When I was a college student in the 1960's, school-of-education courses were notorious for their lack of academic rigor. Professors in other departments cracked jokes about them, and liberal arts students looking for easy credits took them as electives. Everybody called them "Mickey Mouse" courses.
Although I never enrolled in an education course, years later as a professor and supervisor of student teachers at West Virginia University, I did sit in on some that my students were taking and saw for myself that the disparaging things said about them were largely true. I recall one three-credit course on how to ventilate a classroom, arrange bookshelves and operate a movie projector. Other courses I heard about were even more devoid of intellectual content. The widely held notion that public school teachers go into teaching because they are incapable of doing anything else no doubt originated with former college students and professors in other fields who remember those "Mickey Mouse" courses.
But that was a long time ago. Education courses today, I’m told, are more rigorous and comprehensive. In addition to teaching future teachers how to teach, education courses today encompass human growth and development, social diversity, conflict resolution, emotional and sexual issues--things all teachers should know.
Such knowledge, however, cannot be properly acquired in the abstract from lectures and books, and much less from professors who have never labored in a K-12 classroom. It is best acquired from experience, by working in a real school with real students. Education 101 and its sequels may no longer deserve the epithet "Mickey Mouse", but in the main they are a waste of valuable undergraduate time.
In his book The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools, (1999) Martin L. Gross notes that elementary school teachers have to take so many education courses--40 percent of their total undergraduate credit hours--that most of them come out of college no better educated in the core academic subjects than a community college graduate. Other critics, biased perhaps by the profession's "Mickey Mouse" reputation, hold that the intellectual level of the average elementary school teacher is no higher than that of a middling high school sophomore.
Most of the elementary school teachers I know work hard and manage their classes well. Some are very creative. Others try to make up for their academic deficiencies by taking night and summer courses. Still, they could contribute a lot more to the overall education of their students if they had a better grasp of the subjects they teach.
Consider, for instance, the trouble so many high school students of normal intelligence are having learning algebra. In 2004, only 53 percent of high school students in Alexandria, VA, where I used to substitute teach, scored below average on the relatively simple Virginia Standard of Learning (SOL) algebra test, and that despite an all-out effort teach them, not algebra, but how to take the test.
School officials in Alexandria attributed this mass failure to the fact that their local public schools served a disproportionate number of minority and foreign students. Outside critics, for their part, blamed it on the ineptitude or neglect of high school math teachers. But the root of the problem lies in the fact that the average elementary school teacher in Alexandria did not know math well enough to give their students the foundation and encouragement they need to master algebra in the higher grades.
Most elementary school teachers will confess that one reason they majored in elementary education—and as their notoriously low SAT math scores will attest—was that they were not very good at math. Many so fear and dislike math, that they inadvertently, (or perhaps deliberately) turn their students off to the subject.
And pretty much the same holds true for science, English, and social studies. Were elementary school teachers better versed in the core academic subjects, many of the learning problems and educational deficiencies afflicting high school students today would not exist.
Elementary schools have tried to patch up the problem with "resource teachers," specialists to whom students are sent with their class for instruction that their regular teacher can't give them. Thought this is better than nothing, it's not good enough, as much of the kid's school time is wasted day shuttling back and forth from classroom to classroom.
I therefore hold with Martin L. Gross and the growing number of critics who advocate scrapping undergraduate education courses and dismantling the entire public education certification mill.
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