The Education Schools have overemphasized method over content knowledge for the last century or more.  Reading this article will help you understand why we must demand a balance between the how to teach and the content knowldge of what to teach.

Oh Please—*Pedagogy Alone is Not Doing the Job!!

The Education Schools have continued to emphasize the teaching of pedagogical methods/process to the effective near exclusion of any rigorous training in the content areas that teachers are responsible to communicate to their students.  It seems obvious that the goal of education and the basis for the extremely high budgets entrusted to our public schools is only justified if the students learn content along the way.  The expenditures are hardly justified by just exposing the students to the “right” processes.  Right is in quotes because much of the pedagogy that prospective teachers are exposed to does not stand scientific scrutiny as pointed out by E.D. Hirsch Jr. in The Knowledge Deficit.  Following are some quotes from writings about this important issue.  It is vital to realize that this aspect of teacher training has barely changed in the last century because the education school faculties have shown no interest in facing the reality of the damage they are doing by brainwashing their charges in this harmful way.  It will only change if the public (we) demand that it does.

David Klein, A Brief History of American K-12 Mathematics Education in the 20th Century

It would be a mistake to think of the major conflicts in education as disagreements over the most effective ways to teach. Broadly speaking, the education wars of the past century are best understood as a protracted struggle between content and pedagogy. At first glance, such a dichotomy seems unthinkable. There should no more be conflict between content and pedagogy than between one's right foot and left foot. They should work in tandem toward the same end, and avoid tripping each other. Content is the answer to the question of what to teach, while pedagogy answers the question of how to teach.

The trouble comes with the first step. Do we lead with the right foot or the left? If content decisions come first, then the choices of pedagogy may be limited. A choice of concentrated content precludes too much student centered, discovery learning, because that particular pedagogy requires more time than stiff content requirements would allow. In the same way, the choice of a pedagogy can naturally limit the amount of content that can be presented to students. Therein lies the source of the conflict.

Arthur Levine, Executive Summary, Educating Teachers

A majority of teacher education graduates are prepared in university-based programs that suffer from low admission and graduation standards.                  

Universities use their teacher education programs as “cash cows,” requiring them to generate revenue to fund more prestigious departments.  This forces them to increase their enrollments and lower their admissions standards. Schools with low admissions standards also tend to have low graduation requirements.  

The measure of a teacher’s effectiveness is the performance of the students in her class.  The measure of a teacher education program’s success is how well the students taught by its graduates perform academically.                                                     

Quotes from Ed School Follies about Gary Lyon’s article in Texas Monthly magazine, Sept. 1979 “Why Teachers Can’t Teach.”  As reported by Rita Kramer in Ed School Follies.

A cause celebre in its time, it called teacher education in Texas—and everywhere else in the country—“a shame, a mammoth and very expensive swindle of the public interest, a hoax, and an intellectual disgrace.”

Lyons reported that half of the teacher applicants to the Houston Independent School District scored lower in math and a third of them lower in English than the average high school junior and he blamed the state’s sixty-three accredited teacher-training institutions for turning out “teachers who cannot read as well as the average sixteen-year old, write notes free of barbarisms to parents, or handle arithmetic well enough to keep track of the field-trip money.”  He accused the teacher colleges of coddling ignorance and, “backed by hometown legislators,” of turning out “hordes of certified ignoramuses whose incompetence in turn becomes evidence that the teacher colleges and the educators need yet more money and more power.”

He attacked the system that made graduation from an accredited teacher-training program tantamount to certification and heaped scorn on the education bureaucracy, backed by the National Education Association, to whom “to insist upon literacy is considered coercive and potentially harmful” and a proof of “cultural bias.”  Real knowledge and skills, he maintained, had been replaced by “matters such as sex education, driver training, drug counseling, and the proper attitude toward siblings” by “educationists”…afflicted with a cultural relativism so profound it has become an intellectual disease.

“Basic traditional academic disciplines, in which fundamental intellectual skills are supposed to be taught” had, he found, been replaced in teacher education by “a promiscuous choice of courses” that he called the intellectual equivalent of puffed wheat: one kernel of knowledge inflated by means of hot air, divided into pieces and puffed again.”  The graduates of the schools of education, “where everyone is transformed into an A student,” he charged, “are defrauded into believing they have an education,” and he identified the cause of grade inflation and trivial courses (in which “fools dissect, categorize and elaborate upon the perfectly obvious” and in which it is “virtually impossible to fail”) as the system that made the operating budgets of all state colleges dependent on the number of students enrolled.

In programs “where there is no subject matter, only method,” Lyon saw enormous amounts of money, energy, and time wasted, and suggested that future teachers could get more useful experience in less time if they were “apprenticed after securing honest college degrees to proven and experienced master teachers in actual classrooms with real kids.”   When he made the suggestion to a professor of education, the response was, “You’re talking about my job.”

It was a scathing indictment, and it included the prophecy that fully literate teachers would continue to be the exception and the incompetent the rule as the field moved “toward more specialization and more education courses … for an expanded faculty to teach … in such growth areas as special education, learning disabilities” and bilingual education, “the going things these days.”

Lyons hoped his article would blow the whistle on the existing system and that “the attack on the Educationists” monopoly over the public schools may have already begun.”

And indeed, a series of education battles fought in the Texas legislature in the ensuing years had resulted by 1987 in passage of a bill limiting the number of methods courses for future teachers to eighteen hours, about half the previous requirement, beginning in 1991.  Senate Bill 994 also abolished the undergraduate education major.  The intention was to have more time for future teachers to acquire a general education in subjects and skills, to become literate and numerate.

The response of the ed school establishment was predictable.  The Journal of Teacher Education, in its issue of November-December 1988, reported on the new law in an article titled “Assault on Teacher Education in Texas.”  In addition, the head of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, in an editorial entitled “Outrage in Texas,” appearing in the organization’s publication ACCTE Briefs, reported “hostility,” “dismay,” and a “numbing effect” among ed school faculty and went on to speak of “a Kafka-like nightmare” in which “shock, anger, and disbelief” were joined by a “feeling of betrayal.”  To him, any reduction in the time future teachers spend studying pedagogy means that they “will be less prepared to teach,” an understandable reaction from those with a vested interest in the teaching of pedagogy. 

The experience of the Lyon episode shows that the education establishment has great staying power to prevent having to change.  They ignore the truth; denigrate their detractors as not being “education experts,” etc.  As you can see no really positive, lasting change occurred.  While it is obvious that to serve our children’s educational needs requires great change, it is also obvious that it will not be a battle, it will be a long war and the advocates for the welfare of the children will have to be unrelenting in their pressure if the needed change is to occur.  I will leave you with a last quote from Rita Kramer.

The people who become “educators” and who run our school systems usually have degrees in education, psychology, social sciences, public administration; they are not people who have studied, know, and love literature, history, science, or philosophy.  Our “educators” are not educated.  They do not love learning.   Naturally enough, they think of the past as dead because it has never been alive to them.  And they will not bring it alive for their pupils.

Definitions:

*          “Pedagogy” The strategies, techniques, and approaches that teachers can use to facilitate learning. 

**        "Constructivism" A psychological term used by educational specialists to sanction the practice of "self-paced learning" and "discovery learning." The term implies that only constructed knowledge--knowledge which one finds out for one's self--is truly integrated and understood. It is certainly true that such knowledge is very likely to be remembered and understood, but it is not the case, as constructivists imply, that only such self-discovered knowledge will be reliably understood and remembered. This incorrect claim plays on an ambiguity between the technical and nontechnical uses of the term "construct" in the psychological literature...   

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