Awhile back a former Minneapolis Public Schools principal found her way to my landline and initiated a conversation that led to her interviewing me for a project that she is working on for her dissertation, ironically, in education policy out of the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota.
We were not long into that initial conversation when I told her,
“You do realize that the College of Education and Human Development is of the type that is the chief culprit in creating the debased system of public education in Minnesota and throughout the United States, do you not?”
The former principal, now seeking an insubstantial education doctorate, laughed. She had read enough of my blog articles to know that I view the anti-knowledge ideology of departments, schools, and colleges of education as the chief culprit in our education dilemma; and she wanted the interview badly enough that she mounted no defense of herself.
In the run-up to the interview, which we had agreed would focus on the problem of knowledge-deficient curricuIum, I sent her an email reminding her of my disregard for education professors and teacher training programs, telling her that I would be brutally honest on this and other matters in the interview--- so that if she wanted to back out, that would be fine with me.
But she replied, “Time for brutal honesty.”
And brutal honesty is what I gave her.
………………………………………………………………………………………….
When quester for an empty education doctorate, my erstwhile interviewer, got back to me via email to thank me for the interview, she mentioned that she had read my 53-page September 2020 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in which I make the core of my argument as pertinent to the most vexing dilemmas confronting the Minneapolis Public Schools and in particular name those making decisions as to curriculum and professional development who as academic lightweights have no hope of designing the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum or the teacher training needed.
With an irritating cluelessness, she commented that she found the articles interesting, but that I was quite hard on staff at the Davis Center (MPS central offices):
“I,” she said, “tend to look more at systems.”
In a return email, I told the clueless one that she seemed to have understood nothing of which I had endeavored to explain to her, and that irony abounded in her participation in the system conferring lightweight doctoral degrees. That was indeed a problematic system, of design to be sure, but at least as much because of the campus jokes known as education professors who spout their nonsense and then inflict our students with teachers and administrators whom they have trained.
“People matter, “ I wrote. “And the Davis Center staff whom I named as chief culprits producing the curricular morass and low teacher quality were trained by those of the same ilk through whom you are seeking a meaningless doctorate.”
I told her I’d be brutal.
As Mao Zedong declared,
“Revolution is not a dinner party.”
That local activism entails such brutality is why most people recoil from it. But Saul Alinsky and all of those who have achieved change at the local level have had to be brutally honest and name those individuals who are culpable for actions deleterious to the common good.
People matter.
People can sometimes do great things even within a faulty system; but even well-designed systems cannot be successful utilizing incompetent people.
And then the most favorable change occurs when first-rate people design systems full of first-rate staff for human good, productive of majestic achievements for human good.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
I added a bevy of new students in the New Salem Educational Initiative last week, parents each seeking my particular instruction for their children.
And I delivered my book to an additional five people, four at the Davis Center, further fraying central office staff nerves.
I saw no else out and about doing these things: more evidence for the case I make above:
Systems matter.
But people matter more.
No comments:
Post a Comment