Article #1
Facing the Dilemma of Ineptitude in the Public Education Establishment
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 2022 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”
or guide 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 receive
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 typically not 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 pieces of paper that are 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 direct nominal focus toward Black History each
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.
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 embarrassments known as education
professors.
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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 2022, 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
(MCAs).
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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.
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.
The pseudo–profession of
education professor should be no more.
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As we agitate for the
elimination of departments, schools, and colleges of education, though, we must
move ahead with teacher training at the level of the locally centralized
school district. We cannot allow our
students to be subjected to the abuse heaped on them by education professors
and their harmful anti-knowledge creed.
In the search for the
new superintendent, we must find an administrator who, while fulfilling the
necessary licensure requirements, is willing to move beyond her or his own
insubstantial academic training to seek a new senior academic officer who will
in turn bring forward field specific scholars to design academically
substantive curriculum delivered in grade-by-grade sequence throughout the K-12
years.
In facing the dilemma
posted by the nature of training in departments, schools, and colleges of
education, we must realize that all of those in the Academic Division, notably
the 28 members of the Department of Teaching and Learning have been ruined by
the nature of such training; that not a
single member of the Office of Black Student Achievement holds an advanced
degree in a key subject area; that this
is true, too, for the Associate Superintendents and staff in the Department of
Indian Education. As curriculum design
overseen by subject area scholars proceeds, the Department of Teaching and
Learning and the Office of Black Student Achievement should be disbanded; the position of Associate Superintendent
should be eliminated; and the
legislatively mandated Department of Indian Education should be overhauled,
current members dismissed, and the focus of the department directed toward
raising academic proficiency rates for Native American students.
Once we have faced the
dilemma posed by the anti-knowledge creed of education professors and dismissed
those tainted by that ideology, we can proceed to focus on the key tasks in the
overhaul of the Minneapolis Public Schools:
curriculum redesign by academic field specialists; and the training of teachers capable of
imparting knowledge-intensive, skill-replete curriculum.
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