First and foremost, this is a book that required courage to write. It confronts directly the core failings of our K-12 system of education. It faces down the politicization of education and the fact that anyone who dissents will be called ‘racist’ or worse. It does so with hard facts, common sense and pure motives.
RK visited slightly more than a dozen institutions across the United States, from the ed schools considered to be preeminent to those which can fairly be considered marginal. She attended classes, she attended meetings, she interviewed teacher/students and teachers of teachers. The mode of analysis is ethnographic. She records what she heard and saw and she does so without editing the statements made. While she includes summary judgments she allows the reader to judge for him/herself along the way. When a ‘professor’ speaks in broken and ungrammatical English and the students (practicing or aspiring teachers) ask questions that could be answered by a truly educated sixth-grader we can draw our own conclusions.
The overall picture is a look into the mouth of hell. The goal of ed schools is not the inculcation of learning. It is sociopolitical: to achieve equality of result (not opportunity) by dumbing down the curriculum to the point that all students can ‘succeed’ and graduate. The summum bonum is self-esteem, not the honing of skills and the acquisition of knowledge. The ed schools do not see that authentic self-esteem results from accomplishment; they see it as inherent in the ethnic identification of the student. You feel good about yourself because of who you are, not because you have achieved something that can be difficult and is extremely important. Thus, nonjudgmentalism is paramount and relativism and multiculturalism are the order of the day. Expectations are systematically lowered and ‘content’ is subordinated to pedagogy. In fact, ‘content’ is considered to be of marginal importance and it is often treated with the same contempt that attends discussions of tracking, testing and, of course, ‘competition’ and ‘meritocracy’ which are seen to be hegemonic tools to solidify the position of the white establishment. Teachers are seen as facilitators, not instructors and didactic instruction is treated with derision. Dewey is alive and well even though he died in 1952 and the institutionalized expressions of progressive education disappeared with him. The purpose of education is still ‘social change’ not education per se and the classroom is student-centered, privileging ‘expression’ over the acquisition of knowledge. Education is seen as essentially therapeutic, not intellectual, and teachers are seen as social workers rather than, well, teachers. When we hear the teachers and teachers of teachers speak we recognize their vapidity and vacuity. Essentially their assault on ‘content’ results from both a monolithic ideological stance and the simple fact that they themselves do not possess such ‘content’. Hence their ‘research’, upon which they claim to rely and in which they invest the certainty of the single-minded is essentially trivial, the result of belaboring the obvious by restating it in opaque jargon and organizing it via apparatchik-inspired acronyms.
RK is not quite this direct in her conclusions, but these are her conclusions. It is fair to remember that the book is now 27 years old but the ethos which she investigates and identifies is still very much with us. In fact, it has expanded significantly. That is why commentators now speak of K-16 education. Further evidence of ed school hegemony in the modern university is the proliferation of the student affairs bureaucracy and the diversity bureaucracy, both of which are often peopled by individuals trained in ed schools. One of the themes in ED SCHOOL FOLLIES is the belief by teachers that they are not treated like professionals. They are subjected to the whims of politicians, school boards and district bureaucracies. In some cases their principals treat them (and speak to them) as if they are children. This pattern has now been extended to colleges and universities, where ‘professors’ are treated like high school teachers and buried in red tape that is traceable to ideological commitments and corporatist desires to extend bureaucracy and enhance their own career paths by privileging ‘retention’ over expectations. The fact that many students now see their college experience as principally ‘social’ grows directly from the attitudes and institutions which RK describes.
The one unspoken point that stands out with crystalline clarity is that our K-12 (and increasingly our K-16) systems are utter failures. We are trounced by other industrial democracies in international tests and the educational establishment simply does not care. If it cared it would consider alternatives to our current methods of proceeding. Moreover, the students who suffer most from this situation are the minority students who are not expected to perform at the level of their actual capacity. They have lower completion rates in college and they are saddled with crippling debt that they cannot remove through bankruptcy proceedings. A system designed to attack ‘racism’ ends up being among the most ‘racist’ in modern experience.
Bottom line: this is a very important book, one that every concerned parent should read. The practice (following the Holmes report) of dissolving undergrad ed schools and offering teacher training at the master’s level (after an undergraduate education in the liberal arts) helps, but we must keep in mind that liberal arts education is now seriously compromised and itself infected by the ideology of the ed schools. Many have argued these points with generalized analysis and specific data. RK puts institutional and human faces on all of this and gives us a feel for the ethos which has betrayed our students, wasted precious resources and created a system of credential creep which, ultimately, benefits the privileged over the previously marginalized. This is a national tragedy and her observations are generally spot-on.
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