My Brushes with the Educationists Part 1.

By

Tom Molloy

<>PART 1.

INTRODUCTION

<>My first contact with the educationists came after I graduated from college. During my college years, I hadn’t taken any education courses, although I had heard rumors about their inanity. I had never given any serious consideration to being a teacher. Towards the end of my senior year, I began looking for a job but my 1A draft status made me an untouchable. I was beginning to become desperate. By chance, a friend told me of a school district on Long Island that would hire any “warm body” that walked through the door. I walked through the door and I was hired on the spot. Not only did they hire me, but a couple of months later I received a 3D draft classification in the mail. It turns out that anyone desperate enough to work in that misbegotten school was a vital national asset that couldn’t be drafted. <>Of course, there was a downside. I discovered that I would have to obtain a temporary teaching certificate in order to begin teaching in the fall. I was required to take nine semester hours of “graduate” education courses during a summer session and to continue taking three hours per semester ad infinitum until I had accumulated the zillion hours necessary to obtain a New York State permanent teacher’s certificate. As I recall, the titles of the three summer “graduate” courses were something like: Adolescent Psychology, General Methodology, and Methodology of Teaching Social Studies.

EDUCATIONIST PRINCIPLES

<>Naively, I showed up for my first education course full of enthusiasm. By the end of the first hour of class, thanks to the insipidness of my professor and my classmates, my enthusiasm had hemorrhaged, leaving me totally drained. I felt like an alien. The course content was vacuous and many of my classmates were dullards. During that monotonous summer, I learned that each professor had pet principles, which, to an outlier like myself, appeared to be nothing more than pure drivel. As the professors propounded these principles, I kept expecting them to wink, but they didn’t. Most of the principles were so self-evident that one wondered why they were material for a graduate course; others were so absurd that one just wondered and wondered. To cite a few examples of the absurd:

<>Principle # 1. Students who have difficulty learning make the best teachers because they understand the difficulties being experienced by their students. One professor used to pronounce this principle to console those of my classmates who had difficulty comprehending the banal contents of the course. Had I believed this schlock, I would have been left in a terrible quandary. You see, in all humility, I must confess that I never had much difficulty learning and ipso facto I would have been forever consigned to the ranks of the less gifted teachers. If this principle were true, I was one of the few in the class not destined for greatness. Indeed, many of my classmates had a great deal of difficulty learning. Those multiple-choice tests based on the reading of a few pages of trivia really bamboozled them. Had I subscribed to this principle, I would have envied them their dullness. Yet, somehow the thought of undergoing a lobotomy that would confer on me the precious gift of difficulty in learning (i. e., superior teacher status) never appealed to me.

<> Principle # 2. Never use sarcasm with the students. There was a dress code in the “graduate” education department. All male students were required to wear a coat and tie to class. Students who failed to comply were marked absent. You see, a coat and tie had a unique place among the educationists. The education establishment was very touchy on the subject of professionalism because there were those in the academic world who knew that the educationists had no corpus of knowledge that would merit the appellation “professional”. Wearing a coat and tie created the illusion of professionalism. On the first day of class, the professor challenged one of my few intelligent classmates because he wasn’t wearing a tie. My classmate responded, “A monkey could pass an education course if he wore a tie to class. The hard part would be for him to tie the tie.” The professor misinterpreted this bald statement of fact as a sarcastic comment. He responded by delivering a diatribe against sarcasm and enjoined us never to use sarcasm in the classroom. He railed against the devastating effect sarcasm had on the self image of students. I found this emotional outburst disconcerting. It belied my experience. I recalled that some of my most effective high school teachers and college professors were masters of sarcasm. In fact, I had always prided myself on being pretty good at sarcasm, but, in this alien world, sarcasm was taboo. Allegedly, the use of sarcasm deflates the egos of students. I found this rationale rather silly. It took me a while to discern the real rationale for the proscription against sarcasm. As I adapted to the educationist environment, it dawned on me that principle number two was actually a derivative of principle number one. You see, to use sarcasm, one has to be more intelligent than a turnip, but such a relatively high IQ is rare in educationist circles. If one were to use sarcasm, it would be tantamount to confessing that one was too intelligent to be a good teacher. That is to say, in educationist circles, sarcasm is apostasy because by using sarcasm one renounces one’s status as a dullard.

<> Principle # 3. The purpose of education is to instill correct attitudes, not to impart information. Academic achievement is elitist. Here I am paraphrasing. No single professor explicitly stated this principle. I derived this principle as an amalgam of the snippets of wisdom dispensed by several professors. Viewed from the perspective of the self-interest of the teaching profession, this principle panders to the teacher candidates, very few of whom come to education courses either sullied by information or guilty of academic achievement. One must applaud the success of the educationists in shaping the educational establishment to fit this principle. Our secondary students can recite the correct attitudes on saving the whales, cutting down trees, and building nuclear power plants. Many may not know that whales are mammals, that trees produce oxygen, or that a nucleus is part of atom, but attitude--they can give you attitude all day long. There is nothing as edifying as observing a group of teenagers sitting in a circle, picking their pimples, and reciting slogans about the evils of nuclear energy. It’s a tribute to their teachers that they can recite the correct attitudes without ever having to endure the tedium of studying physics, chemistry, or biology. The real triumph of attitude over information can be witnessed every day in our fast food restaurants, where high school graduates brimming with attitude, require pictures on the keys to operate a cash register. We all have our favorite stories about getting change when the registers go down.

<> Principle # 4. Everyone should attend college. It seems paradoxical that a professor could advocate that all students attend college while maintaining that academic achievement is elitist. This apparent paradox vanishes when one realizes that the educationist vision of college is not of students engaged in the elitist pursuits of history, philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and physics. No, their vision of college is a place where advanced attitudinal training takes place. Students, who had already been inculcated with the correct attitude about mundane subjects such as whales, trees, and nuclear energy could now have their attitudes molded in such advanced areas as affirmative action, multiculturalism, sexism, abortion, and feminism. These professors were egalitarians. According to their orthodoxy, all people were literally created equal. In their mind, the only variable in academic success is opportunity. Of course, opportunity is an important variable in one’s academic aspirations. It’s no secret that George W. Bush isn’t equal and didn’t get into Yale based on his stellar academic performance. Yet, most of us believe that intelligence also plays a role. To some of my professors, the idea that intelligence was a factor in an individual’s academic success was heresy. It became apparent in just a few class sessions why these professors disparaged the value of intelligence. <>Despite having suffered severe indigestion trying to stomach my first three doses of education curses, I embarked on another course during the fall semester. This course gave me even more severe indigestion. I spent so little time in this course that I don’t even remember the name of it. It was awesomely awful. After a few sessions I just stopped going. The irony is that I think my escape from this course earned me a grade of “incomplete”—which, according to the rules, would eventually become a failing grade. I have never asked for a transcript, but I presume I actually failed an education course. I may very well be the only individual to have failed an education course in the 20^th century. If there is a “Dunce of the Millennium Award”, failing an education course may very well make me a candidate. <>There was very little substantive content in the dreary education courses I endured. They were a triumph of form over substance. A good deal of the course content was either common sense or nonsense wrapped in glitzy, high-sounding terminology. Two terms that readily come to mind are “horizontal articulation” and “vertical articulation”. I was counseled by my academic advisor that my “vertical articulation” (ability to get along with superiors and subordinates, i.e., students) was satisfactory, but my “horizontal articulation” (ability to get along with peers) needed improvement. How would you like to be told that your horizontal articulation was out of whack? Pretty heavy stuff—sounds a lot worse than not getting along with your peers. The truth is my advisor was right. I prided myself on not getting along with most of my classmates. I was something of a snob. I confess I looked down on “graduate” students who disdained intellectual pursuits. I had teamed up with the few other literate students to form a clique that was despised as elitist by the dullards--faculty and students alike.

To be continued.