"Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges said Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, at an event with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee.
He's not the first to criticize education schools, points out Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network. "The average ed school . . . is nothing more than a politically correct fad factory that gloms onto the latest good-sounding tripe and forces it down the throats of its students."
“Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college," said Walter E. Williams, a George Mason economics professor in 2012. "American education can benefit from slum removal.”
Arnn stands by his statement, while claiming a "deep and abiding affection for teachers."
Dumb can mean “unintelligent,” which I did not mean. Dumb also means “ill-conceived” or “misdirected,” which is, sadly, a fitting description for many education schools today.
Professors of college and graduate education programs primarily teach methods. To be sure, methods are important in almost any human activity, but they are seldom the chief object. Watch orators speak: method matters, but only insofar as it contributes to persuasion. The quality of the text and the ideas matter far more.
"The education bureaucracy has controlled America’s schools for too long," writes Arnn.
Arnn's speech belittled teachers, writes Valerie Strauss, a defender of public schoools, in the Washington Post.
Among other things, Arnn said:
“The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement. ... They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
“We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.”
Hillsdale, which is conservative and Christian, has helped launch “classical” charter schools across the country, Strauss writes, and is helping to open 50 charter schools in Tennessee.
The charter schools use a Hillsdale K-12 civics and U.S. history curriculum centered on Western civilization, she complains. It "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'.”
In addition, Hillsdale helped create Florida's new K-12 civic standards and is helping train teachers. "Some teachers who underwent the training told the Miami Herald that Christian and conservative ideology ran throughout the material."
Here's another view of the curriculum from The Federalist.
Mr Arnn went to Arkansas State University, one of the top universities in the country.
And I’m glad Hillsdale has someone better than George Roche III as President.
My mother went to ed school for a master's. In one class, future elementary teachers were instructed to act out a circus parade. My mother, who was very pregnant, was told to be the elephant. She neither forgot nor forgave.
American ed schools accept too many unqualified students. The average American teacher has scored 980 on the SAT, a bit below average for the cohort; by contrast, in northern Europe, to be admitted to such training requires the equivalent of Americans passing AP exams in English, mathematics, and a second language, which is vastly above the average achieved by U.S. high school "graduates".
A 15-part series of short videos by Dr. Lyle Asher, 'Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults ' is very interesting. The whole lot in one video is an hour-twenty minutes.
Remember, Ed schools are big on the social justice cult. And as Thomas Sowell said, "Social Justice is an actual impediment to developing human capital".
Here is the 6 min video on Ed schools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQCn4rSMJUc&list=PLYNjnJFU-62s_Ji9Tl7hhGkJ1n52m4qwd&index=9
I know you shouldn't draw too much from a single data point, but I dated an ed major in college. She was nice and very good looking, but not what you would call super smart. One night, after we had dinner together I said, "I have to go, I have ten dynamics problems to do for tomorrow." She said, "yeah, I have to go home and make a sock puppet to tell a story in class tomorrow."
(dynamics, by the way is shorthand for a course that involves kinematics, force, momentum and such. Each problem would probably take me about 15 minutes, unless I got stuck)
This lowered my respect for the school of education. You could argue that thi…