Read the column here.
Here is an excerpt:
Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. As such, they are home to the least able students and professors with the lowest academic respect. Were we serious about efforts to improve public education, one of the first things we would do is eliminate schools of education.
The inability to think critically makes educationists fall easy prey to harebrained schemes, and what’s worse, they don’t have the intelligence to recognize that the harebrained scheme isn’t working.
Reputation aside, schools of education are not alone in the “academic slum.” Schools of social work, as well as English, sociology, psychology, and “studies” departments, are just as susceptible to “harebrained schemes” as schools of education. It is a higher education problem, not necessarily an ed school problem.
The difference is that the products of schools of education, i.e., teachers and administrators, are constantly in the public eye and are grouped together into neat units called schools. We can easily track their shortcomings, whereas graduates from other disciplines are scattered about in various professions and unemployment lines.
After five or so years of study in two large schools of education, I have encountered students and professors from both sides of the intellectual spectrum. The problem I found was that most education professors, particularly those involved in teacher education, were too blinded by collectivist and statist ideologies to think about education in any rational way.
