If you need a reason to burn down the nearest “School of Education”

By Michael Becker

Here you go.

Full disclosure. We think that there is nothing more harmful than a School of Education at your local college or university. Nothing. Releasing every person charged with child abuse from our prisons and ensuring them a lifetime of employment at your local school would do less harm than what the inaptly named School of Education does.

Case in point is the following video. This is an actual “teacher” talking about Common Core math with a demonstration on how to approach the problem 32 – 20 = ?

Schools of Education typically have the lowest SAT scores of any program at college. Including pablum like Ethnic Studies. We believe that’s why graduates of education programs certainly seem to be, as a group, the dimmest bulbs in the box.

Think about it. You are sending your kids to school to be taught math not by a math major, but by somebody who has probably taken the collegiate minimum of math courses – one algebra class – and who actually majored in “education”. History? Do colleges even bother to teach history any more? Etc, etc, etc.

Common Core is the product of these dunces. So was “whole language” reading instruction.

Whole language was developed by an education professor at Arizona State University (where did I put those matches?) and was sold as a replacement for phonics in the 80s. The goals of whole language, according to our friends at Wikipedia (a notoriously lousy source, but these goals align well with WL) include:

• focus on making meaning in reading and expressing meaning in writing;

• constructivist approaches to knowledge creation, emphasizing students’ interpretations of text and free expression of ideas in writing (often through daily journal entries);

• emphasis on high-quality and culturally-diverse literature;

• integrating literacy into other areas of the curriculum, especially math, science, and social studies;

• focus on motivational aspects of literacy, emphasizing the love of books and engaging reading materials.

Needless to say, California jumped on the whole Language bandwagon. At the time California introduced whole language the reading skills of their students – taught reading by phonics – were consistently in the top of the nation. In just seven years, California dropped to 45th and 77% of their 4th graders were reading below their grade level.

Common Core is about to do for math what whole language did for reading. We’re glad we’re old. We don’t want to live to see buildings and airplanes designed by people who’ve learned math at the hands of these imbeciles.