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Sunday, July 31, 2005
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AMBIENT MOROSITY II The blogger Instructivist (great blogname) picks up the following ed school course description, typical of many current ed school courses: Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice One, two, three, scratch your head. What the hell is this about? Anything but the content and teaching of math, that’s for sure. In today’s New York Times, there’s a remarkably tough-minded attack on ed schools, titled Who Needs Education Schools? It isolates a couple of things that keep middle-class kids in public classrooms stupid. Diane Ravitch is quoted: “The idea of ‘preparing excellent teachers who are excellent in their subject,’ she says, has been overtaken by other concerns -‘professors wanting to be respected in the university, and teachers’ colleges wanting to become places where research is done and to be agents of transformational change.’” A recent study of ed school curricula is cited: “The general posture of education schools, they concluded, was countercultural, instilling mistrust of the system that teachers work in. Among the texts most often assigned were Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, an indictment of schooling in poor urban neighborhoods, and writings by Paulo Freire, who advocates education to achieve political liberation. Theories of how children learn… were more likely to be taught than what children should learn…” The clever contribution of teachers’ unions to the profession is mentioned: "Because unions have resisted extra pay for high-demand skills like math teaching, the gap in ability between teachers and other white-collar professionals will become bigger, not smaller.” Looks a lot like loser France, doesn’t it (see post just below)? A culture of enforced radical egalitarianism. Curricula devoted not to the intellectual patrimony but to brooding over how the system’s screwing you. |