No, we could NOT do a "better job training" teachers, & the more "we" (who in the hell _is_ this "we" that keeps popping up) try to do a "better job" (i.e. plead with the elite to please train your grave-dioggers better) the more "we" surrender power to our enemies, the more controlled and empty the schooling system will become. Who is going to train the trainers? Who is going to train the trainers of the trainers of the trainers?
Probably the centralized schooling system in France explains the cookie-cutter sameness of communist leaders and corporate CEOs and Prime Ministers in France. Down with any and all "centralized 'educational' systems." Trust the People -- in this case the teachers in our schools.
Schools are not a problem anyhow; there is no problem -- problems are what they have in 6th-grade arithmetic texts with answers in the back of the book. And when there is no problem there is no answer to put in the back of the book or in the last paragraph of an e-mail post. There is a huge complex of social relations, relations that are no one's fault and that can't be changed by finding 'better' people. They can be changed, though to find out how we are going to have to fight one hell of a lot of losing battles.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Alan P. Rudy Sent: Saturday, May 19, 2012 5:50 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] vox populi: standardize testing
Yes, yes we could. but the changes necessary to get there, dramatic. A
-- Alan P. Rudy Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
On Saturday, May 19, 2012 at 12:23 AM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> Yeah. You're right. But we could do a better job training and recruiting
good teachers.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> On Friday, May 18, 2012 at 9:08 PM, 123hop at comcast.net
(mailto:123hop at comcast.net) wrote:
> > No. No. No. No. The problem is not with the lack of a standardized
school curriculum. The problem is fundamentally with a very poorly trained
teaching cadre, further bedeviled by edu trends that change course every
five years or so, further increasing chaos.
> >
> >
>
>
> 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
testing, NOT (necessarily) the existence of a standardized curriculum
(though most common core standards suck eggs).
>
> A
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