That'll Teach 'Em

David Steiner and Susan Rozen did a study in 2004 of what books were actually studied in 18 top Education Schools across the US. Those studied included Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, and U. Michigan. In seven, required courses were all and only psychology courses—no history of education, no philosophy of education. This is all very well, except that psychology has virtually no verifiable results of any sort. Psychology was a part of the curriculum in all but three programs.

Only ten out of eighteen programs, covered either philosophy or history of education. Even in philosophy of ed programs, they found only one prominent philosopher studied in more than one program: John Dewey. Only one program, out of eighteen, featured any mention of Plato, the founder of the Western pedagogical tradition, at all. “Philosophy of Education” courses, when they existed, were much more likely to feature the book “Pedagagy of the Oppressed,” by Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Friere.

Courses in “Foundations of Education” were found to deal almost exclusively with “constructivism,” the recently fashionable (though now apparently being replaced by the new fad, “connectivism”) postmodern theory translated into educational terms. To sum it up: Nothing is real: reality is socially constructed. The traditional view of reality is constructed by the oppressor. It must therefore not be taught.

Only two schools, out of eighteen, featured any mention of direct instruction, the one educational technique actually demonstrated to work in reasonably reliable scientific studies. In both these curricula, its place was relatively minor.

What about rhetoric, which was, as we have pointed out in this space, the Western teaching tradition for over twenty-three centuries? Was there anything preserved from all those years of thought, study, and empirical observation, to be passed down to present teachers?

Nothing. Not a word.

What about non-Western teaching methods?

All of the schools featured required courses on “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” But what did this really consist of? As Steiner and Rozen found at Stanford, “all of these authors were American, and all but one of their books was written in the past 30 years.”

The student teachers learned (and learn) no more about non-Western than about Western traditions of teaching.

And people must go through these programs to be permitted to teach in American public schools. Yes, there are alternative routes to accreditation—but these too are controlled by the Ed Schools, and require essentially the same curriculum.

I have no real idea whether the same is true in Canada as in the US--but given that Canada tends to lean further to the left, it seems likely. You are paying for this with your tax dollars, and unless you are rich your children are required to attend the schools that result.

Me, I'm looking hard at home schooling.