what did you learn in school today?

Today is another brilliant autumn day. Slept in until 0840 and felt like I could have slept longer.
We’d planned on buckwheat pancakes for breakfast but decided against them when I didn’t wake up as early as planned.
We went out for a short ride this afternoon.

We drove by an old mill site on Middle Creek and Gloria got some good images using my cell phone’s built-in camera. She has a good eye for composition.

I’ve started re-reading John Barth’s “Giles Goat-Boy.” I read this when I was just beginning junior high school. I recall the overt political concerns in the book but imagine that there’s a lot I failed to pick up on due to my age and relative inexperience compared to the target audience. It will be essentially a new read. I’m finding that Barth’s view of colleges of Education seem to match mine. While I’m quite appreciative of how important good teachers are, I don’t think colleges of “Education “produce that many.

I have a minor in education despite my degree being in a discipline that is based in physical and biological sciences. Where I studied, there were so many complaints from potential allied health students (lab, imaging, respiratory therapy, physical therapy) about the foreign language requirement that the college of arts and sciences chose to rid itself of the allied health students by granting them to the Ed school’s quest for numerical presence. The result was no language requirement, something I could have benefitted from studying. Instead a slate of education courses was loaded onto students who had absolutely no interest in ever teaching children of any age. The slate included Ed Psych, production of A-V media materials – flannel boards, rubber cement, construction paper, and other fun projects. The class on testing and evaluation resulted in a final which violated every tenet taught over the semester. They were classes that my classmates and I found boring, a waste of our time and money. It got to be even less tolerable when the Ed School shifted a required course from days to two nights/week. Many of us worked and had other concerns as well. Six hours of night class guaranteed that the students would not be willing students. The powers chose a new Ed School graduate to teach the class. She never gained control of the class. We completed all her assignments, but in manner that let her know we had no interest in the course material. And in 30+ years in clinical lab, nothing from my Ed courses was ever necessary.

We were required to take a class in lesson planning. One of my finer collegiate moments took place when I set up my charts and photographs demonstrating how to perform curettage and a subsequent dark field microscopic exam to diagnose syphilis from an open penile lesion. Once the professor, a mild-mannered man who had refused to believe my complaints that his class had no benefit for me, realized what I was going to display before all the nice little girls who wanted to teach children reading and writing; he quickly stopped me. I was all but ejected from the class but did receive an A for the semester.

It was apparent to me in those classes that the college of Education had no grounding in reality. Already, the philosophy of how and what to teach was being taken in wrong direction by “educators” who never entered a classroom, who had little grasp of any core subject matter but lots of hours in theory proposed countless thesis and dissertations that stressed the creation self esteem as more important than teaching core curricula. My opinion in the matter is that self esteem comes from learning the curriculum.

At the same time the theories on education were changing to eliminate tracking students based upon academic capability, to include mainstreaming developmentally delayed students, and to lower the expectations for academic achievement so that those students on the upper end of the “bell curve” were no longer challenged. The belief that all children want to learn is idiotic. The belief that every parent’s little spawn are equally intelligent is sheer stupidity. Yet we have schools today which teach as if both those beliefs are factual and indisputable.

When I entered university first, I had some hope of becoming a history teacher. That lasted through my first class session in “orientation to education.” When tasked to write a four year plan for my university career, I wrote that I realized I was not suited to being a classroom teacher and would change my enrollment and major. It seemed an honest and practical answer. It was true. And it was returned as unacceptable. I was directed to hand in the assignment as if I were happy to become another student being stuffed with faulty information and programmed to parrot philosophies and practices I believed to be either incorrect or of no value to students at any level. I refused and ultimately took an incomplete for the course rather than a “dropped at own request.”

To this day, it amazes me that there was so little academic honesty in that College of Education that they not only refused to accept an honest and potentially life-saving paper. I might have shot someone’s little darling if required to teach children who had neither desire nor ability to learn, particularly after my turn in VietNam. Rather, the authorities, those who had written the papers from which sprang the misconceptions that have damaged our schools so badly, demanded that I begin a career in education by lying about my intentions and my beliefs.

I can’t tell you what the driving force in today’s education schools is. I know that there has been a call for excellence in core subjects. I know that our dropout rate is frighteningly high, our students poorly ranked in core curricula knowledge against most industrialized nations. I still here of schools where students are not graded for academic performance because it might damage their self esteem.

I know, too, that we have spawned at least one, perhaps two, minority generations who feel that education is a “white “value. And I know that many white students have no interest in education.

Yet we have some students who do want to learn, who value education, if not for itself, at least for what it can bring them later. Normally, I find no good in greed. But in this case, I can see using it to encourage learning.

I have hope that we will see a reversal in how we try to teach and who we try to teach. But like the Hebrews wandering the desert until the generation who had been slaves died, I’m afraid we will be wandering a long time yet until we have purged our school systems of those “educators” who think that teaching self esteem is more important than teaching basic education- reading, writing, spelling, mathematics. We need far fewer, if any, “educators” and a whole lot more teachers.

I’d not planned on discussing the state of education or my educational history at all. Blame it on Barth’s book and his commentary on universities, colleges, and educators.