Wisconson Shows the Need for Education and Teacher Training Reform
The photos of Wisconsin’s screaming teachers absent from their classes andof union officials and minor politicians blowing horns and shouting more firmly than ever suggest the need for the reform of teacher education and education in general.
It is the dirty little secret of most universities that its ”education” and “sports” classes are where the students at the very bottom of the intellectual barrel are sent for unchallenging classes so they can stay in school and find gainful employment thereafter.
With some exceptions, most “education” majors graduate knowing little about the complexities and history of the world. Worse, if they fail as teachers they move into administration and, in the inevitable way of all bureaucrats, never hire anyone to teach who might threaten them by having comparable or superior knowledge.
The result is a constant dumbing down of the practicing teachers and fertile ground for unions and political activists who are advantaged by the teachers’ lack of knowledge, history, and the ability to reason. Another result is the ever-growing deterioration of the educations received by our sons and daughters.
The answers are many, easy, and cheap: school districts or the state could require an academic degree from a real college or university for all future hires. And anyone with an academic masters degree or better could be automatically certified as a teacher without taking the mind-numbing education classes that drive away all but the very worst, the folks who shouldn’t even be in college in the first place.
Administrators could be similarly upgraded by requiring superintendants and similar appointees to have masters degrees in business or public administration.
There are a lot of educated men and women who would love to teach but are driven off by the education courses which cater to the bottom of the barrel.
I know these things because I am one of those people; I wanted to be a teacher – until I took an education course. It was so awful and the “professor” so unintellectual that I thought it was a unique case. So I took a second education course – it was worse.
