by Dr. U » December 10th, 2007, 5:20 am
Just read through the 3 pp of RusM's posts about Education on Christian Forum. Very well written and cogent. RusM: You might consider working this up into a book at some point - seriously. I promise to read Gatto, (which in Spanish or Italian, would mean I promise to read the cat, but I digress), as soon as I get a chance, probably after finals are done.
I can add several of my own observations from several points in life, corroborating what he says.
(1) I went through public education in Chicago in the 1960s/early 1970s. I tell some people I know who live in suburban Philadelphia stories of what went on there, and some of them can't believe I'm telling the truth, sounds too much like Charles Dickens! However, my students from inner-city Philadelphia, Camden, Chester, Baltimore, Washington and NYC believe everything I witnessed, b/c their schools today are as bad or worse. And I was not even in a bad neighborhood, just a lower middle class factory area.
The political patronage system of the Democratic Party that has run Chicago for generations protected incredible laziness and incompetence. I witnessed as a child at least two teachers who were mentally ill, one with symptoms that may have been Alzheimers and another - a 1st grade teacher - who was something like a sociopath, making children do things like crawl on all fours and bark in front of her. Parents tried and tried to get the really bad teachers removed, but they were protected by the Democratic Party. The principal of my elementary school would blow cigarette smoke into the face of parents who complained about teachers. (I am no fan of the Republican Party, may I add, but they don't run Chicago.)
For children from poorer families, it's a horrible situation - there are few alternatives, and it is compulsory.
(2) Like RusM, by the end of HS, I was poorly prepared for life. I came into college through the back door while working a labor job. A night class here and there at a junior college on subjects that piqued my interest helped me discover or rediscover how much I really enjoyed learning, after my schooling had, frankly, taken it away. Eventually, I decided to try a semester FT, and kept going. The further I went in my studies, eventually into graduate school, the harder the courses became, but the better my grades became. Looking back, I had to unlearn all the passivity that the school system promotes and learn to feed myself - and organize my time efficiently and work hard. (I tell my science majors early on that one way I know I have succeeded as their teacher is when they begin turning in papers that show that they now know more than I do about a subject - indicating they are successfully teaching themselves and no longer need me.) I eventually got a Ph.D., did research for 8 years, and then accepted a FT job as a Biology professor, which is what I do still.
I have met some very brilliant scientists in my life, and it strikes me how the best don't fit the standard educational package. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, for example, was home-schooled. His parents didn't do this for Christian reasons - they weren't Christians -but b/c they believed he would get an inferior education to what they could give him. I worked for some years with a Jewish man who won the Nobel Prize. He received most of his pre-college education in yeshiva schools, then blitzed through an MD/PhD. I'm not remotely in their league, but I was surprised how fast I was able to learn Spanish without a class as an adult, after miserable experiences trying to learn German or Russian in high school classes. I'm convinced we're wasting years of the lives of students the way we teach currently. I agree with RusM, after also doing my own background reading about how the current US Education system developed in the 20th Century, that it's about social control more than about training children and young adults in knowledge and wisdom.
Fortunately so far for the US, most university professors do not have to go through the "Education" training process. There's always some deadwood in any university, but - I can only really speak for science - there are still many very good science faculty getting out there. As RusM discusses in his posts, however, NONE of them would be able to teach HS science without several years of "Education" courses!
Along those lines, another scientist I worked with was the son of poor immigrants who escaped Czarist pogroms to come to NYC. During the Depression in the 1930s, it was not uncommon for unemployed Ph.D.s to teach HS science classes. (There were not all the "Education" hoops there are now - they were considered basically competent to teach science b/c they were scientists!) That was the case for my colleague, he had several HS science teachers with Ph.D.s, in a HS in a poor neighborhood in NYC. He later went on to develop the production methods for two vaccines that you would all recognize, profoundly benefiting world health, and many lesser known scientific accomplishments as well. He revisited his old NYC HS once, in the 1980s, and was depressed and angry afterwards when he told us about it over lunch. It was still a poor neighborhood with many immigrants, but now none of the science teachers he met there had science backgrounds, most were stop gaps with no particular preparation to teach science, and certainly none had science Ph.D.s. He was angry that they were stealing the futures of those kids, just as poor as he had been.
(3) Here's a third observation: Among the faculty at mine and many other schools, Education majors are legendary for being the most ill-informed about science, about history, about world events, about almost anything, except "educational theory" and current "policy". They're prepared to do a lesson plan on whatever a school district hands 'em, but not to evaluate whether it's true or right. Many also consider a "B" to be a bad grade, which causes no end of problems. There are, of course, always happy exceptions among "Education" majors, but I will say that I have seen several of the best potential science teachers leave an "Education" major b/c they couldn't stand the, mmm, male bovine waste products any longer.
The saddest thing is, too many of the Education majors don't get it, what they're really missing! As one example, one of our professors last year gave poor test grades to a group of future teachers in the special Physics for Education course we offer. (They would almost all rapidly sink to the bottom in a real Physics course.) She shared some of their answers with me, including one in which a university student in all seriousness had the Sun revolving around the Earth. The students, however, were furious about their grades, on what both the teacher and I perceived as a pretty simple test of basic knowledge anyone who's educated should know about elementary physics, geology and astronomy. And what do you think their group response was to us? Yes! "Why do we need to know this? We're going to be teachers!".
Please don't get me wrong, these are mostly fine kids as human beings, but many really don't understand why there is value in learning as much as you can about all that you can.
Anyway, RusM's posts hit my response button, as did Lewis book' Aboliton of Man when I first encountered it. In line with the subject here, yes, Lewis was very perceptive about where Education in the English-speaking world was going. Men - and women- without chests, indeed.
I'm blessed to think that I've contributed in a small way to a Christian education in biology in the context of how God sees humanity for my students. I have alumni out working in a variety of places, some now with doctorates, and others not, but in places of real influence. I don't know how I personally can take on the whole Educational system, but I am convinced that it's essential that we use every alternative we have to teach genuine thinking within a Christian worldview. We're to be salt and light, a metaphor rich in applications, and for those of us who teach, this is as important a ministry as any.