Education in peril

It's too perilous really. We shouldn't even be facing this peril. We should instead go attack the castle Anthrax. That would be a fun peril.

-- ...."But even our students who are graduating are often not receiving the education they deserve. In low-income schools, students have less than a 50 percent chance of being taught by a mathematics or science teacher who holds a degree in the subject he or she teaches, according to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. This explains at least in part why less than a third of our fourth-grade and eighth-grade students performed at or above a proficient level in math, and why American 15-year-olds fall below the international average in mathematics literacy and problem-solving in the Program for International Student Assessment....."

Back to my frequent points on education. Yes, I don't believe science is necessarily the be-all it's advertised as. But if we're going to hire teachers, they damn well better know the material. I've often wondered about education majors. What exactly are they studying? It amuses me the line oft quoted that education majors entering graduate school have among the lowest GPAs and lowest GRE scores. (Philosophy majors are the highest by the way). I'd much prefer that we hire people who have the education in math or science to teach. Some of them want to, some might even be good at it. There's much restriction on who can be hired, and how and what they're to teach. I don't think that's necessary. Teaching and learning is something that we can all do. Some of us are better at one or the other, but still. We can all learn how to teach because we do it ourselves. We teach ourselves things all the time. We show things to co-workers like little tidbits of information to make the work easier or less barren.

I don't necessarily believe either that what we teach should be so standardized. Past elementary school, there isn't much we studied that was in and of itself a necessary subject for general success in our adult lives. Maybe civics, if it was taught rather than imparted. What each subject allows is the exploration of types of learning, fields of study, and different disciplines of the language of life as it were. That we can point to our flagging education system and say blindly "we're not teaching enough science or math", isn't a manner of deducing the actual problem. The problem is the way we (as a society, teachers might differ w/ this) look at teaching as a whole. It's virtually assumed that teaching is a particular art that has specific characteristics that carry over the entire general population. But learning is a specific art to a specific person. It's even specific to the type of learning we're doing at the time. Why would teaching be any different? I don't get how standardizing the process is going to offer us a solution to this crisis of stupidity.