Why Teachers Can’t Teach
Because they don’t know anything. Teacher education is a massive fraud. It drives out dedicated people, rewards incompetence, and wastes millions of dollars. Our taxes pay for it all, but our children pay the real price.
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Central to all three functions is the establishment and elaboration of dogma. Ask hard questions of almost anyone involved with teacher education—the Texas Education Agency, the colleges and their education departments, the school districts and their teachers—and the chances are the first response will be to kick the problem downstairs. The TEA insists it is powerless to demand competence due to political pressure exerted on the Legislature by the colleges. The colleges insist they must assume prospective teachers to be literate when they arrive from the high schools. High school teachers say they cannot ignore the subject matter in their courses to teach skills that should have been mastered in junior high. Eighth-grade teachers blame seventh-grade teachers, and so forth back to first grade, where teachers have no one left to blame but society, which they do. The NEA (National Education Association), the chief proponent of no-fault teaching, urges us in a pamphlet to take note, before deciding who is responsible for plummeting test scores, of the “distractions which characterized American life in the past decade or so.” Among the nominees are the war, the draft, riots, corruption in high places, assassinations, and television. The “decade of distraction,” we are told, “puts an additional burden on teachers who are asked to provide stability while other aspects of life are in chaos.” If everyone is to blame, in other words, no one is to blame.
It is considered rude to point out that all of the above except television have been constants of America’s and everybody else’s history, and that further disruption outside the classroom may confidently be predicted. Society, moreover, cannot be fired or have its budget cut. All it can do is feel guilty and go to PTA meetings.
The same NEA pamphlet quoted above, written as a response to public concern over declining test scores, urges us to remain philosophical: “While we ask why the scores on college entrance examinations have gone down, T. S. Eliot’s probing goes much deeper: ‘Where is the learning we have lost in information? Where is the understanding we have lost in knowledge? Where is the life we have lost in living?’” As usual, the Educationists are changing the subject. Eliot was asking a religious question about man’s quest for wisdom and his fear of inauthenticity; we want to know about test scores. By quoting him, the NEA seeks a classy way to preserve that most sanctified of Educationist principles, that of the Whole Child. (During the sixties it was called “relevance” but the same thing was meant.) According to that doctrine, so prevalent among professional educators that it is invisible to them much of the time, to insist upon literacy is considered coercive and potentially harmful; secondary matters such as sex education, driver training, drug counseling, and the proper attitude toward siblings are equally necessary. Many of these goals are, of course, worthy. But they are secondary. Everywhere but in the education school, that is.
For the Educationists, the doctrine of the Whole Child is a magical balm that washes away their sins. Ask a question about skills, and you get T. S. Eliot, transforming the question to one about values. Who is a happier and more productive member of the human community, an illiterate peasant or a tax lawyer? Values, of course, are relative. What then is the point of having tests at all, whether of students or teachers? By a marvelous coincidence, the NEA was holding its national convention in Dallas last summer at about the same time the bad news about the DISD teachers was breaking. Hardly ruffled, the nation’s largest teachers’ organization paused just long enough in its deliberations to pass a resolution condemning competency testing. Should public unrest persist, we may yet hear the NEA citing Ecclesiastes: “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
To be sure, not all teachers agree. The American Federation of Teachers, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, favors competency testing, the Dallas NEA affiliate has no objection, and many teachers I talked with felt the NEA, as one high school teacher put it, “made us look like a bunch of cowardly blockheads.” But unless you understand that the NEA was being perfectly sincere, not defensive or cowardly, you don’t understand the Educationists’ world view in its fullest incarnation. For this I recommend that you read the aforementioned pamphlet, entitled On Further Examination of “On Further Examination.” Naturally the document contains the obligatory attack on competency tests for cultural bias and the obligatory defense of teachers against charges that they are in any way responsible for whatever may be wrong with American education. But what really caught my eye was the suggestion that competency tests are not just unfair but actually dangerous.
As an example of the NEA’s reasoning, consider its reaction to the idea of exit examinations that would ask students to prove, in order to graduate, that they had actually learned what they are assumed to have been taught: “Once we establish minimal competencies we tend to get just that—minimal competence. One would hope for considerably more than this.” Of course one would. One would also hope for more from the NEA than an assertion so contrary to common sense. No soap.
Equally revealing is the section titled “About the Future.” “It is unlikely,” the NEA contends, “that eighth-grade teachers would think it appropriate to give a test to one eighth-grade class in 1970 and to another eighth-grade class seven years later and expect the difference in scores to say anything useful. What would such a difference in scores mean? That the teacher is better or worse? That the students have gotten smarter or dumber? That societal values have changed? That our knowledge base is different? Can we, in fact, compare children of one set of circumstances with those of another?” The paragraph closes with a slap at those who “believe that there is a single unchanging standard which can be measured and compared across time” and asks, “Is this a realistic assumption?”
To this I can only reply: of course it is. I completed the eighth grade in 1957. There is no question that societal values have undergone considerable change in the 22 years intervening, and that the sum of human knowledge is greater than it was then. But the last time I checked, three 9’s still equaled 27, nouns and verbs still had to agree, and the nation of Italy continued to extend into the Mediterranean Sea and somewhat resembled a boot. Test results in Dallas, Houston, and elsewhere suggest that large numbers of certified teachers are not capable of passing on such skills and bits of knowledge because they have no command of them to begin with. Educationists are afflicted with a cultural relativism so profound it has become an intellectual disease. The obvious proposition that values are relative has been warped to signify the opposite of what it really means: that some facts and ideas are more important than others. In Educationese it means that they are equally arbitrary. Hence charges of cultural bias, where bias is defined as requiring literacy and the kind of knowledge rarely gained by hanging out on street corners or watching soap operas.
The products of the Educationist monopoly descend upon the colleges and universities, which, like the rest of the bureaucracy, are committed to permanent growth. Having long ago surrendered to the twin deities of egalitarianism and vocational training, colleges and universities have lost control of their own curricula. On most campuses, there is a continuing low-grade conflict between the basic, traditional academic disciplines, in which fundamental intellectual skills are supposed to be taught, and the vocational programs. Job training is winning everywhere—in too many instances a sort of job training that leaves students unprepared for the profession they think they are ready to enter and insufficiently educated to adjust when the jobs don’t materialize. Philosophy shrinks almost out of existence, while fashion merchandising advances.
So the catalog grows thicker by the year, and students have a promiscuous choice of courses that are the intellectual equivalent of puffed wheat: one kernel of knowledge inflated by means of hot air, divided into pieces, and puffed again. The vast majority of such courses are graded, if at all, by multiple-choice or true-false exams. In those rare instances where written work is given, grammar, punctuation, and style are seen to be the business of the English department alone. Nobody in most departments really has any idea whether his students are fully literate; very likely he has never asked them to write. (Perhaps that is just as well, given the kind of jargon-laden, semiliterate humbug that is the going thing in far too many disciplines.) American higher education has been drifting in this direction for some time. The public schools, dominated by Educationists, have already been there for quite a while. Very bright students who catch on early or who come from educated families may escape with a few skills; the rest are defrauded into believing they have an education.
When I was in school I always assumed that teachers were persons who had been very good students themselves. Some facts compiled by the Coordinating Board of the Texas College and University System make it clear that such is not the case today—at least, not until they enroll in the school of education, where everyone is transformed into an A student.
Of the 10,120 new teachers who graduated in Texas colleges in 1978, 8273, or roughly 80 per cent, attended public institutions. The greatest number, 869, came from Southwest Texas State University at San Marcos. North Texas graduated 648, East Texas 601, Stephen F. Austin 491. Of the larger schools, UT-Austin graduated 690, Texas Tech 623, Texas A&M 453, the University of Houston 362, and so on. In the private sector only Baylor prepares teachers in large numbers, graduating an even 400. SMU was next with 73. Rice graduated exactly 1. The higher a college’s entrance requirements and general academic reputation, the lower the percentage of certified-teacher graduates in its graduating class. Smart kids with good high school records avoid teacher training.
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