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I think for three years I watched Robby Suave at The Hill tee off on the Teacher's Union for fighting against phonics based teaching, despite all the science and decades of outcomes showing that whole language teaching is a miserable failure. But teachers hate it, because it's rote and boring, and they insist on narcissistically avoiding all unpleasant aspects of their job. Despite being responsible for the education of our next generation. So their union fights phonics based teacher curriculums tooth and nail.
At least that's what Robby's reporting showed consistently over the years. It was a bit of a hobby horse for him, and an area where his libertarian brain really found a nit to pick with the "trust the science" blue team.
The point I'm drifting towards is that this is really a proxy battle against teachers. The profession is overrun with activist LARPing as educators, their union is controlled by a lesbian activist, and to whatever degree education is occurring, it's haphazard and inertial based on decades of diminishing institutional knowledge. It's a low pay, highly political profession, and increasingly only true believers are attracted and willing to stay in the profession. The ones that treat the trials and tribulations of the profession as a test of faith for their activism are the only ones that thrive.
The median teacher is a normie. Mathematically, this must be true- there are simply too many of them for it not to be.
But to be more specific, teachers are very very conformist women who are at least moderately good at school. If, going through a 'standard' American education system, you uncritically do what the system recommends at every point(and are smart enough to do so, but not smart enough for someone to recruit you out of it), you will probably wind up as a teacher. This is not a recipe for pushing back against retarded activist union bosses or doing hard work that your coworkers doubt the value of.
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle. It's hard to see how she even could. She took the job because she didn't think the default path pushed on her through very well, would rather go home after her shift than engage in politics but doesn't know how to say no. She probably likes believing that she's helping the kids in her classroom; she certainly likes the kids. She probably doesn't like her admins or union bosses but does whatever they say with no pushback- because she has never pushed back against anything in her life, ever. That the teaching profession is populated, on the 'grunt' level with the normiest, most submissive women in existence may not be good, but it is a failure of all of society rather than of those teachers themselves.
There's about 4 million primary and secondary school teachers in the US, compared to about 260 million adults. That leaves plenty of room for non-normieness among teachers.
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
All the "virtue-based" banners and signs in teachers' rooms when I was a schoolchild always struck me as very silly. Lots of transforming "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." into an acronym, lots of "At our school, home of the Bears, we are Based, Effective Altruist, Rationalist, Sapient" or "Everyone here C.A.R.E.S." standing of course for "Courteous, Achieving, Responsible, Excellence, at School on time"... I don't know that any of these did anything, but I'm sure there was some sort of state or federal grant money involved in "teaching ethical citizenship and public service" to children, for which these useless banners played a role.
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