Article #2
The Unfortunate History of Public Education in the United States from the 1970s Forward
All problems of the locally centralized school district in the United States are traceable to wretched teacher and administrator training programs.
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. Further, public schools administrators have typically been ill-educated in similar manner, then take academically bereft courses of the sort leading to administrative licensure.
………………………………………………………………………………….....
This ironic lack of academic focus is traceable to regrettable developments at Teachers College, Columbia University during the 1920s.
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.
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.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Schools in the United States at the 19th-20th century divide were of widely varying quality. Most students did not attend school past grade six. But by the first two decades of the 20th century an increasing number of students were seeking attendance in high schools that generally featured classical curricula in mathematics, natural science, history, government, English literature and usage, and Latin. An intermediary institution, junior high, also appeared in some urban districts, for students in grades seven through nine, featuring academic preparation for the high school curriculum.
At that turn of the 19th into the 20th century, normal schools offered formal preparation for some teachers; these varied widely in quality but in general assumed that teachers would be instructing students in a rigorous academic curriculum. But by the second decade of the 20th century, teachers colleges located on university campuses overtook the normal schools as institutions of teacher preparation. Education professors, now ensconced in university settings among academic field specialists, began to emphasize pedagogy over curriculum, with the assertion that the systematic acquisition of knowledge was not important.
The writings of John Dewey, while full of internal contradictions and often lacking clarity, typically asserted that education should resonate with the experience of the child and offer practical preparation for life. More clearly, William Heard Kilpatrick and Harold Rugg advocated for a putatively progressive approach to education that deemphasized the sequential acquisition of knowledge and skill sets. Heard in 1918 penned an article, “The Project Method,” and soon published a book of the same name; in 1928, Rugg, with coauthor Ann Shumaker, published the book, The Child-Centered School. In these two volumes we have the foundations for the “progressive” education movement that, against the vigorous counter arguments of such subject area proponents as William C. Bagley, became entrenched at the teachers colleges, most influentially at the Teachers College of Columbia University.
This view of education took many decades to prevail in the schools of locally centralized districts across the nation. Many teachers had trained as field specialists. Many parents of immigrant populations and African Americans relocating as participants in the Great Northern Migration wanted a substantive education as a basis for scaling the educational ladder to success. But paradoxically in synch with a creed known as “progressive,” proponents of those ideas absorbed and espoused racist precepts of the first decades of the 20th century that expressed doubts as to whether the children of southern and eastern European immigrants and African American migrants could master an academic curriculum . Such populations were typically tracked into vocational curriculum while decision-makers won to the “progressive” creed begrudgingly provided an academic track to satisfy expectations of university admissions offices.
During the late 1960s, the “progressive’ creed thrived in a zeitgeist with individual personal expression at the center; “progressive” ideology now dominated among teachers and administrators, all trained by education professors in departments, colleges, and schools of education.
This was terrible timing:
In ferocious irony, advances in civil rights made possible the pursuit of the middle class lifestyle for African Americans positioned to climb the economic ladder; and fair housing laws made residential housing covenants less likely: African American middle class flight joined white flight as phenomena that at the urban core left behind the poorest of the poor.
Crack cocaine hit the streets in 1980.
Gang activity proliferated.
Urban school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools were overwhelmed, with almost all-white middle class teaching staffs faced with the duty to teach populations with which they had no cultural affinity. And with the triumph of “progressive” education, these teachers had little of substance to offer their students that could assist them in ending the cyclical poverty that created the conditions of inner city life. Mainly white educational theorists touted critical thinking, lifelong learning, projects and portfolios as measures of student learning, curriculum driven by individual teachers and their students--- all in the absence of logically sequenced knowledge and skill sets measurable by objective assessments, thus robbing students of the information base upon which genuine critical analysis and a lifelong pursuit of knowledge could proceed. The mantras of education professors became excuses for teaching very little at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment