Introduction to a Multi-Article Series >>>>> How to Avoid Speaking Like an Education Professor

All problems of the locally centralized school district in the United States are traceable to wretched teacher and administrator training programs. 

 

Although central office administrators, building principals, and teachers within the locally centralized school district have their particularistic differences connected to roles occupied within the education establishment, their fundamental views on curriculum and pedagogy are essentially the same.  Teachers unions and administrators with their own group affiliations may struggle together over contracts, evaluations, and job assignments, but teachers and administrators at all levels espouse the views that they imbibed from those campus low-lifers known as education professors. 

 

Ever since the transformation of the normal school into teacher’s colleges created within universities during the 1920s, education professors have sought to make a place for themselves in their new institutional setting.  Lacking the knowledge base of field specialists such as psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, chemists, literary scholars, historians, and economists who were best positioned to provide prospective teachers with a strong knowledge base, education professors began to emphasize pedagogy over subject area training for teachers.  They came to view schools as dispensers of many attitudes and vocational tools purportedly for the good of students:  training for a life of work integrally connected to the employment and social position of parents, socialization for citizenship, and for a period of the early 1930s the internalization of a collectivist outlook for constructing a socialist society at a time when the Great Depression had undermined faith in liberal democracy.

 

Education professors came to profess a belief in a “constructivist," "child-centered” approach to education that minimized the value of imparting logically sequenced, commonly shared knowledge sets, in favor of giving great scope to the child’s own life experiences and interests, with the presiding classroom presence transformed from teacher into “guide” or “facilitator.”  Student mastery of well-defined knowledge sets, education professors maintained, was not important.  In addition to preparing for one’s vocational and civic responsibilities, the student should learn to think critically about topics of immediate personal and societal importance and to access information as a lifelong learner.

 

Emphasis on the individual interest of the student as the driver of what was to be learned fit well with the zeitgeist of the 1960s.  Over the decades since the 1920s, parents, teachers, and local communities had often objected to the views of education professors, but during the years from the 1960s to the present year of 2018, the ideology of the education professor has been dominant in our schools.  When a student gets to high school, she or he may scramble quickly to make-up for lack of knowledge by taking substantive Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses; but even the most ambitious college-bound student graduates with large gaps in the knowledge and skills necessary to make the most of the college or university experience.

 

The multi-article series of articles that will appear on this blog over the course of the next few days focuses on the mercurial lexicon of the education professor.  The list given below will be taken ten items or so at a time;  I will convey the meaning of each of the terms from the perspective of the education professor, then I will explain the harmful impact that education-professor-speak has had on administrators, teachers, students, and society.

 

For now, please examine the following list.  Think about what you have read and heard of these terms.  Form your own initial view of these terms.  Then ready yourself to consider what I have to convey about these items of the education professor’s terminological expostulations as to their impact on the quality of K-12 education.

 

Please now review and ponder these terms:         

 

Accessing Skills

At Their Own Pace

Authentic Assessment

Break the Mold Schools

Child-Centered Schooling

Competition

Constructivism

Cooperative Learning

Critical Thinking Skills

Culturally Biased Curriculum

Culturally Biased Tests

Developmentally Appropriate

Drill and Kill

Exhibitions

Factory-Model Schools

Facts are inferior to understanding

Facts are soon outdated.

Hands-On Learning

Holistic Learning

Individual Differences

Individual Learning Styles

Learning at their own pace

Learning by Doing

Learn to Learn

Metacognitive Skills

Multi-Aged Classrooms

Open Classrooms

Passive Listening

Performance-Based Assessment

Portfolio Assessment

Problem-Solving Skills

Project Method

Promise of Technology

Research has shown

Rote Learning

Self-Esteem

Student-Centered Education

Teach the child, not the subject

Teach the whole child

Textbook Learning

Thematic Learning

Transmission Theory of Schooling

Whole-Class Instruction

Whole-Language Instruction