What Got Me Started Was This Kid in a Cub Scout Uniform

You can’t consider yourself a moral person and at the same time allow the field of education to replace well-designed instruction on tough and important material (what it takes to sustain a democracy, how to read accurately and with deep comprehension) with superficial coverage of dumbed-down subjects.

You can’t spend your life in silence, smiling in a collegial (brain-dead) way, while a thousand schools of education celebrate themselves for being “stewards of America’s children” as they turn out new teachers whose heads are filled with nonsense (“pedagogy”) and who have no idea how–exactly and effectively–to teach anything. —What Got Me Started Was This Kid in a Cub Scout Uniform (EducatioNation)

Strong words.

I don’t teach in an ed program, so I’m looking at this from the outside.

At Seton Hill, ed students must major in a subject besides education, so when I do teach education majors, they are usually double-majoring in English. On the other hand, one of my classes has a large proportion of education majors who aren’t terribly thrilled by the fact that they have to take several English courses (even if they don’t plan to teach English). But I take this as a sign that our ed program holds students up to high standards.

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