BY
TOM MOLLOY
There is a mass of evidence that our primary and secondary schools are colossal failures in educating our children. I can't begin to present the evidence here, but to readers who want an overview of the scope of the US education disaster, I recommend reading "Inside American Education" by Thomas Sowell and the "Conspiracy of Ignorance" by Martin L. Gross.
To me the most shocking revelation is not that our schools are failing to educate the average student, but that the academic achievement of our best and brightest lags so far behind that of the best and brightest of other countries.
When my two sons were in elemenatry and secondary school, they would often bring home notes from school administrators and teachers. The cheery notes with happy faces couldn't hide the fact that semi-literate teachers infested the schools. I used to be appalled at the numerous grammatical errors. Often I would correct the errors in red ink and send the corrected copy back to the originator. Not surprisıngly, I never received a word of thanks or any feedback whatsoever. Then one evening at a PTA meeting, the PTA president, herself a practitioner of fractured English, told me that the faculty and administrators were "indigent" at my corrections. I told her it was the parents, not the teachers, who should be "idignant" because there were so many illiterates on the faculty. Then, I suggested that, if the PTA were doing its job, it would be insisting that illiterate teachers be removed from their positions.
The educationist establishment, in moments of candor, admits there are problems with the quality of schools. In fact, it wages a brilliant disinformation campaign, asserting that the principal problem is the lack of sufficient money to achieve excellence. Yet, when we compare results of our public schools with those of parochial schools with a lot less money, the "money" argument seems to dissolve. Comparing public and parochial schools, one might argue that the amount of money is inversely proportional to the degree of success. The Washington D.C. schools are a fiscal black hole, sucking in scads of money per student with little or nothing to show for it. If money were the key to success, the typical graduate of the Washington D.C schools would be a Rhodes scholar. In reality, the typical graduate lacks the literacy skills to fill out a job application without assistance.
Fellow citizens, I am convinced that the poor quality of our schools is primarily attributable to the overall poor quality of teachers. I believe a self-serving educationist establishment, consisting of the teachers' unions, university education departments, and school district superintendants is threatening our democracy and our prosperity by perpetuating a teacher certification system that vitually ensures academically handicapped teachers. To be certified, would-be teachers have to subject themselves to the intellectual debasment of hour after vacuous hour of education courses. Everyone with a room temparature IQ who has taken an education course knows that these courses are a sham.
Students majoring in education are the academic bottom feeders. Their average SAT score is well below that of students with other majors. They are the academic dregs. How can we expect our schools to produce academic excellence when so many of the teachers have never attained any academic distinction?
So, why does the educationist establishment insist that would-be teachers subject themselves to ed courses--a compendium of half-baked theories, psycho babble, anti-intellectualism, egalitarian mischief, mutlicutural schlock and disasterous pedagogical fads--in order to achieve certification? There are two reasons: Money and money. First, ed courses are a cash cow for the universities. Because of the lack of serious content in ed courses, university education departments can offer these sterile courses to dullards. Universities deliberately set very low standards for education majors so they can tap into this lucrative, but illicit market. That is, they extract tuition out of students who, were it not for the low standards, would be asking,"Lettuce on that burger, sir? Second, the requirement to take these junk courses deters smart individuals from becoming teachers. For academically gifted indivduals ed courses are an outrage. The insipidness of the course content and the intellectual torpor of fellow students combine to deter intellectuals from pursuing a career as a teacher. This deterrence creates an artifical teacher shortage, forcing teacher salaries up.
If you have an MA in mathematics from MIT, you can't get a job teaching high school without taking the required number of education courses. Yet, in many states, the teacher with 18 or 21 hours of "mathematics for teachers" (the appelation "for teachers" is code for "dumbed down") courses, is considered qualified.
One can be fooled by glitzy catalogs of courses offered in education departments. Look at the following three graduate courses offered at a university near my home:
Advanced Approaches to Interdisciplinary Learning
Social Policy for Families and Children
Instruction in Early Childhood and Elementary Education
If you are impressed with these pretentious titles, let us recall that many of the students who take and pass these courses are semi-literate. They are the ones who graduate and write ungrammatical, unintelligible notes to parents. The lack of substance in ed courses is the reason that dullards take refuge in this intellectual wasteland. One dirty little secret about ed courses is that graduate ed courses are no more diffucult than undergraduate ed courses. You can get an MA in education without ever having taken a single undergraduate course. All the courses are bullshit. There is no beginning and no end, no real corpus of knowledge. Try taking graduate courses in chemistry, mathematics, Latin or most other academic disciplines without having taken undergraduate courses.
Perhaps the real tragedy is that many of the would-be teachers have never experienced the sublime joy that comes from studying the great works of history, literature, economics and philosophy; have never gained an insight into the pure wonder of mathematics and science; and have never experienced the thrill of speaking in a foreign language. The very concept of academic achievement is alien to many of these would-be teachers. To them school is drudgery.
To be sure, many of the would-be teachers lack the mental acumen to enjoy inellectual pursuits, but those who do have the acumen are victimized by the requirement to take stultifying ed courses. While would-be teachers are studying such weighty topics as how to cut out paper dolls and how to arrange a bulletin board, they are unable to study the ideas of humankind's greatest thinkers.
The time has come to clean up the mess and close all education schools and departments of education. I suggest we offer amnesty to all professors of education rather than punish them. We could also offer them vocational training so they could learn some useful skill. Some of my friends have suggested reeducation camps to rehabiliate these imposters. I disagree. I think we should treat these culprits with compassion despite the horrific legacy they have bequathed us. Years ago I coined the following definition of a professor of education: "One who can take a bikini idea, and bundle it in a snowsuit so no one wants to look anymore".
Let's establish meaningful certification standards for teachers.. Elementary school teachers should be required to obtain a real liberal arts degree. Secondary school teachers should be required to have a degree with a minimum of 40 semester hours in their subject area.
To thwart the inevitable diploma mills that would proliferate, teachers should be required to take a State certfication exam to confirm their knowledge.
All newly hired teachers should be on probation for a year. Those who demonstrate pedagogcal excellence would be retained; the others should be dismissed. I estimate that given high standards, the attrition rate for newly hired teachers would exceed 50 percent.
If we don't act to energize our schools, our children are going to be flipping hamburgers, digging ditches, doing laundry, and cleaning yards for the affluent Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, who do have schools that produce excellence.
