Article #1:
The Intellectual Damage Inflicted by Education Professors and
the Incompetence of the Teachers and Administrators Whom They Train
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.
………………………………………………………………………………….
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.
………………………………………………………………………………….....
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.
………………………………………………………………………………..
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment