Educationists And Education Don’t Mix
By Margaret Snyder (10/26/03)
The twentieth century was the century of educationists and it isn’t over yet. By educationists, I mean people who give a lot of thought to theories of education without having to prove that these theories have any basis in reality or having to pay the consequences if they don’t. In fact, many of these educationists did quite well for themselves.
On a local scale, I can point to Dr. Rebecca Stewart, a director of elementary education in our local district in the 1960s and 70s. She had devised a new method of teaching reading called the Initial Teaching Alphabet, or ITA. Instead of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the ITA had more characters, so that each sound had its own character. She thought children would learn better this way.
She also collected royalties on all the textbooks sold. So for a few years, every child in the school district was subjected to the ITA, until somebody figured out it was worse than nonsense, it was damaging our children. The ITA never caught on in a big way nationwide, but plenty of other ideas did.
In reading we have had look-say, whole language and phonics. In math we have had new math and the new new math. The same happens in foreign language instruction. We had translation-based; audio-lingual, wherein thousands of Spanish students learned how to say they don’t like meatballs but not much else (or in the case of my youngest brother, “an evidently official paper”; at least the meatball one has a verb); proficiency-based instruction; direct method; and others.
All of these methods spring from the same mind-set, namely, that it is possible for one person or, just as improbably, a committee, to produce an entire, self-contained system of instruction that will include everything that every teacher needs to reach every learner. This is simply not possible.
Good teachers find what works for them in each new fad that comes along and incorporate that into the mix of other stuff that has worked for them in the past. That is, they do this when the education establishment lets them. Sadly, the education establishment is stacked against good teachers and is driven by a social agenda.
The education establishment has two purposes. One is to change society, one child at a time. So we have had such abominations as outcomes-based education, which sounded fine until we learned the outcomes were not knowledge, but prescribed social attitudes and behaviors; the self-esteem movement, which includes rewriting history because human children are no longer individuals but identified by group and each group must find a happy reflection in the history book; social promotion; and sex education, in which children are to be relieved of the “hang-ups” of the old order.
The other purpose of the education establishment is to perpetuate itself. It does this by creating a language that can be understood only by the cognoscenti and through the above-mentioned creation of theories that must be learned in their schools and departments of education. Now, since about the time women began to have better opportunities elsewhere, future teachers have consisted disproportionately of the least able students. This is not an opinion; it is a fact, seen by comparing the SAT scores of college students in different fields. These students then spend four years of college, not primarily studying any discipline, but being indoctrinated into the education establishment.
Then, the teachers so produced will be required throughout their careers to participate in “professional development”. Professional development generally does not include study in the actual subject matter the teacher teaches, but only the new language and theories of the educationists.
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