As a teacher for over two decades, I’m allowed to criticize people who regularly extol all the wonderful teachers in our country. In any cohort numbering over five million, there are obviously many excellent teachers, but as a whole, educators are one of the nation’s least admirable professional cohorts and contain numerous individuals who shouldn’t be near children at all.
Thomas Sowell has long noted that education majors represent the dregs of college and post-graduate applicants. One study found that only 7% of high school seniors with SAT scores in the top quintile chose education as a major, whereas more than half of those in the lowest quintile went into education. What’s true of students is also true about their instructors and the quality of classes taught by these “doctors” who rank at the bottom of the academic totem pole in terms of collegial respect. Little wonder that Jill Biden’s “doctorate” degree (Ed.D.) was in education. Her so-called dissertation was accurately described in a 2020 Wall Street Journal opinion column as emitting “so much noxious methane the EPA should regulate it.”
Given the paucity of significant content compared to disciplines like history or science, there is always the temptation, as Sowell again notes, to promote educational fads. Some years ago, for example, the look-say method of reading replaced a long-proven technique, phonics, doubtless to create some new-and-improved product. As if depriving generations of children the ability to read effectively weren’t bad enough, schools of education (along with their 10 to 1 leftist scholastic mentors) also employ curricula designed to indoctrinate kids in perverse ideologies that have proliferated for decades at universities where former terrorists like Distinguished Professor of Education Bill Ayers and Northwestern Law’s Bernadine Dohrn found cushy employment.
Hellbound and Down 