All problems of the locally
centralized school district in the United States are traceable to wretched
teacher and administrator training programs.
We have known for at least 35 years that we
must transform our systems of K-12 educational delivery in order to give
citizens of all demographic descriptors an excellent education. In 1983 a federally commissioned study, A Nation at Risk, signaled the crisis in
schools of the United States, with implications for many facets of life in the
polity, given the critical importance of education to the quality of life in a
nation of advanced economic status and world leadership.
By definition, we have not cared enough to
make the needed changes. People do those
things about which they care deeply or to which they are addicted. In the United States, people get married, and
secure the most remunerative employment possible. They have children and angle for the best
possible lives for their own particular progeny. People buy houses, automobiles, electronic
goods, and consumer items of many sorts at the upper ranges of what they can
afford. They tweet and text and stare at
computer screens. They ensconce
themselves in front of television sets to dance with the stars, identify their
favorite new singing voice, and immerse themselves in the reality of other
people’s vapid lives.
All of this is more important to people as of
the year 2020 than the education of our precious children.
Rarely does any child in the United States get
an excellent education. As a nation we
do not believe enough in the importance of knowledge-based lives to even
imagine an excellent education for our children. We go to war because in our episodic
propensities going to war at the time seems the right thing to do, or we are
told by people of our political affinity that it is the right thing to do, not
because citizens as a whole have the knowledge base in history and
international relations to make considered judgments of their own. Whether or not, and for how long, the Federal
Reserve should pour money into the economy is a policy decision evaluated by
people on the same episodic and self-focused basis, not because the typical
citizen has a whit of knowledge concerning macroeconomics. The reality of climate change is evaluated by
the typical person not on the basis of any depth of scientific knowledge but on
what scientists themselves say, at best, and in view of religious and personal
biases, at worst.
The unit of delivery of excellent K-12
education in the United States must be our locally centralized school
districts. In public education systems
of East Asia and the European social democracies, curriculum and policies are
centralized at the national level, but in the United States
people claim an attachment to local
control. So in this nation, any progress
that will be made in
transforming K-12 education must be made at
the level of the locally centralized school district. We cannot and should not pin our hopes on
charter schools or vouchers. Most
charter schools are worse than conventional public schools. There are not enough excellent private
schools to accommodate the masses of K-12 students, even if a thoroughgoing
voucher system could be instituted. And
in any case, should we ever aspire to the quality of education found in East
Asia and the European social democracies, we need to find a way to approximate
the coherence of curriculum found in those educational systems.
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Mediocrity
of K-12 education in the United States originates in departments, colleges, and
schools of education wherein professors do not believe that systematically
acquired and mentally stored knowledge of the liberal arts is important. They believe, instead, in so-called
“constructivist” approaches that begin with the knowledge base and life
experiences of the student as a foundation for seeking information that is
relevant to the particular young person.
This so-called “progressive” approach to
education is implemented upon the assumption that the systematic, sequential
accumulation of knowledge in math, natural science, social science, history,
literature, and the fine arts is not important.
Only those topics that passionately drive a given student, for which a
teacher serves as “facilitator” in accumulating this particularistic
information, are important. As to
accumulated knowledge from the human inheritance, one can always “look it up.”
But this view of education and the teacher is
deeply flawed. Imagine going to a
cardiologist with complaints about chest pains and being told that the doctor
would have to take a moment to look up what is known about arterial blockage,
because this was not covered in medical school.
Consider describing to an attorney an experience whereby police officers
broke into one’s home without a search warrant and being told by this lawyer
that this sounds like an interesting predicament that would have to be
researched, because such instances were not part of the law school curriculum.
Taught by such professors promulgating the
“constructivist,“ “progressive” approach to knowledge and pedagogy, our K-5
teachers, especially, enter our classrooms woefully underprepared. Those who teach at the grades 6-12 level are
a bit better trained, because most get bachelor’s degrees in legitimate
disciplines (e. g., physics, math, history, economics, English literature, fine
arts). But low licensure requirements
mean that those who enter our middle schools and high schools are not always
truly masters of their fields. Graduate
programs for teachers, in the meantime, provide programs for easily attained
master’s degrees that are financial spigots for universities.
Teachers unions act in ways to protect such
unprepared teachers. Most central school
district and school building administrators are too busy protecting their
sinecures of substantial remuneration to contest teacher union power, and thus
the status quo prevails. Our children
walk across stages to receive diplomas in name only. Most could not tell you the difference
between debt and deficit; the Roman and
Byzantine Empires; Newtonian and Einstein’s
physics; Ego and Superego; or the literary styles of Fitzgerald and
Hemingway. And they could not tell you
the essential differences, as we recall our nominal focus on Black History in
February, in the approaches to the African American dilemma in the early 20th
century as espoused by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Dubois, and Marcus
Garvey.
Constructivist
ideology and systemic flaws operate in highly similar ways from state to state,
so that teacher preparation programs and institutions of K-12 education
maintain the status quo of mediocrity in Minnesota and throughout the nation. But we cannot afford to wait for the needed
overhaul of teacher preparation programs on college campuses, nor can we depend
on action taken mainly at the state level to produce the needed institutional
change.
The needed
overhaul of K-12 education will ride the waves of energy emitted by local
school district activists who take seriously the great accumulated wealth of
knowledge that defines the human experience, working to retrain teachers and
revamp curriculum to ensure that children of all ethnic and economic
descriptors receive this knowledge as their rightful inheritance.
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.
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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 2019, 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) 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.
Although this key anti-knowledge
message took different forms as pedagogical fads came and went, the essential
core of the message has 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); and
by students in Minnesota on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments.
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Education professors are
objectionable generally. Mathematics
education professors are objectionable particularly. A mathematics education professor is someone
without the intellectual mettle to pursue a degree in mathematics, thus
retreating to a similar-sounding credential.
Many mathematics education professors lack the intellectual discipline
to master the intricacies even of algebra and geometry, much less calculus,
differential equations, linear and advanced algebra, topography, and the
ever-ascending challenges in a legitimate mathematics masters or doctoral
program.
So mathematics education
professors conger up various iterations of the purportedly deep-think, multiple
answer, learn via manipulative approach as reported by Faiza Muhammad in
“Several Districts Are in the Midst of Overhauling Their Curriculum” (Star Tribune, Section B, Page 1,
February 8, 2018). This approach is akin
to the “New Math” that produced such deleterious results in the 1960s
and early 1970s and has made
unfortunate comebacks at various intervals ever since. As with previous students upon whom such an
approach was inflicted, the students of the Brooklyn Park, Anoka-Hennepin,
Osseo, and Columbia Heights school districts will be academically poorer for
the infliction.
Because mathematics professors
are themselves mathematically challenged, they are forever contriving ways to
make what is simple seem difficult, so as to avoid what is truly
difficult. Notice that their gimmicks
are never applied to mathematics at the higher levels; their ruses would never be applicable to
Advanced Placement courses at the high school level. The schemes of mathematics professors always
come with a pretension of philosophical depth, always focused on relatively
simple mathematics at the K-5 level.
But simple does not mean
trivial. The operations and concepts
pertinent to addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions,
decimals, percentages, fundamental probability, ratios, proportions, graphs and
tables are vitally important
Students in the New Salem
Educational Initiative inevitably come to me for academic assistance because
they have not been taught these skills in their classroom. This is especially true for K-5 students, but
the point is also that until I teach them these skills most high school
students have never acquired the requisite ability in the fundamental
operations and basic skills to succeed at higher mathematics. I
teach them skills, then we ascend to college preparatory mathematics.
Students of the Minneapolis
Public Schools and other school districts perform so wretchedly in mathematics
because mathematics education professors have been playing with their lives, in
order to survive pseudo-professionally.
They must stop.
Teacher training programs as
currently inflicted on our prospective teachers and administrators should be
terminated.
The pseudo–profession of
education professor should be no more.
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