I think you've overreacted, though. Michael said he agreed with you wholeheartedly in his first sentence.
I, personally, don't grok the torture thing - wasn't my experience nor, as far as I know, my son's who went to a "inner city" school where the first day of school freshman had their head's dunked in toilets and there were no doors on bathrooms to control students, etc. The next year he was recruited to play bball at the richest public school in the county, and went to school at a place with flatscreen televisions hanging in hallways.
Not to say it doesn't happen, I just wasn't clear on whether the torture thing is part of the institutional (normative) structure of schooling and if there's a literature on this. I'm more familiar with the literature on social life in school/uses of school to segregate people along lines of intra-class warfare, etc.
At 12:14 AM 5/21/2012, Alan P. Rudy wrote:
>On Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 10:39 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> > what's a wander or loser?
> >
> > I'm not sure how we got on this topic, but is there a concern among the
> > public that teacher's don't have enough knowledge to teach their subject
> > matter? E.g, are there social studies teachers or english teachers who are
> > found lacking enough knowledge to teach?
> >
> > At 09:19 PM 5/19/2012, Alan P. Rudy wrote:
> >
> > I'll repeat, none of the general superficiality of my teachers' knowledge
> > impinged on my schooling - except for when they were wanders or losers
> as well.
> >
> >
>
>
>Damn autocorrect, I typed wanker, it corrected it to wander. And the way
>we got onto it was, though she's backed off it now, Joanna said that
>schools'd be better if teachers knew their stuff better. There are many
>folks running around this country saying - loudly and to attentive ears -
>that teachers don't know their subjects any where near well enough and
>that standards for people to become teachers must be raised. I was
>disagreeing with Joanna. I was saying that despite knowing their subjects
>to a pretty shallow extent, most teachers I had did a more than sufficient
>job of teaching me what they were assigned to teach and that the problems
>with schooling (and, yes, I know the problems with the work problems) are
>wider social problems not problems with teachers. But now Michael Yates
>has taken what I was specifically saying about Joanna's specific statement
>as if it were ringing endorsement of public education in every place at
>all times...
>
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