HeyBub wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:
HeyBub wrote:
Leon wrote:
"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...
J. Clarke wrote:

John Silber, former president of Boston College, was asked what
one thing could be done to improve the quality of education in
America. He answered: "Abolish colleges of education."


Sounds exactly like the typical "former" employee with an ax to
grind would say.

I'd say get rid of public education and all the bureaucracy that
come with it. Privatize it.

Yep. If universal education is felt to be a worthwhile goal, give
out vouchers.

Oh, and before you shrug off John Silber as a disgruntled
ex-employee, you might check his Wikipedia entry. I just did and I
see I made a mistake: He was president of Boston University, not
College.

FWIW, I have a friend who has a PhD in education, and is retired, not
fired, so one can't claim that he is "disgruntled", who shares the
opinion that the flaws in the system are inherent in the educational
philosophy currently being taught in the colleges of education, and
in the poltical tendency to require the schools to provide more and
more social functions that are not rightly part of education.

It's worse than you think.

In America, we do not have a single living Nobel laureate or Fields
medalist, not even the president, who is qualified, by law, to teach
in the schools of my state. No winner of the Pulitzer, Booker, Hugo,
Edgar, Newberry, Caldecott or other literary prize. Nor can any of
the justices of the Supreme Court stand in front of a classroom as a
teacher.

In my state, one can be certified to teach mathematics at the
high-school level without ever having had a college course in
Calculus.

Pitiful really.

Does anyone doubt that a retired Civil Engineer could teach geometry
off the top of his head? Would you expect a retired nurse to be able
to instruct in high school biology? And so on. Well, they can't.

Makes one want to weep.

There is a notion popular in the colleges of education that the teacher's
skill is teaching and that the teacher doesn't actually have to know
anything about the subject matter, and that expertise in a subject is
actually undesirable.