I grew up in a town with a big teacher's college. IIRC, it was established in the 1880s, as a normal school for training teachers. The rise of those normal schools was a response to the desire to hire young women into the teaching cadre and decrease pay - much as secretaries used to be men and such positions were a necessary path to management. The book's in boxes, but this is a classic socialist feminist argument about gender, occupation, and income.
I took a number of education courses as an undergrad, at one time preparing to teach high school, and most of the people in the activist network were professors of education. The issue of pedagogy fads and trends -- the critique of them is a well-known issue, a target of critique for at least 50 years. I mean, that's kind of par for the course since academics *are* always looking for the next big thing, no? The idea is not to publish about what works but what doesn't work and then mount an argument for a new method to change the world, yes?
Anyway, interestingly critique pedagogy was a major focus in E.D. Hirsch's book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Hirsch argued, among other things, that it was the faddish shifting from one pedagogical tactic to another that was the reason why our schooling sucked in the U.S. He makes this argument, IIRC, in his chapter defending what others have called a "kill and drill" pedagogy.
At 12:16 AM 5/19/2012, Alan P. Rudy wrote:
> The problem is fundamentally NOT a very poorly trained teaching cadre…
> I don't believe for a minute that the teachers who schooled me to the
> point I qualified for Swarthmore were substantially any better trained
> than those today. As Carrol has regularly argued, I think, most teachers
> in most schools in most communities since the start of mandatory public
> education were only moderately well-versed in the material they taught
> and even less well prepared to teach anything well. The key, if you
> accept that schooling's primarily about reading, writing and arithmetic
> (with some world cultures-y social studies and some history of war and
> great dead white guys thrown in for good measure), is that the whole
> social milieu within which teachers teach has changed
from the power of
> the union to the work and home lives of the parents of the kids, and
> from the state of the school's supplies, buildings and grounds to the
> actual social promise of "an education." At the same time, you are right
> the problem at hand is standardized teesting, NOT (necessarily) the
> existence of a standardized curriculum (though most common core standards
> suck eggs). A ___________________________________
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