Said Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, quoted in "Teachers go to the ‘dumbest colleges' — who said it and why it matters," a WaPo column by Valerie Strauss.
But what's really bothering Strauss isn't the outrage of insulting education departments. It's Hillsdale's participation in charter schools around the country. There's the "Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help 'students acquire a mature love for America.'"
A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released last year extols conservative values, attacks progressive ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for example: “The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.” Hillsdale College itself offers a “classical liberal arts core” to its students; the website lists more than 30 authors and thinkers that students will encounter — nearly all of them White men.
She's right about that. I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Only one woman crossed the line.
Posts
178 comments:
One of the smart girls in my grade school went to Stanford , and became a 5th grade teacher.
What’s the return on that investment?
I've met some smart and insightful people teaching in education departments. Having said that, one clearly doesn't need to be intelligent, or even particularly hard working, to get any education degree. Some of the dumbest people I've ever met had Ed.D. degrees.
Our University system has turned into a spoils program for progressive activists.
It needs to be destroyed.
And education majors are the dumbest.
Journalism majors are close on their heels.
Women are drawn to teaching.
Augustine was African just like Elon Musk.
Before Ed schools, women made up most teachers before college level, which was tiny until WWII. They trained in teachers' colleges like the one Lyndon Johnson attended. They did a damned good job. Ed schools enroll the bottom quintile of college students. The faculty of these departments are bored by teaching actual skills so they invent fad like "Whole Language" reading or "Common Core" math. Phonics and sentence diagraming taught millions to read and use correct grammar. Now that is passe and the latest fad is "white supremacy."
I am curious (honestly), Ann, what females would you add to Hillsdale's list? I took both "philosophy" and some American Lit in college and what I read looked a lot like this. I did not do poetry so even Dickinson didn't make my reading list. This was almost 60 years ago, but I wonder how a reading list that covers this same period would look different today.
By the way, Arizona now has a 100% voucher program so that kids can attend any school.
As P. J. O'Rourke famously said..
Anyone that doesn't see how screwed up US Education is, has never F*cked an El Ed major
There was Sappho, a regular in the classical tradition. Then a long gap until Vicki Hearne.
"She's right about that. I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. "
Is that how one characterizes some of the greatest authors in the history of the world - by the color of their skin, and not by their ideas?
I've always said Journalism schools are the dumbest departments on campus, but that's probably not fair. J-school is about teaching students to obfuscate what's happening in the world. I don't really know what Ed-schools teach
I actually wish I could read this article. Oh, well.
I was a teacher of JoJ (Just off the Jet) refugee and immigrant children for 37 years. I'm here to tell you it's true that it's the dumbest discipline or Department in any college. Basically transcribed gobbledygook presented badly. You do not need a four year college education to teach. Two years of subject matter and a you should be good to go.
Where's Maya Angelou? Or Amanda Gorman?
What’s really bothering Strauss is the heavy burden of having to defend against a statement that’s true.
"Is that how one characterizes some of the greatest authors in the history of the world - by the color of their skin, and not by their ideas?"
That's what we do, nowadays. Seems pretty shallow.
The classical Greek world is as different from ours as anything ever. Exposure to ancient Greek literature takes you into a world far more different than ours than any book by any contemporary writer of any race or any country. But, hey, they're just a bunch of old white men. We are doomed.
Came for the rhhardin obligatory Vicki hearne reference, not disappointed. Thanks for turning me on to her.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't can't, teach teaching
Dumb question: does Bronte not merit inclusion?
"The faculty of these departments are bored by teaching actual skills so they invent fad like "Whole Language" reading or "Common Core" math."
I think that's a problem. What they teach is actually harmful.
Only one woman on the list?!?? Are not Taylor Swift and Shania Twain women?
....
Oh, never mind.
At my college:
El-Ed only required "funsy" math, yet the graduates are tasked with establishing the foundation for further study of math. I did a LOT of math tutoring, especially for our youngest son. Some of his teachers were obviously frightened by math (hell,by arithmetic).
Wl-Ed only required "funsy" science. Not so great foundation there either.
No foreign language.
But lots and lots of education theory.
In a near by city we have a state U. The local paper had a headline a few years ago that this school was one of the top teacher's colleges in the nation. I was amazed since I'd dealt with the school in my professional capacity. (Lots of hand holding is the kindest thing I can say).
Then I read on. Sure they were a top school. In the number of diplomas given out. The schools in that city are hell holes.
Results on tests are horrible. Unless you don't care about reading, writing or math.
Along with my major, I took education classes in order to be certified to teach. (Which I ended up not doing.) There were some very smart people in my classes. I also met some of the dumbest I have ever met anywhere. (I don't know how some of them managed to dress themselves each day.) The professors/instructors were in the middle - none inspiring or brilliant, but also not the worst ones I had.
When I took the classes in the '80s, they seemed mostly to be trying to teach common sense. Things like showing respect for other people and treating them in a professional manner. From what I can tell about education since then, they gave up on that and are just saying, "you do you".
I learned the value of a quality education when I was 6-years-old and saw the Disney film, "The Sword and the Stone". To teach young Mort about fish, Merlin didn't give him a book on ichthyology, instead, he turned Mort into an actual fish. If they aren't showing the film in our schools of education, they're doing it wrong.
Only one woman crossed the line.
Why do the best men do more interesting, valuable, and novel work than the best women? I think this 4chan post explains it:
"People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism. They literally do not ask 'is this true,' they ask 'will others be OK with me thinking this is true.' This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it. Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective 'is this true?' filter. This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think."
(This also helps explain why Althouse bases virtually everything she writes on stuff published by high-status outfits like the New York Times and the Washington Post long after they've demonstrated they're propaganda mills that consciously lie to advance political goals.)
I admit this is second hand, but I trust the guy who told me. He said that at a department heads meeting, and ed school department head "bragged" that they took the students with the lowest SAT scores and graduated them with the highest college GPAs. The math department cannot make this claim.
Jane Austin would improve the list and make it more enjoyable to read through.
Hillsdale College was created precisely to provide an alternative to the hate America and wokeism ideologies that dominate education today.
Holding the number of people constant at 37, which women would one add, and which men would one then subtract? After all, if one can't argue that each woman to be added is superior for the purpose to the man to be deleted, then it stands to reason that the list is fine as it is. The same goes for any other category of person aside from white males.
I think this would be a very good exercise, for a number of reasons. However, you need the discipline of holding N constant.
Marketing and PR classes at my school were just 'show up and get a good grade' kind of propositions...
When I was in college, I visited a friend whose roommate was an education major. The roomy was cutting pictures out of magazines and pasting them onto construction paper. I thought perhaps she was going to decorate the walls of her dorm room.
It turns out this was the final project in one of her education classes.
My best teachers were my law professors. None of them had an education degree.
Dr. Jill? She’s wicked smaaart.
A very detailed look is outlined in a recent presentation, Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults w/Dr. Lyell Asher. I found his evidence and arguments compelling
This is a link to the 9th short video that covers Ed schools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQCn4rSMJUc&list=PLYNjnJFU-62s_Ji9Tl7hhGkJ1n52m4qwd&index=9
Scroll down to the bottom of the list for a link to the combined video which is 80 minutes long.
"by the color of their skin, and not by their ideas?"
Color of the skin, AND penis, or lack thereof.
Found the article elsewhere: "as if SAT and ACT scores were an important determinant as to what kind of professional a student graduating from a less selective school will be. They aren’t — and in fact, the majority of America’s highest-ranking schools have suspended or ended the use of SAT/ACT scores for admissions."
I don't know about the first assertion here, but we all know why SAT/ACT scores have been abandoned and it doesn't have to do with the fact that they aren't predictive.
As to her lament that the schools teaching conservative values are of a religious nature, well you've kind of ceded the field.
>Ann Althouse said...
...lists more than 30 authors and thinkers that students will encounter — nearly all of them White men. Only one woman crossed the line.<
I could be wrong but read your last sentence there as righteous protest.
So I internet searched "best female authors of all time." Most on those lists are simply laughable in comparison to Hillsdale's list of "White" males.
There are numerous lists of "famous" female philosophers to be found and they are a smidge more substantial than the authors lists. But they are still rather meager.
It would be really interesting to see your list of women that could fly with Hillsdale's eagles.
We ARE talking K-12 readers, not college students.
Any literature course that omits Jane Austin (Pride and Prejudice) is faulty.
On par with Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) we should include Laura Engles Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, and Lucy Maude Montgomery (Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables). On par with Dickens we have Elizabeth Gaskell and Cranford. Much of this literature doubles as history. Much can be introduced with movie or TV adaptations.
We can add Mary Shelly with Frankenstein, who might arguably be credited with INVENTING her genre.
I wouldn't object too much to Lorraine Vivian Hansberry and her autobiographical work To Be Young Gifted and Black, if only for her portrayal of her own most influential literature teacher.
Jane Austen and Mary Shelley should be in that list as well as Edgar Allen Poe IMO
What frosts lefties like Valerie Strauss is that Hillsdale even dares to exist, and it teaches the greatness of America's founding principles. Classical education is much derided these days, but Hillsdale exists to teach that the world didn't begin the day you were born. Even dead white males from long ago have much to say, and human nature hasn't changed much over the millennia.
Leftists have been trying to get their claws into Hillsdale for a long time, and might have succeeded if the school had not made the bold decision to forgo all forms of government money, and therefore control. Students rely on tuition and scholarships, but cannot accept government aid if they want to attend Hillsdale. It is an island of free-spiritedness in a vast ocean of conformity.
Jill Biden. Oops, I mean, Dr. Jill Biden.
Ed Hirsch literally wrote the book on this 25 years ago. It all started with Rousseau...
But at this late point in time it's just become a deflection from the real problem: stupid unruly unready kids and their apathetic entitled parents.
And their cell phones.
The quality of results from public education has declined dramatically since the emphasis for teachers moved from subject matter experts to teaching techniques. The proof of this is from private schools that hire teachers based on knowledge of math, science, history and literature without teachers’ credentials and turn out much better educated kids. The single most impactful thing that could be done to improve the quality of public school education is to abolish Education degrees and departments.
The new new math really sucks as does the whole language horse piss. My grandkids go to elite Boston suburb public schools who don't play around with modern learning theoretical pablum. My 12-yo grandson assigned reading this summer is Treasure Island and Call of the Wild. He has already devoured the Hornblower and Jack Aubrey series. It's mental illness for you people to keep harping on and focused on all of the negativity and stupidity that always has been and always will be part of this world.
She's right about that. I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Only one woman crossed the line.
If everyone read these sages, even only these sages, how much better we'd all be.
On the literature side, by the time you're getting to Frost, Hemingway and Faulkner, yes, there are some women and POCs you could add with conviction. Probably with some earlier beacheads back to Austen. Philosophy is out of my wheelhouse but I'd wager accomplished female philosophers were thinner on the ground for even longer.
Is there a significant vein of philosophy covering most of these epochs practiced by African Americans or plain ole' Africans, in Western civilization? On par with the greats on this list?
If you're going to teach an overview of the best of Western Civ, you cannot simultaneously maintain that women and non-whites were oppressed, while adding them to the curriculum in equal numbers of even a significant plurality. Either their talents were smothered or they weren't, choose one.
The scarier part of this observation is that these Ed school graduates develop their own curriculum and generally have learned classroom management from their schools. A complaint in the many videos of "Why I left teaching" is, however, that now in many districts the curriculum is dictated in detail so the teachers no longer feel they have any input. Also, the extreme lack of discipline in Gen Z and the lack of support from the administration in trying to enforce any level of discipline.
The unspoken reality of all education from top to bottom is that it is improvisation and highly dependent up on the "sage on the stage". Not only their knowledge, but ability to teach, ability to control the classroom and how they feel on any particular day. And increasingly, teachers and professor are not taught or expected to control their emotions, check their personal problems at the door and how to do their job despite it all.
Search for "Why I left Teaching " videos and you'll learn a lot. Yes, a bunch are about pay, overwork, etc, but lack of control is big as well.
I've found this former teacher's videos (Teacher Therapy) informative.
Why I Quit Teaching Gen Z! - A Story of Little Things That Made a Big Difference
https://youtu.be/RUvIQJo2j5g
"One of the smart girls in my grade school went to Stanford , and became a 5th grade teacher.
What’s the return on that investment?"
Probably a very decent return on investment for society. I had some pretty good elementary school teachers.
BUT, those formerly "Normal schools" that now style themselves as "Universities" are now the great party schools of the US. And the graduates now teach your kids by example that work days are just an interlude between weekend parties, which begin promptly at 5PM Friday. (Hope none of my teacher friends notice /recognize.)
Not my name. Not my color. Not my girth. Not my sex.
Sexism in social, economic, and political venues brayed in handmade tales.
Discard your diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry). Lose your Pro-Choice ethical religion. #HateLovesAbortion
Men, women, and "our Posterity" are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.
In my retired world, I spend a lot of time around retired teachers. I can't speak to how competent they are in their specific field (there is reason to think they are very competent) or the colleges they attended but, as a group, they seemed to have skipped Civics 101.
What other women would you suggest to
cross the line?
Those are some heavy hitters.
Although to judge from his more recent postings that Sophocles guy is an idiot.
Is this a hopeful sign?
Educators no longer need a college degree to begin teaching in Arizona public schools
The running joke when I was in college in the early 90's was "Anyone who thinks teachers are smart never [enjoyed carnal relations with] an El Ed major."
Nothing I've seen in the intervening 30 years has changed my opinion.
Update to earlier comment 👆🏽
“The education requirement for teachers in Arizona has changed. Under legislation Gov. Doug Ducey signed earlier this week, a person only needs to be enrolled to get their college degree to begin teaching in public schools. It’s a big change, and it’s been met with mixed reactions.”
I should’ve read the whole thing first.
Blogger Christopher said..."If you're going to teach an overview of the best of Western Civ, you cannot simultaneously maintain that women and non-whites were oppressed, while adding them to the curriculum in equal numbers of even a significant plurality. Either their talents were smothered or they weren't, choose one."
Thank you for that.
"Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche."
If you want more chicks, get rid of Whitman and Hawthorne. Substitute Jane Austen and George Eliot. The problem (as somebody wrote upthread) is itd most;y about the "Great thinkers". And wimmen aren't into Philosophy or Political Theory, or Theology. Its like making a list of the 30 Greatest scientists and inventors and crabbing about there only being one woman.
Thomas Sowell wrote about this in great detail in his 1992 book, "Inside American Education. The Decline, the Deception, the Dogmas." He goes into actual numbers, such as grades, SAT scores and other data about those who entered the education departments vs other curricula around universities. It was not always this way. He also gets into what his education was, growing up poor in Harlem, but having great schools, vs what is available to the young now (in 1992. It's much worse today. Much, much worse.) This is a great book and, though written decades ago now, would still seem stunningly accurate when looking at todays education system and what the kids are now learning.
The canonical list from Hillsdale's Western Civilization curriculum is what? Not gendered enough? Are those listed not some of the greatest minds and words of Western Civilization? Missing more women, are we? I'm sure they can create a course to fill that goal IF there goal was to count penises and vaginas. Its not. And no one who goes to Hillsdale is looking to count penises and vaginas, or melanin, or pronouns. They're looking for an education based on the traditional trove of knowledge from Western Civilization. While they cannot include everybody, it would be hard to argue that, on its merits as a course offering great thinkers of Western Civilization, their list is, if anything- extraordinary- and represents the foundational thinking that our civilization was born from.
I'm sorry, but not shocked that a WaPo thinker finds it awful that the list is almost all men. And white men to boot. I can almost hear her exclaiming, "Eewwww!".
"But what's really bothering Strauss isn't the outrage of insulting education departments." Looking at what our kids are being taught in K-12 and Higher Ed today, including law schools now, I can only wonder how more and more people aren't insulting education departments and figuring out a way to gut the entire thing and start over. In fact, some of them have. Hillsdale is one such place. The new University of Austin is another, which has Bari Weiss as one of it's founders, and an amazing collection of people in line to teach there. Common Sense.
I'm under the assumption that Education Departments on college campuses are filled with young women wearing pink pussy hats, being taught how to "educate" by older women who hate men. Am I wrong? Have they started classes on how to facilitate a transgender story hour for nine-year-olds? It should at least be offered as an elective.
Public schools for the last twenty years have been emaciating young men, teaching them to be ashamed of masculinity, their fathers and grandfathers. They wanted to take over parenting, and they have failed. These Tik-Tok posting, green haired, nose ringed Millennial teachers are insane. And they are ALL the output of Education Departments. Own it.
Of course they take zero responsibility for the output. Unlike physicists, engineers etc...who are held accountable for output in their careers.
I graduated from college over 30 years ago, and it was well known that only dumbest college students went into 'Education'. That's because you could make more $ with any other major, and "Education" was a boring made up area of study. Most of the education majors i knew, either didn't want the rough and tumble of the "real world" or they wanted to stay 16 forever, or they wanted an easy job with 2 months off in the summmer.
They could add Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Also Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin.
Get rid of Dickens and Eliot. Add Stevens and Auden.
Jim said: "I had some pretty good elementary school teachers."
Not trying to be snarky, but I'm wondering when you were in elementary school? What years? It makes a difference.
“The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. …"
Have to disagree slightly. They are also trained in the dumbest part of some pretty good colleges. I went to one, and learned the truth of the adage, “Anyone who doesn’t know what’s wrong with America’s schools never screwed an El-Ed major.”
“Only one woman crossed the line.”
She’s also the only one all of whose works can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I’m guessing she was a diversity include.
minnesota farm guy said...
I am curious (honestly), Ann, what females would you add to Hillsdale's list?
For what it's worth, I would add Margaret Sanger's works on eugenics, and Hillary's "It Takes a Village".
European history was largely formed by European men. If you think It’s worth learning about the foundations of our civilization, you’re going to be focussing on the work of mostly white men. If you want to reduce the number of white men, you are going to have to reduce the quality of the teaching.
It’s a clear choice.
"She's right about that. I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. "
Yes, but for all we know some of these great authors and thinkers could have been women with penises.
This engineer was so grateful to have to diagram sentences. It made grammar accessible.
I agree with Arnn pretty well on every count, having spent quite a few years in the classroom, either as a full-time high-school science teacher [Chem, Adv Chem, Earth Sci], or half-time junior-college prof [Geology, Physical Geography, Agriculture, much of it in French] in Canada, whose education system regularly tests in the world's Top 5. They have long emphasized subject-area knowledge over pædogogy, and it shows. The US now struggles to remain in the Top 50, down from Top 10 some 40 years ago.
Imagine, then, my shock, when upon returning to the US after a couple of decades and having learnt of a desperate need for science teachers, I was told that neither my experience, nor my licenses [British Columbia, Yukon, and Québec] were considered valid, due to "insufficient training in Education, and the lack of a supervised student teaching year. I, with four degrees in the hard sciences as well as years in both the classroom and as a worker in those fields, that I would have to obtain a 4-yr Bachelor of Education degree.
So I worked as a substitute for over 15 years, and though I enjoyed the kids, it remains one of the most discouraging times of my life. Because I was teaching subjects I knew thoroughly I always ditched the teachers' sub-day plans for video and stupid make work. "Hey folks, you wanna watch a video and fill out a worksheet, or do you actually wanna learn something ... and have fun at it?" They all chose the latter, and I told them stories, from my knowledge and without notes, especially for history and geography. Sciences were more often practical examples. They asked good questions and got good answers ... even "troubled" kids in tough districts, and they couldn't get enough of it. "Can you be our regular teacher? was a common refrain.
But year after year I noticed declines in interest, enthusiasm, and knowledge. Bio II students did not know that RNA mediates protein synthesis. In April, Chem I students could not balance anything more complex than Na + Cl and had no idea wuhat a benzene ring is. In Civics, the mandatory Grade 12 course on constitutional governance, even in the spring they were utterly lost in key stuff like the key rights described in the Constitution and the structure of the federal government. Nearly all said "rights" are what the government ALLOWS you to do. French IV students rebelled when I spoke with them in French -- "We're here to LEARN French, not to speak it !!" In one sorry day for Grade 9 General Science, I had to explain (to class after class) how powers of 10 work. And on and on.
The most difficult part was having to face how much WORSE the Grade 12s were -- in every subject I taught -- in 2017 than their equivalents had been a dozen years earlier. The reality, however, is that the women in the classroom are now Third-generation pædogogues who've never done anything REAL in their lives.
Our children are being robbed. Hillsdale are doing their best to ensure that at least some REFUGIA of classic knowledge persist. If it's mostly white males, so be it. I might add one of the Hindu classics, along with Sun Tzu to the list of authors, and maybe Ibn Battuta but there are two key realities -- Western Civilization was formulated and developped by White men. Asian civilization by Asian men.
And the physical infrastructures of those civilization were/are overwhelmingly designed, built, and maintained by MEN.
Have a young relative that has finished 3 years of early childhood education program at a highly regarded state school. Struggled mightily in high school and had an IEP for some type of learning disability. Has been on dean’s list multiple quarters in the college program but so far has been unsuccessful in passing the first of the state required certification exams. Will likely graduate with substantial debt and a degree in family studies without ability to teach (which may be a good thing). University did nothing to convince her that this might not be the correct path. Just pay tuition and move them along. Not sure what the future will bring but definitely not a good investment or experience.
On "teachers are stupid because ed majors are stupid" and other nonsense:
1) The data on "Ed majors are stupid" comes from the SAT/ACT scores of people planning on being ed majors and I believe it comes from back in the 90s. In 1998, education schools had to deal with a new law that would rate and rank them on how many of their ed majors passed the credential test. Rather than deal with that, they just made passing the credential test a requirement of the major. So in the vast majority of ed schools you can't remain an undergraduate education major unless you pass the credential test. Ed majors who can't pass have to resort to another major--usually sociology, psychology, or an identity major study.
There's much better evidence on the average SAT scores of teachers who pass the credential tests. High school teachers have had credential tests for 50 years and their *average* SAT score is above average for the average score of college grads (that is, they track the scores of high school seniors who graduate from college). Elementary schools are slightly below the average again, for a college grad. Credential tests keep a *lot* of black and Hisspanic people from teaching.
2) A substantial chunk of teachers aren't education majors, particularly high school teachers. Even some of the "ed majors" are actually subject majors who get an ed speciality. So an undergrad degree in Math, Secondary Ed, is a math degree with some ed classes. Still others get post-BA credentials or post BA Master's degree.
In short, ed majors aren't stupid, at point of graduation their SAT scores would not look noticeably off the average, and high school academic teachers would be higher than average.
3) There's vanishingly litle evidence that smart teachers get better results. (I say this as someone who was in that 2012 genius study with GRE scores of 800/780.) Lots of research on this point. There's also lots of research on the fact that black kids do much better with black teachers, so miuch so that dropping the credential cut score to allow more black teachers could conceivably do much to improve black kid outcomes.
4) It's true that women in the top 10% of SAT scores aren't often becoming teachers anymore. However, there are lots of men who became teachers. Result: the average SAT score has not changed much over the past 50+ years. Also, a lot of black kids were taught by black teachers and while some of them went on to better opportunities, a lot of them almost certainly had much lower scores and in today's world, many of them wouldn't be able to get through an ed degree.
Upshot: not only do teachers not need to be smart, there is no halcyon yesteryear where teachers were a lot smarter.
All of this is well known in the ed researcher world, but most people can't be bothered to read it. If you want to read it, I have a blog https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/
On Hillsdale College charters:
First, Hillsdale charters hire ed majors. I am working on a piece on this and something like 40% of the teachers are ed majors at these classical academiies. However, these schools also function as a Hillsdale jobs program--something like 20% of the teachers are Hillsdale grads. Another thing they clearly do is hire parents of students to teach--a lot of housewives with 20 year old college degrees. Most of the rest either got a credential after grad (as I did) or they are classics majors.
Second, Hillsdale charters are overwhelmingly white. There's one non-white majority in Jacksonville. The rest of them are 70% white or more. Not much to worry about bringing them into a state, because they can't possibly scale, and they are too white to withstand scrutiny if there's major growth. Tennessee has white kids to spare, so eh.
So any notion that Hillsdale colleges are going to teach kids who can't read is a joke,even though they do hire ed majors.
I'm sure that Hillsdale would be happy to hear anyone's arguments for additions or deletions from the list. But that curriculum is a well-designed, comprehensive alternative to the toxic admixture of various socially toxic strands of postmodernism that originates in Ed schools full of stupid faculty and students who think being "antiracist" means destroying Western culture.
The best is most certainly the enemy of the good in this case
Given that the list of authors includes an 'Eliot' as an English author, they may be referring to George Eliot rather than T.S. This would double the number of females on the list.
I already had a degree and had worked various jobs for 30 years when I decided I would like to teach 4th grade. I had to go back to college, take several semesters of Ed courses, do some student teaching, and pass a couple of extremely easy certification tests before I was anointed a teacher. I lasted 4 years.
All the Ed courses were crap, student teaching is where you really learn about the bureaucracy which is public Ed. Enjoyed the kids, hated the system.
Austen is also on there.
In addition to being intellectually and academically bankrupt, Education Departments are a scam. The local public schools offer to pay teachers more if they get graduate degrees, and they will pay the tuition to get that graduate degree. The result is that huge amounts of "public school funding" goes to the Ed department, and the teachers are paid more because they have had their heads filled with Marxist indoctrination, race hatred and idiotic fad teaching methods.
The public schools aren't "broken", they are diseased. They are parasitic criminal organizations, gnawing at the guts of our civilization.
I remember a southern belle (can we say that anymore?) at Ole Miss, majoring in El. Ed., referring to a couple of her courses as "Kiddie Lit" and "La La".
The latter was a Music class.
There's some real Intellectual Rigor, right there! I'm sure Dr. Jill aced them.
Lots of Jane Austin fans here.
I see that the Hillsdale K-12 program DOES introduce Austen, with film.
https://www.hillsdale.edu/academics/classical-liberal-arts-core
I suppose it's a truth universally acknowledged that Colin Firth introduces Austen
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112130/
much more faithfully than Gerard Butler introduces Herodotus
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416449/
"I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche."
Yeah, and if you looked at the reading list at Beijing U, you'd see a lot of names ending in -ng. That's because Beijing U is a Chinese University in a Chinese country, and aims to continue and improve Chinese civilization. See how that works?
"If you're going to teach an overview of the best of Western Civ, you cannot simultaneously maintain that women and non-whites were oppressed, while adding them to the curriculum in equal numbers of even a significant plurality. Either their talents were smothered or they weren't, choose one." [Christopher @ 12:15]
Carry that to the next level. Distribution of male and female intelligence on the Bell Curve reports that females tend to trend toward the mean. As you approach either end of the curve (extremely intelligent or extremely disfunctional) one sees fewer female and more male representation.
Now, keep in mind that in any age, most of what is produced (art, music, literature, philosophy, etc.) is average, but we don't herald Michelangelo's average contemporaries as we do Michelangelo or Beethoven's average contemporaries as we do Beethoven. If you are going to choose from the best as the basis for instruction one would expect, based upon that Bell Curve distribution, that such choices would be predominantly male.
This highlights the curent danger of choosing by social requirement (as Strauss implies) rather than competency: You choose the best minority oboist, not the best oboist; the best transgendered violinist, not the best violinist; the best female flautist not the best flautist, and so on. You wind up with a less-than-the best orchestra, and likewise, the less-than-the best curriculum on Western Civilization than you could have designed.
I can speak for my overgrown normal school alma mater--it will never rank as a great party school (thank goodness). There is little greatness there, of any kind. (Especially since I retired.)
I had a couple of close calls when it comes to teaching. If I had had a History MA in hand in '93 I would have been offered a job teaching History at one of the elite prep schools. As it turned out my boss where I was took another job and I got hers. Being part of the university faculty was a lot better I think than being a tutor and handholder for the rich kids--at least the university didn't expect me to coach, or show up at the games to cheer.
Is the term "Teachers College" a mild pejorative everywhere?
In every classroom, there's two people who don't want the hour to end - the teacher and the one who goes into teaching.
It's mental illness for you people to keep harping on and focused on all of the negativity and stupidity that always has been and always will be part of this world.
Howard, your white privilege is showing. How many black kids are in the schools your grandkids attend? Do you know how California public schools are doing with teaching ?
Here it is.
The percentage of students in California who performed at or above the NAEP
Proficient level was 34 percent in 2019. This percentage was not significantly
different from that in 2017 (31 percent) and was higher than that in 2000 (13
percent
That was math.
The percentage of students in California who performed at or above the NAEP
Proficient level was 32 percent in 2019. This percentage was not significantly
different from that in 2017 (31 percent) and was higher than that in 1998
Reading.
The dilemma in hiring teachers is what works better? The talented teacher whose knowledge of the subject is shallow, or the teacher who has a deep understanding of the subject but lacks the skills to pass it on to someone else? When there are people who have the knowledge and the talent to teach it, they often have other opportunities that come with larger paychecks and more respect for what they do, and they take them.
You want a Great Books curriculum? Here's one of the most famous and long-lasting:
St. John's University Great Books Program.
Sappho and Virginia Woolf are XX-genetic humans in the Freshman Year program. The rest, I think, are XY-genetic humans, although Plato may be just a non-feathered biped.
a person only needs to be enrolled to get their college degree to begin teaching in public schools.
My first wife was an Ed major in college and part of her senior year was teaching in a public school. That was a long time ago when most Ed majors were smart girls who taught for a few years until their husband's careers got going.
A Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum released last year extols conservative values, attacks progressive ones and distorts civil rights history, saying, for example: “The civil rights movement was almost immediately turned into programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the Founders.”
Which is a true statement on Hillsdale's part.
Hillsdale College itself offers a “classical liberal arts core” to its students; the website lists more than 30 authors and thinkers that students will encounter — nearly all of them White men.
Which is a sexist and racist statement by Valerie Strauss.
Note: she does not say: They left out these great works, that are by women, she says "they are bad, because they got the best works, rather than being racist and sexist pigs and judging authors by their sex and skin color."
Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche
So, other than many Jane Austen, who's missing? Who should be thrown out, and why?
I'd personally be happy to toss Dickens and replace him with Austen, but even I have to admit that Dickens had more of a public effect than did Austen, and by the time she and he came along there was an America, and American writers, and Hillsdale quite properly favors American literature over its contemporary English literature.
So, unless you can make a specific case for specific replacements, and make the case based on something more than "I want some darker skinned writers" or "I want some writers with tits", you don't have a case to complain
The Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberal out of the Aristotelian tradition wants to know empirically who are the best known and most consequential thinkers, doers and creators in human history. You would expect that to some extent, those are the people we should be studying.
There was earlier work (see Charles Murray's Human Accomplishments for example) which attempted to have a structured approach to the question, but all such efforts ultimately came down to subjective choices which of course could easily reflect cultural, gender, and class biases.
A few years ago a group out of MIT attempted to put this on an empirical basis. (http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2016/01/05/authors-corner-is-fame-fair/)
Wikipedia is a low barrier to entry enterprise where almost anyone can create entries for any person (or event or thing). There are Wikipedia editions in more than 200 languages.
The researchers posited that individuals with entries in more than 25 languages could be considered globally consequential. They introduced analytics to deal with recency bias and with English language bias. The project was called Pantheon.
(https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201575#t2)
This yielded a portfolio of 11,341 people with entries in more than 25 of the different Wikipedia language editions. I.e. 11,341 people known by the greatest number of people around the world in their native language.
A fascinating research which seems never to have gotten much traction, presumably because the results were incompatible with the prejudicial fads of academia. I looked at the results five or six years ago. (https://thingfinder.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-globally-consequential-what-does.html)
To the issue of how many women one might expect to be on the list of most influential, well-known or consequential, and limiting the list to people living in the past 100 years, globally 19% of them are women. By region they are Africa 8%, Asia 19%, Europe 15%, North America 27%, Oceania 31%, South America 9%. In other words, and as an example, 8% of those making the 25 language cutoff who are from Africa are women. 27% of those making the 25 language cutoff who are from North America are women.
From a different angle, 42% of all women deemed globally consequential are American.
Focusing on STEM, only 477 people are primarily identified as STEM who also make the 25 language cutoff. Of the 477 who are STEM, only 3.6% are women.
None of this answers the normative question about who and how many women should be recognized as influential, consequential and well-known. It does answer the descriptive question: Among all Wikipedia editors and language editions, which people and which women are most widely recognized as influential, consequential and well-known?
A start. And very interesting in the details.
Jonathan said...
Dumb question: does Bronte not merit inclusion?
Well, if you look at the "English Literature" (vs "American Literature") section, who would you pull out and replace with one / all of the Bronte sisters?
Did they have more of an impact than Dickens? Who else is even remotely their contemporary?
Jupiter said...
"I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche."
Yeah, and if you looked at the reading list at Beijing U, you'd see a lot of names ending in -ng. That's because Beijing U is a Chinese University in a Chinese country, and aims to continue and improve Chinese civilization. See how that works?
*************
Why, that's crazy "Whiteness" talk!!
What's even more ironic, Pacific Rim countries are turning out thousands of accomplished classical musicians, while that genre is dying out here
Don't they know they are "culturally appropriating" the music of their colonial oppressors?
"Hillsdale charters are overwhelmingly white... 70% white or more."
So, pretty much like... America.
or they wanted an easy job with 2 months off in the summmer.
I plead Guilty.
It is kind of an outrage that Jane Austen isn't on the list. You could always teach Plato's Symposium, where Socrates says he learned everything he knows about the all-important subject of eros from a woman named Diotima--otherwise unknown. She apparently described "love of boys" (by men) as a necessary step, or at least a step way above average in its usefulness, on the way to wisdom. Maybe there could be a family-friendly drag show with no penis-showing, but readings from this dialogue. There is a fairly creepy guy named Pausanius in the dialogue; he complains that even in relatively easy-going Athens the authorities are hypocrites, making at least some effort to crack down on his kind of homosexuality. Also a fantastic speech by the comic poet Aristophanes: we wander through life looking for our other half, who may look a bit strange. A step or two above Mary Shelley, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis and Robin DiAngelo. Class: compare and contrast.
As others said, where are the Brontes? And Mary Shelley did invent an entire genre. These women writers were taught before going woke became required.
Be really daring and include Ayn Rand in the philosophers.
When my daughter read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" I joined her. I associated Angelou with not-to-my-taste poetry, so I was pleasantly surprised. She was a stellar fiction writer.
J Melcher said...
We ARE talking K-12 readers, not college students.
Any literature course that omits Jane Austin (Pride and Prejudice) is faulty.
That's a strong statement from someone who doesn't know the actual reading list.
Or do you have it? Not author names, but the books they use? because I can't find it on the web.
On par with Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) we should include Laura Engles Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, and Lucy Maude Montgomery (Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, and Anne of Green Gables).
"We"? So this is your program now?
On par with Dickens we have Elizabeth Gaskell and Cranford.
Dickens wrote over 70 books. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote what, 10?
Are you trying to claim she had even remotely the same impact on England that Dickens did?
We can add Mary Shelly with Frankenstein, who might arguably be credited with INVENTING her genre.
Sure, if you want to discuss the horror genre.
Apparently they don't
I wouldn't object too much to Lorraine Vivian Hansberry and her autobiographical work To Be Young Gifted and Black, if only for her portrayal of her own most influential literature teacher.
That's so generous of you. I'm sure Hillsdale appreciates your generosity
Ann,
Did you ever attend a graduation ceremony at Wisconsin? If so, what percentage of UW "doctorates" came from the College of Education?
It's not going to be engraved in stone, but I used a preposition where my staff writers recommended a conjunction, in "while adding them to the curriculum in equal numbers of even a significant plurality." Corrected version below, please update when the paperback comes out:
If you're going to teach an overview of the best of Western Civ, you cannot simultaneously maintain that women and non-whites were oppressed, while adding them to the curriculum in equal numbers or even a significant plurality. Either their talents were smothered or they weren't, choose one."
My wife was high school valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa. Not dumb. Taught in public secondary ed for years. Did some time in local business or jr. colleges, and some time as an adjunct at a satellite campus of a highly-regarded state college. In the latter, it was discovered that students who could finesse their schedules preferred adjuncts with secondary public ed backgrounds because they could TEACH. And they really needed to learn because the adjuncts taught the earlier courses whose material was necessary to the next level.
Being a professor means having demonstrated mastery of a certain material. It does not mean to gladly teach.
The professors I met through my wife's work didn't seem any brighter outside of their area than anyone else.
If anything, you'd have thought they were going to emigrate en masse from this hellhole.
Upshot: not only do teachers not need to be smart, there is no halcyon yesteryear where teachers were a lot smarter.
**************
Not exactly a ringing endorsement of teachers, is it...
And....wanna 'splain why, in those non-existent halcyon yesteryear, elementary and high-school teachers WERE able to offer solid education in history, civics, English, math and the sciences, but today they can't or don't????
If nothing's changed, why is American education failing?
If you're going to introduce Students to the "Western Literary tradition" and "The Great Books of Western Civilization" and you're limited to 30, there's no reason to start counting the number of Skirts or non-whites. What could be dumber? Its contrary to the whole objective that Western art and ideas are important. But hey, who cares about that? Let have affirmative action to get the "Correct" number of wimmin and browns, and blacks! And why stop there? Where are the explicit Lesbians & Gays, the Transgenders, or the Indians Chinese, Arabs and Latinos?
Its not WHO is writing these books that's important, its WHATs in them. People concerned with the WHO when it comes to art and idea are just exposing the fact they don't really care about Western art or ideas. And that gives you a clue why someone like Strauss brings it up.
"That was a long time ago when most Ed majors were smart girls who taught for a few years until their husband's careers got going."
Yep, that describes two my older relatives. Became HS teacher in the early 40s. Had they been born 40 years later, they would've gone into Business and risen high in the Corporate world. That's what their daughters did.
My cousin had his three kids go to a Hillsdale Charter School. Great kids, great education, superior to any public school in the area. Two of his kids are female - they think independently and don't put up with any nonsense from any politician, regardless of party. The readings they 'had to endure' make them smart, strong and independent.
Oh, and the family is Hispanic. Which may or may not be POC.
Wasn’t Eliot a woman? That would make it two who crossed the line.
"Given that the list of authors includes an 'Eliot' as an English author, they may be referring to George Eliot rather than T.S. This would double the number of females on the list."
It's disrespectful to George Eliot that they didn't even notice this problem. If they had picked GE rather than TSE, they would have noticed. I guarantee you it's TSE that they mean.
Look at the pattern of students through college. Take TTU when I went decades ago. HUGE Freshman Engineering class. Gateway courses are Calculus, Chemistry 111 series, and Statics and Dynamics. Much smaller Sophomore class. Oddly enough, the Business Department has a much larger Sophomore class, inheriting a lot of the Freshmen from Engineering who could not quite make the Calculus. They pick up a few more who lose it in Diff Eq and Physics in the Sophomore year. Then you have what they call quant in the Business department. Quantitative Analysis, they say. In the Engineering Department it is known as cookbook stat. This is the first gateway course in business. Those who cannot pass it, move on to Education. This was before the Nursing program was added, that changed it some, but it is the historical pattern. The reason NO ONE does studies on it is that it is inconvenient. They do not WANT studies on the pattern that follows, because it says bad things about the Education Department. Me, I would rather my kids were taught by people who have majors in subjects, and then get a minor in education so they can teach. Just seems to make a hell of a lot more sense to me.
These lists are difficult because you're trying to give young students a taste of the great thinkers and writers of Western Civilization. And because its an American list, we need to have some Yankees on there. Here's my breakdown:
Greeks: Aeschylus, Sophocles
Romans Middle ages: Virgil, Ovid, Dante
Brits: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot
Americans: Twain, Faulkner, Thoreau, Hemingway, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Frost.
Philosphers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche.
Personally, I toss out Whitman and Hawthorne. And put in Ezra Pound (His abc of reading is a classic) and Austen.
George Eliot is the most forgotten Great author. She was greatly respected and popular while she was alive and for a long time afterwards. His reputation seems to have gone downhill after WW II Don't know why.
Good thread. i too thought of teaching HS or whatever when I retired. I could teach history or an American Lit class with my eyes closed not to mention Finance 101 or a few others.
But as others have mentioned, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. I sympathize with Teachers who want to protect their jobs and don't want people "parchuting" into their profession, but isn't there a teacher shortage?
Its too bad. I coulda been a contender, but I'll settle for being a bum - a beach bum.
I taught for nearly 30 years(82-2010) as an adjunct in Southern New Hampshire University business school. Mostly in the MBA program but once in a while as an undergrad.
A fair amount of rigor was expected of me.
I also (01-03) earned an Ms in their school of education. No academic rigor at all. We never did cut and paste with scissors but came close. Cutting and pasting for research papers was common and encouraged.
It was an intellectual/academic wasteland. It looks good on the resume though since I do a lot of training for clients.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
In literature, they certainly have plenty of options for consequential females, but almost everywhere else, the long history of western civ was male dominated, and thus all the potential great women would have been weeded out by culture, consequently there were no female Homers or Socrateses (Socratis?) to choose from, and thus you would always have a curriculum dominated by males. And since the vast majority of western culture is also white, they would also be white. Stupid argument to say that it should not be dominated by the people who dominated the thought circles of the last 2000 years. The argument is, that these people did present the great ideas, and one fault we have is that they failed to in one great idea, which is to mine the combined intellect of all available people, not just the well connected. But that does not mean we don't teach their ideas and thus damage the pursuit of intellectual development to spite their racist, misogyny that they cannot go back and undo.
Oppressed people often don't have a lot of free time for writing.
Heh. I'm such a fan of Middlemarch that T.S. didn't even come to mind.
It was just a generation ago that smart women were told they could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries. This placed brilliant women in schools. My 5 th grade teacher was an absolute genius, it was obvious. Now they are all doctors and lawyers, good for them, bad for kids. Time moves on.
Two other points
Hillsdale was founded in 1840 or so and was integrated even then.
Outside of Ed schools, how many college professors/teachers have ed degrees or even ed credits? Or any educational training other than the occasional 1-2 hr workshop? Pretty close to zero other than the occasional oddball like myself.
Yet most seem to figure it out pretty well.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Could any of the highly educated and articulate commenters or even our hostess be allowed to teach in a public school in America without a teaching “certificate” ? No they would not. And thus we are deprived of a vast reservoir of talent. The tecpadhing guild is resistant to expertise, to real world experience.
American Blacks and Hispanics read at appalling low levels. Read this and weep. https://www.city-journal.org/how-to-really-be-an-antiracist-teach-black-kids-to-read
"Upshot: not only do teachers not need to be smart, there is no halcyon yesteryear where teachers were a lot smarter."
OK. Now do the nose rings, sexual perversion and grooming. I don't recall a lot of that from my own childhood, but maybe I just didn't notice.
Wasn't george Eliot a transsexual?
Not really since she normally identified as a woman.
But calling herself "George" can let the crossdressers claim she is one one of them.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
CWJ (11:46):
One way to subtract some men while keeping the total at 37 is to subtract Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, who are all mentioned twice: there are only 34 different names in the 37. (Am I the only one who noticed?) That would make room for Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Edith Wharton, all of whom are as good as any novelist already on the list.
I would also subtract Thoreau, Whitman, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but I'd also be inclined to add some other men (Euripides, Aristophanes, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, for instance).
As for GLBTQs (which I can't help pronouncing 'glibbety-cues'), Sophocles, Plato, and Vergil seem to have been gay, Shakespeare bisexual, some others screwed up in less-easily-categorized ways: e.g. Swift, Nietzsche. Willa Cather seems to have been a lesbian, and wrote better novels than Faulkner or Hemingway, so substituting her for one or the other would be a twofer, and improve the quality of the list.
As for race, Augustine (pace Lyle Smith, 11:04) makes it clear in his voluminous writings that he was of Berber ancestry, though Romanized - his parents spoke Latin at home in small-town what-is-now-Algeria.
George Eliot hid her sex behind a male pseudonym.
"Presentism" is a terrible thing, among the worst kinds of bigotry.
What? No Nobel Prize winning Dylan. Tsk, tsk.
Blogger rcocean said...
. . . Had they been born 40 years later, they would've gone into Business and risen high in the Corporate world. That's what their daughters did.
So the daughters adopted male values? What is good about rising high in the corporate world? It is not a good in itself.
"Oppressed people often don't have a lot of free time for writing."
Yeah, look at all great women writers. political thinkers, and philosphers since they got the vote in 1919. There's zillions! Oh wait, wimmen are still being Oppressed. Damn that patriarchy!
"OK. Now do the nose rings, sexual perversion and grooming. I don't recall a lot of that from my own childhood, but maybe I just didn't notice."
There was probably none in your childhood, but if you grew up in the 60s there was a lot of political indoctrination in certain schools, as much if not more than now.
And there's not a *lot* of "sexual perversion and grooming" at all. The question itself makes you look like a moron.
Generally, you get fired for that nonsense. Not nose rings, though.
"Could any of the highly educated and articulate commenters or even our hostess be allowed to teach in a public school in America without a teaching “certificate” ? "
Sure. They'd have to get the cert *while* they were teaching, but it's pretty easy to do. And you're not "deprived" of a vast reservoir of teaching talent. If they wanted to teach, they'd teach, and there's no evidence they'd be any better at it.
"The tecpadhing guild is resistant to expertise, to real world experience."
Totally untrue. In fact, teachers are the prime believers in real world experience. Ask any researcher who wants us to heed his bullshit study that didn't match (wait for it) the real world.
"American Blacks and Hispanics read at appalling low levels."
Higher than at any point in history until the idiots got their way and implemented Common Core, which dropped reading scores slightly.
"It was just a generation ago that smart women were told they could be teachers, nurses, or secretaries. This placed brilliant women in schools."
"Not exactly a ringing endorsement of teachers, is it..."
Not sure which part--the part that brains don't make better teachers, or that they're smarter than they've ever been.
"And....wanna 'splain why, in those non-existent halcyon yesteryear, elementary and high-school teachers WERE able to offer solid education in history, civics, English, math and the sciences, but today they can't or don't????"
They didn't. All available evidence on test scores shows that we've improved black and Hispanic scores, and kept more kids of all races in schools.
"If nothing's changed, why is American education failing?"
It's not failing. The standards are unreachable. The only reason you delude yourself that we did a better job in earlier generations is because people could drop out and no one had to take hard classes. In the years from 1950 to now, we are teaching more kids harder topics, which they grasp somewhat better,keeping more kids in school, and not writing off black and Hispanic kids. The only thing that's changed is that morons think you can teach anyone anything, so the test scores that are actually better than in the past are deemed "below average".
Hillsdale College went to its many knees when Clairmont Institute, the once-distinguished conservative think tank took over the college, then plunged into Trumpism, illiberalism, and lying about the 2020 election. Larry Arnn, the Vice Chairman at Clairmont, was appointed President at Hillsdale. Lots of the Institute's authors and scholars had already jumped off the cliff.
Among them, law professor John C. Eastman, who contrived an illegal plan to stop president-elect Joe Biden from moving into the White House.
Clairmont Lincoln Fellow conspiracist and “king of fake news” Jack Michael Posobiec III. Posobiec, already well known as a promoter of the Pizzagate hoax and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, was then working as a correspondent and host for the One America News Network (OANN), which became one of the major promoters of false claims about the 2020 election. Claremont remains proud of their affiliation with Posobiec, with an institute official recently calling him “one of the best public political voices in America”—just days before it was revealed that a right-wing website Posobiec frequently promoted was a Russian disinformation project.
And among the latest crop of Lincoln Fellows is Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing youth-mobilizing group Turning Point USA. Kirk bragged about sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight” for Trump on January 6. After his slimy “Falkirk Center,” co-founded with Jerry Falwell Jr., imploded, Kirk was ousted from Liberty University. The Claremont Institute has welcomed him with open arms.
The institute’s best-known scholar is Michael Anton, author of the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay. The essay, published pseudonymously on the CRB website, provided a rare intellectual defense of Trump and was promoted by Rush Limbaugh in the months leading up to November 2016. Its premise was that Democrats posed a threat to the country analogous to the 9/11 terrorists and that the election of Hillary Clinton would mean certain death for America (“a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto").
Finally, we have Glenn Ellmers, a full-flame fanatic, senior fellow, and visiting research scholar at Hillsdale College. Ellmers’s essay begins by characterizing his enemy, which, it turns out, consists of the majority of the country: “Most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” The people he has in mind are the ones who voted for Joe Biden. The real and “authentic” Americans are, “by and large,” the 74 million people who voted for Trump—“the vast numbers of heartland voters who still call themselves Americans.” For Ellmers, there is only “the one, authentic America”; the rest of the people in this country “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.” He goes on: “It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.” Ok - how about non-white furriners?
A good discussion, with lots of fine suggestions for writers in addition to those mentioned. Note that you would need the entire course catalog from Hillsdale, including syllabi, to be sure that none of your favored authors (of color, sex, proclivity) are taught there.
Hillsdale College went to its many knees when Claremont Institute, the once-distinguished conservative think tank took over the college, then plunged into Trumpism, illiberalism, and lying about the 2020 election. Larry Arnn, the Vice Chairman at Claremont, was appointed President at Hillsdale. Lots of the Institute's authors and scholars had already jumped off the cliff.
Among them, law professor John C. Eastman contrived an illegal plan to stop president-elect Joe Biden from moving into the White House.
Claremont Lincoln Fellow conspiracist and “king of fake news” Jack Michael Posobiec III. Posobiec, already well known as a promoter of the Pizzagate hoax and the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, was then working as a correspondent and host for the One America News Network (OANN), which became one of the major promoters of false claims about the 2020 election. Claremont remains proud of their affiliation with Posobiec, with an institute official recently calling him “one of the best public political voices in America”—just days before it was revealed that a right-wing website Posobiec frequently promoted was a Russian disinformation project.
And among the latest crop of Lincoln Fellows is Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing youth-mobilizing group Turning Point USA. Kirk bragged about sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight” for Trump on January 6. After his slimy “Falkirk Center,” co-founded with Jerry Falwell Jr., imploded, Kirk was ousted from Liberty University. The Claremont Institute has welcomed him with open arms.
The institute’s best-known scholar is Michael Anton, author of the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay. The essay, published pseudonymously on the CRB website, provided a rare intellectual defense of Trump and was promoted by Rush Limbaugh in the months leading up to November 2016. Its premise was that Democrats posed a threat to the country analogous to the 9/11 terrorists and that the election of Hillary Clinton would mean certain death for America (“a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto").
Finally, we have Glenn Ellmers, a full-flame fanatic, senior fellow, and visiting research scholar at Hillsdale College. Ellmers’s essay begins by characterizing his enemy, which, it turns out, consists of the majority of the country: “Most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” The people he has in mind are the ones who voted for Joe Biden. The real and “authentic” Americans are, “by and large,” the 74 million people who voted for Trump—“the vast numbers of heartland voters who still call themselves Americans.” For Ellmers, there is only “the one, authentic America”; the rest of the people in this country “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.” He goes on: “It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.” Ok - how about non-white furriners?
Blogger Michael said...
Could any of the highly educated and articulate commenters or even our hostess be allowed to teach in a public school in America without a teaching “certificate” ? No they would not. And thus we are deprived of a vast reservoir of talent.
I retired after back surgery at 55. I had 10 acres on Vashon Island and was thinking of building house there. I thought maybe I could spend my time teaching biology at Vashon high school. Nope. No certificate.
To be sure, the Hillsdale page lists a number of writers and thinkers who the students will 'encounter.' That hardly suggests comprehensive reading of all the works possible, especially when the names listed are not exhaustive.
No Rousseau? Darwin? The ogres Marx and Freud? Thank God they study Nietzsche, anyway.
I would hope they get some exposure to Machiavelli, Gibbon, even some Clausewitz. I notice one of their topical special studies--"American Generals." Let them have Grant.
For many years, my selective liberal arts university in the Pacific Northwest region has produced high school math teachers who were highly employable. Our math department has had a mathematics education major that requires most of the upper level courses required for the traditional math major along with a trio of math education courses TAUGHT IN THE MATH DEPARTMENT by people with PhD's in mathematics (plus additional education training). With a bachelors in math ed (or pure math) plus a one-year MS in education, our students passed the state praxis exams and were snapped up by schools. Apparently, however, the education school here has recently eliminated the requirement that its masters students interested in high school math certifications take the Math Department advanced course in teaching high school mathematics, so the enrollment in that course has plummeted, and that course is on the chopping block. I suspect that eliminating the secondary ed math course helps preserve the all-important multi-culti, multi-gender, feelz- and anti-racism focused ed courses. I wonder what impact the change will have on the employability of our math ed grads, but I am more sure about the impact that will have on K12 students.
"[American education is] not failing. The standards are unreachable. The only reason you delude yourself that we did a better job in earlier generations is because people could drop out and no one had to take hard classes."
I was recently looking at old high school yearbooks and was shocked to realize how true that is. When I was a senior, almost no one took AP Science. The last year I taught high school, it was expected for about a third of the class. Most people then took no math past Algebra I and Geometry. Lots of people took "business" courses like typing that don't even exist any more. And of course there were a lot more drop-outs.
Whether modern students actually remember much of what they are supposed to learn is a different question. My experience is that they don't. The standards are feel good and impossible.
At Penn State, the College Of Education was commonly referred to as Grade 13
The valedictorian of my high school class back in the 60s went to Harvard for his BS and Stanford for his MS in physical education and education, respectively, and then spent his career as a PE teacher and football coach.
It's not a great thing for a college president to say... but it's also not wrong.
There are degrees you flunk out of, degrees you flunk into, and a pile in the middle. Education is firmly in the "flunk into" category.
The reading list looks like a slightly cut down version of a college classical curriculum. You can always quibble about some inclusions, but representationalism is the least convincing reason for doing so.
For my parents' generation (and further back, in Lyndon Johnson's) the state teachers' college was a way off the farm or the factory floor, so I don't feel like knocking them that much now. A lot has changed in Ed Depts since then to be sure.
I do wish that my high school English teachers hadn't all gone to state teacher's colleges. They didn't exactly inspire or awaken young minds, but the teachers in other departments who had better credentials weren't always inspiring either, and often had other problems.
" Most people then took no math past Algebra I and Geometry. "
Yep. In 1980, just 32% of students took Algebra II or beyond.
"Whether modern students actually remember much of what they are supposed to learn is a different question."
Preach.
The institute’s best-known scholar is Michael Anton, author of the infamous “Flight 93 Election” essay. The essay, published pseudonymously on the CRB website, provided a rare intellectual defense of Trump and was promoted by Rush Limbaugh in the months leading up to November 2016. Its premise was that Democrats posed a threat to the country analogous to the 9/11 terrorists and that the election of Hillary Clinton would mean certain death for America (“a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto").
gadfly points out another "conspiracy theory" that came true. What we have now is as bad as Hillary would have been. Are you still defending Biden and his regime ?
Totally untrue. In fact, teachers are the prime believers in real world experience. Ask any researcher who wants us to heed his bullshit study that didn't match (wait for it) the real world.
It's nice to have the teachers' union point of view.
I'm seeing Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. Only one woman crossed the line.
Yes, and from that listing Dickinson (like Eliot, honestly) seems a bit like she might have slipped in under the wire because someone was a fan. The rest are all solid picks. I might have substituted Jane Austen or Edmund Burke for Thoreau, though -- I know he's "important" to understanding his little historical moment, but he just seems like such a pretentious git.
The university I attended was founded as an all women's Catholic College - no surprise they were well respected for creating teachers and librarians.
The key was - they have never provided anyone with an undergraduate degree in 'Education'. Sure, you can take all the courses required for teacher certification there, but you must also major in something - Math, English, History, etc.
When I asked the University president about it she (a Nun who had taught everything K-Grad school at one of the many schools the religious order owned and ran) replied "You have to actually KNOW SOMETHING in order to teach anything." Then she had a bit of a rant about the stupid people who just get degrees in education but what would they possibly educate anyone with?
Sadly, I am sure that nun is long gone and so are her entirely sensible takes on education.
I would divide the list by subjects
Epic poetry
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton - There's no woman to add
Philosophy
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche. There's no woman to add.
Plays
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare. Is there a woman playwright in this class?
Poetry
Ovid, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Yeats, Eliot, Frost
Emily Dickinson is a poet and better than Ovid or Wordsworth.
Here I really question the "canon."
Swift, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner
What about:
Social novel: Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Jane Austen
Horror and suspense which was practically founded as a genre by Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Ann Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho)
Mystery - Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Charlotte Armstrong, JK Rowling
Children's books - JK Rowling, Beatrix Potter, Laura Ingalls Wilder, LM Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, E Nesbit
It's as if from the late Nineteenth Century on women are writing in "niche" categories and even the greatest fame, the most enormous sales and the most established presence among readers hasn't freed them from their niche or turned them into writers who deserve study. Moreover, most of these enormously popular women writers were contradicting the established themes of their times, i.e., mystery writers using social expectations to hide "whodunnit" in plain sight; children's writers attacking present day education or the emphasis on money and class in relation to marriage. The interplay between enormous popularity and actual direct contradiction of socially established norms and memes is always interesting in reading women writers.
The only thing that's changed is that morons think you can teach anyone anything, so the test scores that are actually better than in the past are deemed "below average".
When I in 7th grade, in the late 60's, I took algebra. A few years ago, I happened to look at my 7th-grade great-niece's math homework. She was being asked to "estimate" the area of a 6 X 7 rectangle. Not "calculate" the area, that would be too hard. Just "estimate". Like, "around 50". They included a picture of said rectangle, apparently as an aid to the estimation process. I am fairly sure that this pedagogical innovation originated in a Department of Education.
The faculty at the University of California produced a report on the predictive value of SAT/ACT on return after freshman year, and on-time graduation, disaggregated by race/ethnicity, and strongly recommended retaining the tests. The Board of Regents ignored them.
MIT, and also Lowell High School in SF, have reinstated entrance exams.
"And there's not a *lot* of "sexual perversion and grooming" at all. The question itself makes you look like a moron. Generally, you get fired for that nonsense."
Ah. So if I don't want to look like a moron, I'd better stop asking about the sexual perverts and groomers infesting the public schools, and the corrupt and criminal school boards that encourage and protect them. I begin dimly to perceive the outline of the sort of "educational realism" you espouse.
Retired teacher here. I can vouch for the dumb part. My former college teaching supervisor told me a joke on his crew: “If you can’t do, teach. And if you can’t teach, teach teachers.”
Btw, he was a very mediocre teacher but props to him for being able to tweak his own.
The woman writer I would place most highly on the list would be Emily Dickinson. She was brilliant. Also likecZjane Austen, Harper Lee (edited version), and Flannery O’Connor.
In 1900, most Americans sent their kids to public schools, and Americans in large cities often relied upon public transportation. Americans outside the large cities have long since developed systems of private transportation that take us where we want to go, when we want to go there, at a price that is high but acceptable. But for some reason, we are still using the same shitty public "education" systems that have only gotten worse as their price has increased by a factor of one hundred or more.
Your kids aren't criminals. Don't send them to prison.
Don't misunderstand me--the mostly public education system created after WWII, with its myriad promotions from normal school to college to university (to Carnegie R1 status for my alma mater, yay!) was one of the true wonders of the world.
But as Amis pere noted about the parallel development in the UK, "more will mean worse." It was impossible, here as well as in Europe, to maintain traditional subjects and standards in the face of a flood of new and not that well-prepped students, even if the world hadn't needed wholly new areas of expertise.
History PhD programs at quite mediocre state u's once required reading knowledge of a minimum of 2 or 3 foreign languages for non-AmHist candidates; now 2 is a lot and 1 is normal. I'm not as familiar with other disciplines but suspect the same in the more traditional humanities.
Blogger Wa St Blogger said...
... And since the vast majority of western culture is also white, they would also be white. Stupid argument to say that it should not be dominated by the people who dominated the thought circles of the last 2000 years. The argument is, that these people did present the great ideas, and one fault we have is that they failed to in one great idea, which is to mine the combined intellect of all available people, not just the well connected. But that does not mean we don't teach their ideas and thus damage the pursuit of intellectual development to spite their racist, misogyny that they cannot go back and undo.
********
Can you point us to any non-Western civilizations that did NOT engage in racism, misogyny and slavery?
Can you explain how Jesus was "well-connected"?
For that matter can you explain Marxism? Mohammed?
FAIL
The ogres Marx and Freud?
**********
Both charlatans, proven so again and again and again.
At least Freud didn't cause a hundred million deaths.
(But you don't hear about him any more. do you.....)
Were the Ancient Greeks and Romans “white”?
"So if I don't want to look like a moron, I'd better stop asking about the sexual perverts and groomers infesting the public schools, and the corrupt and criminal school boards that encourage and protect them. I begin dimly to perceive the outline of the sort of "educational realism" you espouse."
No. If you don't want to look like a moron, don't act as if a few examples on a hack's twitter feed are an infestation, much less that school boards are universally corrupt and criminal.
"I am fairly sure that this pedagogical innovation originated in a Department of Education."
Well, it's actually something you can look up as opposed to speculate. And when you do, you'll find that the standards were written by math professors. Not education professors: math professors. DoE has squat to do with curriculum.
And the people who encouraged that being taught at a young age were education reformers--the people who agree with you that teachers are stupid because ed schools.
Mary Martha, the beloved nun didn't know what she was talking about. Ed schools have nothing to do with what teachers teach. That's set by the state.
It's bizarre, given this is a law professor's blog, how many people post here just to emote about nonsense.
Like this:
"I can vouch for the dumb part. "
Oh, well, because your personal experience is what we should rely on, rather than data.
"It's nice to have the teachers' union point of view."
I'm a Republican, Trump voter, and I loathe teachers' unions. Not because they damage much, though. Totally ineffectual.
This is for K-12. Boot Yeats as redundant and Melville, save short stories, as college work. Austen and George Eliot, thought Eliot may be better for college too. If so, add in some Bronte instead or Frankenstein. If you must teach Thoreau, make it an object lesson in failure.
But the exercise is a bad one. Grade schoolers should have their own list. Wilder and Five Little Peppers -- building blocks for reading long-form, teaching American history in the one case and exposing them to our cultural origins in the other.
Frost? Incomprehensible as a stand-alone. Plenty of room for other male and female poets. He's not that great anyway.
Education Realist: can you explain why the AERA, the largest professional group for education professors, put terrorist and predatory rapist Bill Ayers in charge of their National Curriculum Board for a decade, as they quietly filled classrooms with lesson plans from the SPLC? Those chubby grade school teachers treated him like a rock star.
And yet another article about education which fails to discuss chronically absent students & extreme behavior problems.
This is not a k-12 list. The author starts talking about a k-12 curriculum, but then switches to a Hillsdale classical core, which is a foundation in Western and American thought.
I know this isn't k-12 because my kids attend a Hillsdale sponsored charter. Next year, my middle schooler will read To Kill a Mockingbird. Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor are also on the high school list. In addition, my grade schooler read Fredrick Douglas last year.
"And yet another article about education which fails to discuss chronically absent students & extreme behavior problems."
It sounds like you are a bad person who blames the victim. Therefore, you should not be listened to.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Hildegard of Bingen
Teresa of Avila
Edith Stein
"I'm a Republican, Trump voter, and I loathe teachers' unions."
Would you by any chance be a "life-long" Republican?
Talked to a teacher yesterday, one semester short of fifty years in secondary ed.
Below a certain number passes, the teacher is in trouble with the school. Corrective action must be taken. Issues with students not doing their work are irrelevant.
It's not worth it. And so....pass.
Grading down for late work is not allowed, or if it is, it's going to cause a fail, so...there's no grading down for late work.
Our daughter....National Honor Society in high school. President of the student council. Editor of the yearbook. Varsity soccer. Student rep to the city council. her senior year.
In college, tapped for s service honorary, ran two Alternative Spring Breaks trips, one to paint a woman's shelter in New Orleans, the other to work in a food pantry in Brooklyn. First year out of high school was an exchange student in Venezuela where, because she took over the class when the teacher didn't show up which was frequently, she got the nickname "profi"
Highly regarded at both high schools where she taught. Was driven out of public education by two assaults by students about which the principal did nothing.
Quite happy in Christian school.
Lots more going on than dumb teachers.
Having said that, I know teachers today who are not dumb in the conventional sense, but if you did some kind of assessment of what they espouse, you'd think so. Much more obvious they have a Narrative and they'e either lying or have convinced themselves of nonsense.
Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" covers the Western Cultural thinkers who influenced the famed thinkers of the last 500 years. Fascinating read.
effinayright, I would hope that any survey of Western history would include both Marx and Freud. What possible justification could there be for omitting them, if the goal is to produce people who understand the important parts of the last few centuries?
Those yo-yos were world-historical, and educated people should know something about their works and influence.
Narr,
History PhD programs at quite mediocre state u's once required reading knowledge of a minimum of 2 or 3 foreign languages for non-AmHist candidates; now 2 is a lot and 1 is normal. I'm not as familiar with other disciplines but suspect the same in the more traditional humanities.
When I was a musicology student at Cal, the traditional choices were French, German, and liturgical Latin. But the requirement had been reduced to two languages besides English, and the choices expanded. So I did German and Italian. Flunked the German first time, b/c Taruskin set the exam, and it began with a graf-long sentence that ended with about six or seven stacked-up verbs. I spent 45 minutes on that, wrote "First sentence a total loss," and used the rest of my time to translate the rest of the passage, which was much easier. Taruskin: "Well, it wouldn't have been much of a test if I'd just given you English with German words, now, would it?" Bastard :-)
UDee,
Yes. And the "chronic behavioral problems" are now all classified as disabilities, so that anyone not wholeheartedly on-board with the program is now "against disabled children." Noooo, we are in favor of not putting children whose "disability" consists in violent acting-out into school rooms with ordinary, nonviolent students.
Education Realist said...
No. If you don't want to look like a moron, don't act as if a few examples on a hack's twitter feed are an infestation, much less that school boards are universally corrupt and criminal.
1: The only people who would get upset about Florida's "don't say gay" law are the utterly ignorant (who don't know what's in the law), and the pro-child sex grooming.
Because no one else thinks it's appropriate for school teachers to discuss sex with kindergarteners.
2: The general customer service rule is "for every customer who complains, there's another hundred who are silent, but still bothered."
What's X in "for every teacher who posts on public social media that (s)he is sexually grooming her/his students, there's another X who are doing it but not bragging about it on public social media"?
I would guess X = 1000 or more. Since we're talking about behavior that will often get you in trouble is it gets out.
Unlike the customer service complaint, where about the biggest negative is you'll be ignored.
How many sexually grooming teachers makes an "infestation" in the US?
100? 1,000? 10,000?
At 20 students / teacher, 10,000 groomers == 200,000 groomed kids EVERY YEAR
3: The teachers unions don't fight like rabid weasels to get control of the school boards because they want to make sure the school boards are proper representatives of parents.
Every single school board that has a majority of "teacher's union" backed candidates on it is inherently corrupt.
Because their job is to monitor the schools, and you can't do that when you're in hook to the people you're supposed to be monitoring
Let us set an objective standard:
Have educational outcomes become better or worse since the imposition of the Department of Education and/or the various university-level Education programs?
If the answer is an unequivocal "YES", then by all means, let us keep on keeping on, doing as we have been.
If the answer is actually an emphatic "NO", why are we even debating the question? Shut the BS down, sow the land with salt, and fire the graduates of these programs. Shut down the DOE, while you're at it.
We don't establish standards, and we don't ever enforce any sort of consequences for failure in our various aspirational programs. You tell me that we need a "Department of Education" at any level, and my question in return is "Why? What will it accomplish? Define that, please... And, show me how long it will take to show results, so that we may revisit this question at an appropriate time, to assess the outcome of your ideas..."
We never do this, and display puzzlement at why such initiatives as "Department(s) of Education" are such signal failures. Well, of course they are, dumbass... The way you administer and assess these things, they're veritable magnets for corruption and waste. You set out by not establishing concrete goals and standards for those goals, why are you surprised that these things turn into money-pits? It's like hiring a contractor and telling him to "provide housing" for your family; by the time he gets done with it, you're going to have an essentially unlivable mansion that costs millions, because it's not in his interest to ever finish the job or make it work. He's going to worry more about spending your money, than anything else.
Stupid is as stupid does, and we've been derisively stupid with all of this.
Laymen can easily look at history professors and think something close to "money for nothing, and chicks for A's" but that;s because they don't know the realities.
Lockhart, who I mentioned before ("Firepower") has a named chair at one of our great public u's, but has to supplement his income with saleable titles like that one, and his biography of von Steuben. To pursue his interests in more obscure subjects he had to learn Danish and Russian.
Discussing his research with a hard-science colleague, he mentioned all his work in the Russian archives. The scientist speculated that it must be really expensive. "How so?," asked the history prof.
"Oh, you know, paying for all the translation."
That one cracks me up.
Education Realist said...
No. If you don't want to look like a moron, don't act as if a few examples on a hack's twitter feed are an infestation, much less that school boards are universally corrupt and criminal.
1: The only people who would get upset about Florida's "don't say gay" law are the utterly ignorant (who don't know what's in the law), and the pro-child sex grooming.
Because no one else thinks it's appropriate for school teachers to discuss sex with kindergarteners.
2: The general customer service rule is "for every customer who complains, there's another hundred who are silent, but still bothered."
What's X in "for every teacher who posts on public social media that (s)he is sexually grooming her/his students, there's another X who are doing it but not bragging about it on public social media"?
I would guess X = 1000 or more. Since we're talking about behavior that will often get you in trouble is it gets out.
Unlike the customer service complaint, where about the biggest negative is you'll be ignored.
How many sexually grooming teachers makes an "infestation" in the US?
100? 1,000? 10,000?
At 20 students / teacher, 10,000 groomers == 200,000 groomed kids EVERY YEAR
3: The teachers unions don't fight like rabid weasels to get control of the school boards because they want to make sure the school boards are proper representatives of parents.
Every single school board that has a majority of "teacher's union" backed candidates on it is inherently corrupt.
Because their job is to monitor the schools, and you can't do that when you're in hook to the people you're supposed to be monitoring
Whoops, Birches, on close reading, you are right.
What does that say about those of us who bloviated about reading without reading closely? Abject apologies.
"Education Realist: can you explain why the AERA, the largest professional group for education professors, put terrorist and predatory rapist Bill Ayers in charge of their National Curriculum Board for a decade, as they quietly filled classrooms with lesson plans from the SPLC? Those chubby grade school teachers treated him like a rock star."
Ed professors and "chubby grade school teachers" aren't the same thing, and I'm pretty sure that you'd be hard pressed to prove classrooms were filled with lessons from the SPLC. Ed professors have very little to do with k12.
"Would you by any chance be a "life-long" Republican?"
No, I was a Dem until 2000 for state, 2008 nationally. I've had a blog for 10 years, dude, you think I'd lie about it for this comment section?
Greg:
" The only people who would get upset about Florida's "don't say gay" law are the utterly ignorant (who don't know what's in the law), and the pro-child sex grooming."
Not true. It appears lots of Dems are upset by it. If you want to argue that half the country is either ignorant or pro-grooming, then you're the idiot. Mind you, I agree with you. The Florida law is fine.
"The general customer service rule is "for every customer who complains, there's another hundred who are silent, but still bothered.""
Uh, no. Not true. And *Definitely* not true for online discourse, where the opposite is true. Online discourse is demonstrably not representative of any population. It's also not true for customers, by the way (Before I was a teacher, I designed customer service apps.)
So your whole logic frame is wrong.
"The teachers unions don't fight like rabid weasels to get control of the school boards because they want to make sure the school boards are proper representatives of parents."
True. So? Teachers unions do well at controlling school boards when parents don't care about issues. When parents do care, teachers are a far second to parents. School boards know who elect them.
takirks:
"Have educational outcomes become better or worse since the imposition of the Department of Education and/or the various university-level Education programs?"
Those are two separate questions. The DoE is irrelevant to educational outcomes. It mostly enforces the ESEA, which is also irrelevant toi educational outcomes. But not to funding. Various level university programs? Actually--and separately--they probably have. Again, only fools think that pre-1970s educational outcomes were better than today's.
Education Realist said...
Greg:" The only people who would get upset about Florida's "don't say gay" law are the utterly ignorant (who don't know what's in the law), and the pro-child sex grooming."
Not true. It appears lots of Dems are upset by it. If you want to argue that half the country is either ignorant or pro-grooming, then you're the idiot. Mind you, I agree with you. The Florida law is fine.
I'm entirely comfortable that the vast majority of Democrat voters go around with their heads stuffed up their backsides, I mean in a dishonest left wing bubble.
I'd be shocked if more than 10% know that the law imposes "don't talk about sex" only on K - 3. Which is to say: Ignorant
The ones who Are pissed that K teachers can't discuss sex in class? They are bad people
"The general customer service rule is "for every customer who complains, there's another hundred who are silent, but still bothered.""
Uh, no. Not true. And *Definitely* not true for online discourse, where the opposite is true.
Do people whine easily on the internet? Yes, they do
Do people easily and regularly make videos where they talk about how they go behind parents backs and discuss sex with their students, often in violation / contravention of school rules?
I find that a lot harder to believe.
Whining and complaining is free.
Bragging about doing things that can get you fired? Not so
True. So? Teachers unions do well at controlling school boards when parents don't care about issues. When parents do care, teachers are a far second to parents. School boards know who elect them.
So are you claiming that the majority of parents in a lot of school districts WANT "boys in skirts" in their daughters' bathrooms and locker rooms?
Bar groups in CA send lawyers and judges into middle and high schools to teach the Bill of Rights in history or civics classes of one kind or another. I have been participating for almost 2 decades off and on. The students are a mixed bag, but I am invariably impressed by the teachers. Maybe the fact they sign up for the program is an indicator.
AERA's national conference is for college students (many of them teaching lower grades) aspiring to rise to university teaching and for professionals who teach teachers.
So yes, maybe some of the chubby women I saw swooning over terrorist murderer Ayers were college professors and some were women teaching lower grades who were planning to become college professors. Some were from other disciplines, studying the professors themselves. Some professors and college students would pad their resumes with posters presenting research. Some sat on panels: some came to waste our money because they got a free trip.
All this is normal. What is not normal is having an unrepentant, serial bomber, wannabe cop-killer, fugitive, and sexual predator elected and re-elected for ten years to run the committee most powerful in the U.S. for deciding how to train teachers to teach the curricula in most public K-12 schools.
Post a Comment