[lbo-talk] Yong Zhao

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue May 15 21:12:00 PDT 2012


Teacher training is indeed notorious -- but is there any careful study of _why_ it is so horrible. I think it is that the cause is the same as the proliferation of empty books and articles by intelligent people in the humanities and social sciences.

Sociology has no subject. Literature departments have no subject. Colleges or departments of education have no subject.

This is not the fault of literature professors, sociology professors, or professors of education. And despite the impossible task of doing research on a topic that does not exist, professors in all of these many fields without a subject do turn out a surprising amount of commentary on the world, somewhat twisted because they have to pretend that they are contributing to a discipline -- impossible because the discipline did not exist.

Freshman composition was always a crime of sorts against humanity. The Harvard professor who 'invented' it spent the final decades of his career attempting to put the monster back in the bottle. But despite its fundamental falseness, it was a class that many students got something (not writing skill) out of, because it was taught by people whose interests lay elsewhere and who accordingly just messed around on this or that and got a scattering of students thinking. But it has become a 'real' discipline in the last 4 or 5 decades. People write books on the evaluation of writing. The foot soldiers who teach it are put through courses to teach them how to teach it; it is almost a fucking 'science.' The result: As in the past, those who write well in third grade are still writing well 20 years after graduating from college; those who found writing a horror and a task they hated in third grade still find writing a horror 20 years after graduating from college. I believe that at some schools senior writing tests are being or have been introduced. A test is not a useful tool unless some minimum percentage fail it. So there will be some percentage of students who have battled their way through college for one purpose only: to get that piece of paper which gives them a huntig licence to find a job that will support them. They will have accumulated considerable debt, and that writing test will put them forever in the category of college dropouts.

To get back to the point of departure: Do not blame the professors of education. They are mostly true believers in the existence of a skill ('Profession'!) called "Pedagogy." They are devoting heart and soul to understanding that (non-existent) skill and train young people in it. Those young people of course believe there are such things as "English" or "Sociology." But since the 'profession' is being disciplined in more and more rigid patterns, they will not be able to just mess around and in the process introduce elementary or high school students to the excitement of thinking.

I had a teacher in 7th-8th grade who was outrageously ignorant; even as an 8th grader I could recognize some of his errors in biology. (Like all my teachers he had what was called a "life certificate," earned in one or two years of college, which qualified its possessor to teach in any school district which did not have its own 4 year high school. (That is, rural schools.) But he did like kids; he was enthusiastic, we had a good time and learned quite a bit actually. Sloppiness was the great virtue of the U.S. schools during much of the 20th-c. That sloppiness is being eliminated.

That process of disciplining school staffs would be worth studying and relating to other social processes underway.

Carrol



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