A rerun, yes, but worth reconsidering in light of some recent posts:
The Farce of
Education as a field of study
“My Ph.D. thesis, which
was the only thesis that was shown to be true, showed that students who study
tend to learn more.”
Quote from an Education
expert who came to tell us how to teach better. It isn’t simply that this was
considered a Ph.D. level thesis that worries me, it’s all the wrong theses that
still nevertheless led to successfully awarding a Ph.D. in Education.
With
all the new suckers pouring into the system, one might think that all the new
data from incoming students would lead to breakthroughs, real improvements in
how course content is delivered, leading to better and easier learning by the
students. A field that might do something like this is called Education, a
field that has exploded in influence the last twenty years; its practitioners
are Educationists, and their numbers have likewise grown.
The
study of how humans learned used to be part of psychology, the domain of psychologists, and is a
legitimate mode of inquiry in a legitimate, if often qualitative, field.
Education, on the other hand, is more about how to transmit knowledge, or at
least it is taught that way. It might be more fair to say Education is more
about getting high retention/passing rates, since that’s the entirety of how
the field is presented to other faculty.
Not once in years of being lectured by
Educationists have I been told “teach how to graph a line this way, students understand
it better,” or “use this method to draw a parabola, it more intuitively relates
to the functional definition” or even something as pathetically simple as
“here’s a mnemonic for the rational root theorem.” Not once has an Educationist
ever told me anything that would help students learn and understand the
material in my courses, nor have I seen an Educationist offer up anything
directly useful to another course.
Instead, it’s always “give more extra credit assignments that don’t
relate to the course, it will get more students passing,” or similar advice
that couldn’t possibly require years of study to give.
Luckily, being at an institution of higher
learning, I can go to someone else in my department (i.e., someone that
actually knows the subject), and get help in finding additional ways to explain
concepts. But Educations seems to have nothing to offer students of any
particular discipline.
Student: “Why do I have to learn this
crap? I’m only going to be teaching 8 year olds once I get my Education
degree.”
Me: “Because the parents of those 8
year olds want the teacher to know more than an 8 year old.”
--I get an Education major that
complains to this effect every semester, and my response never gets old. Most
all Education majors believe they’ll only teach small children.
At the undergraduate level, Education
majors live in a world of their own, with most all subjects converted to a
special format just for this special major. There’s a special Math for
Education Majors course, with- few mathematical concepts. As mathematics is a
basic skill useful in many fields, perhaps it merits a general course just for
education majors. Similarly, many topics in psychology might well be justified
as having special courses just for Education majors, and they are offered as
such.
Why are there special Chemistry for
Education Majors and special Physics for Education Majors courses? Shouldn’t
people planning to teach subjects like chemistry and physics have an actual
knowledge of the subject, given to them by people that know the subject? Even
music, apparently, is too technical a subject to be handled by specialists in
the field, so campuses offer special Music for Education Majors courses as
well. In times past, a teacher of a subject was required to actually know the
subject, but now a degree in Education is the starting and ending requirement,
and knowledge of a real topic no longer is considered necessary. Having
directly observed the material in these courses, they really are just highly
watered down versions of “real” courses.
“1. If a 12 foot ladder is broken
into 3 equal parts, how long is each part?
2. If you go the store and buy a
6-pack for $4.59 and a loaf of bread for $2.20, what is your total bill? Ignore
sales tax.”
---final exam questions for a “Math
for Education Majors” course I proctored, calculators allowed. The other
questions were likewise simplistic, with no requirement to solve them in any
particular way (for example, like an 8 year old would solve it). Only the
“extra credit” question was arguably at the high school level: “Write as an
algebraic expression: A number plus three times the same number is twelve.” No,
they didn’t have to solve it.
The Special Olympics is a fun idea; it’s
composed of special events for members of our society that, realistically,
aren’t able to compete in the “real” Olympics. There’s nothing wrong with this,
but nobody seriously thinks competitors, even winners in the Special Olympics
are world-class athletes with much to say to others wishing to learn physical
skills.
Education as a field is basically the
Special Olympics of higher education, and most everyone in the industry
(outside of Education) knows it; as I showed in an earlier article,
Educationists would rather deceive people about their specialization, because
their credibility is so low (outside of Administration, and I’ll explain why in
a future essay). Nonetheless, this special major with special classes is
supposed to be taken seriously.
“Needed: Math tutor.”
“Needed: Chemistry tutor.”
“Needed: Physics
tutor.”
“Needed: Writing
tutor.”
--various sites and
places allow for postings of students needing tutors. I often frequent them, as
I occasionally tutor for math. Not once, not one time, has there been a student
looking for an Education tutor. As near as I can tell, the field covers no
material so difficult that any student would need a tutor to understand and
become proficient with it.
Graduate level Education degrees fare
little better. Students entering graduate programs in education commonly score
among the lowest on the GRE (Graduate Record Examination, a test comparable to
the SAT, but for college graduates; public administration is the only field of
study with incoming students often scoring lower than education majors). It’s
worth noting that the majority of education programs don’t even require
applicants to take the GRE—scores would probably be lower if so. Education
majors even score less on the qualitative (English comprehension) part of the
GRE than non-native English speakers, and often score abysmally in the other
sections1.
Now, ordinarily it wouldn’t be any concern
of mine what goes on in other fields, but Education has a ridiculously powerful
influence over what goes on in educational institutions, and that’s where I
work, so it matters to me. Administrators are easily enraptured by even the
most marginal of Educationist topics, as long as the Educationist promises to
deliver what administrators want: retention. It seems every year another new
method of teaching at my school is introduced by an Educationist for dubious
reasons.
“You should put more
writing in your math courses, it will improve retention.”
--typical advice and
justification from an Educationist training me how to teach.
Always, Educationist
advice is justified by the increasing the retention (all that matters to
administration). Never is education part of the reason; the field really should
be called Retention rather than Education. Nevertheless, faculty constantly
receive indoctrination lectures in Educationism (administration tells us to be
grateful for all the “professional development” they give us), and sometimes we
try to take their advice:
“Half a dozen students turned in the same paper, word for word, in my
course. One student changed the font, but otherwise, the same paper. There’s
even a line in the paper where I think a cat walked across the keyboard, so the
text reads ‘the elDLKSNLKNLKNSGectron…”, and no student chose to even edit that
out.”
--Physics professor explaining to me how adding writing to his course
helped with learning. Any wonder at all how students got used to the idea that
if they all turned in the same paper everything would be ok? This type of thing
doesn’t happen out of the blue. Catching cheaters cuts into retention, so it’s
discouraged by admin.
Luckily, not everyone is under the
influence of this field of study, and allow me to present an example where
ignoring Educationists yields many beneficiaries:
Our written languages are phonetic; the letters
on the page represent sounds. Thus, the deaf are at a strong disadvantage when
it comes to learning how to read, and only with advanced training by an
Educationist can they achieve even high-school level reading skills (with third
grade reading level being acceptable even at high school graduation), and it’s
basically impossible to for them to learn more than one written language. Any
Educationist will happily tell you this, and this is what is still taught in
special Education for the Deaf courses.
Viataal (formerly called The Institute of the Deaf), in
Sint-Michielsgestel, The Netherlands, begs to differ. Their deaf children learn
to read three languages (Dutch, English, and German), reading at grade level in
their native tongue by graduation, and graduating students typically read
English at a 9th grade level. Surely such achievements are only
possible using the best possible Educationists using the most advanced
theories? No, not at all. While the school does have its own theories about how
to teach the deaf, they simply do not hire people with education degrees, not
even specialists in teaching for the hearing impaired…there are none at the
school. Instead, hiring is based on the subject needed. When the school needs a
physics teacher, they hire a physicist and train the new teacher on how to
teach the deaf2. To that high achieving school, it just makes more
sense to have the subject taught by someone that actually knows the subject,
and spend a little time training that person how to teach the deaf, rather than
spend years training someone in educational gobbledygook, and then have that
poor soul try to teach a topic he knows nothing about.
“2 + 12 = 16”
“16 = 16”
“Are these the right
answers?”
“Yes. One side equals
the other side.”
--Excerpt from Winning
at Math, Fourth Edition, page 171, an Educationist book on math. Yes, four editions.
While perhaps the school for the deaf is
some isolated example that only applies in The Netherlands, consider how
disastrous various new types of Educationist-spawned reading programs have been
for teaching. Homeschoolers use “Hooked on Phonics” and raise children that
read, while public schools try “Whole Word” and “Ebonics” methods to churn out
children unprepared for the real world, much less college. Similarly, “New
Math” has been of little use to helping public school age students. And yet,
with this sort of track record, college administrators rapturously accept any
idea coming from this field, especially one that improves the all-important
retention of college students (and those sweet checks!).
Should a field with a flawless track
record of failure have much influence in the teaching of our young adults in
higher education? Should they be teaching our children?
Think about it.
Footnotes:
2) http://www.lewrockwell.com/taylor/taylor130.html
No comments:
Post a Comment