an internship program in which you teach during the day and go to night school to advance from long-term sub to fully credentialled. You would think that this would be more practical, with emphasis on how to solve the problems they faced that week. Unfortunately, she reports that most of it was the same BS.

kudzu bob said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
kudzu bob said...

>I find the smugness here unwarrented. (And lame.)<

Not smugness, but rather impatience at an obvious misreading of Sailer's position. Pay better attention.

A good place for you to start is by figuring out for yourself what it is that you have so needlessly misunderstood about Sailer's writings. No way am I going to take half an hour to explain your mistake to you, any more than I am going to secure a plastic bib under your chin and then cut your food up into tiny, bite-sized pieces for you.

read it said...

What indeed? Do you think that if the best math teachers teach these guys it will make much difference? If not, then why complain about the lack of proficiency in those that do?

What is the proposition -
Great teachers can get everyone working at AP Calculus level?

If yes, then there is a reason to complain about bad teaching methodology. If not, why does it matter?

Extra credit to those who answer without ad-homninem! (Please see your own teachers to understand why if you don't already!)

__________________


It is not just the inanity of thinking that teaching methods can overcome the inappropriateness of the curriculum, there is also the overwhelming and unnatural proportion of women in the teaching profession. Most students, especially boys, respond better to men. Boys have always been lead by and trained by men. Women are better with babies, little kids and girls. However, not even 100% men teaching with 100% ideal teaching methods can overcome the absurdly inappropriate curriculum that does not prepare students for any real job. Even a valedictorian is not qualified to be much more than a bank teller or secretary. Public education prepares kids for more education not for jobs.

James Kabala said...

Albertosaurus, your experience is quite unusual. In most graduate schools different departments might as well be on different planets, even in closely allied subjects, let alone ones as different as calculus and political science.

Anonymous said...

Thrasymachus said

>Since American society is so repulsed by knowledge, unless schools can come up with something else to teach, they have no reason to exist.<

True and well-stated.

The trouble is the very idea of universal education. The project of teaching all the plain people, a moony scheme dating at least from Rosseau, was adopted, adapted, and corrupted by America's Robber Barons of the late 19th Century, who turned it into a cynical machine to produce "GOOD WORKERS" - reliable, ruly slaves for the factory and the farm. Every head would be processed, for efficiency's sake.

But if this blog or HBD teaches anything, it's that people are not equally educable. Life experience of even the most rudimentary sort tells us that not every individual is cut out for "education" by prides of professional pedagogues. Beethoven, the musical genius, couldn't add up a short column of simple figures, and multiplication was a mystery to him. He presumably had many opportunities and the incentive to learn it, early in life and later. He didn't. He had other interests. Steamrollering him for 12 years in public jail/school would probably have meant no Fifth Symphony.

If imparting useful, interesting knowledge to eager, intelligent children is the goal, then homeschooling is the only viable "system."

The truth is that universal public education is not more than a program for occupying and pacifying the lower orders, and keeping down any nascent upper orders. The elite doesn't want Fifth Symphonies: it only wants to make sure the unwashed are not rebellious and can turn the cranks. Even turning the cranks has been dropped as a goal.

Smart people don't let their kids get caught in the teeth of universal public education - if they are financially fortunate enough to avoid doing so.

The solution to all the problems of public education is to abolish public education forthwith.

Lots more along these lines, if you haven't already read it: Here.

Anonymous said...

Kudzu Bob - you don't address the points but you are pretty good with the zingers. I'm sure your teachers would be very proud. Assuming you went to a clown college.

kudzu bob said...

>What indeed? Do you think that if the best math teachers teach these guys it will make much difference?<

The question at hand is what Sailer thinks, not what my opinions on the matter might be.

Even in clown college they teach us to pay at least some semblance of attention. Honk! Honk!

Truth said...

" I'm sure your teachers would be very proud. Assuming you went to a clown college."

POW! Right in the kisser!

You're not so bad with the zingers yourself, Sport.

Anonymous said...

Four informative and entertaining books, which are also free online at SourceText.com, are Richard Mitchell's Less Than
Words Can Say
, The Leaning Tower of Babel, Gift of Fire and Graves of Academe. Mitchell (who recently passed on) was an English professor at Glassboro State College and records for us his ground-level observations of the unbridled goofiness of the teachers college there and its effects on the teachers, adminstrators, and students, along with some insightful comments on the history of American education. On the same site are his newsletters with additional wit. If you love thinking about thinking and reading about American government schooling, you'll love Mitchell.