All Academic Decision-Makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools Have Been Ruined by Education Professors

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.

 

During the first two decades of the 20^th century, the normal schools that had been established in the latter part of the previous century metamorphosed into teachers colleges that soon became attached to universities.  Education professors were then faced with the need to justify themselves amidst true academicians whose specialties in psychology, philosophy, and the key subject areas of mathematics, natural science, history, political science, economics, literature, and the fine arts made them better purveyors of knowledge for academic training of teachers.  Thus did education professors become advocates of process over content, pedagogy over subject matter;  more insidiously, they became opponents of the systematic impartation of specified knowledge and skill sets.

 

Although this key anti-knowledge message took different forms as pedagogical fads came and went, the essential core of the message never changed.  That message is entirely consistent with the contemporary education professor’s insistence on the ability to think critically and to become an enthusiast of lifelong learning as the key components for students in K-12 schools.  The education professor maintains that the acquisition of specific knowledge and skill sets is not important, for those can always be looked up or learned as necessary.

 

So never think that such pap is new or “progressive,” although education professors appropriate the latter appellation.  Such harmful jargon has been the consistent usage of education professors for a century.

 

Professors of cognitive psychology demonstrate through research published in professionally refereed journals that knowledge builds on knowledge, freeing up limited short-term memory for quick retrieval in the pursuit of knowledge sought in the moment.  Adept and informed critical thinking depends on knowledge.  Love of learning most often happens when students pursue knowledge systematically as a matter of acquired habit, a labor of love.  Critical thinking and lifelong learning are functions of knowledge purposely pursued;  they are not efficiently or effectively demonstrated in the absence of systematically acquired knowledge.

 

Education professors have done much harm in seeking to make a place for themselves at colleges and universities, where they occupy the lowest rung with regard to professorial status.  They send forth ill-trained teachers, particularly at the K-5 level, who know very little about mathematics, natural science, history, economics, psychology, literature, English usage, or the fine arts.  Middle school teachers are little better, and most high school teachers are not capable of serving as instructors in advanced courses such as those for Advanced Placement.

 

Thus do we get abominable performance by students in the United States on the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment).  At the Minneapolis Public Schools, we get extraordinarily poor performance on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments, and on the ACT and SAT college readiness exams.