Sheep-Goats
Joined: 16 Apr 2004
Posts: 527
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 Posted: Sat Apr 17, 2004 10:52 am Post subject: Teaching education: Shouldn't educators know better? |
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It's something that goes beyond assumption that most of the people posting on this board are teachers, and probably in the most formal aspect of the word. Therefore, most of us probably figure that teaching is, at least, a beneficial thing to do for someone -- and I'm sure that we all also recognize the harm a teacher can do, in no large part due to their posistion of authority and trust.
As such, most of us probably remember some bad advice we got from an academic advisor (or teacher) about a class we should take, and then took it, and now consider it more or less a detriment to our education itself.
My argument against teaching education, and especially the fallacy of degrees in education, is generally conducted in dialog form. It usually goes something like this:
| Quote: |
SG: I don't believe that education should be a viable avenue of study at the higher-education level.
XX: I have a degree in education. Why do you think that?
SG: Well, I can ask you directly, then, what can you teach?
XX: Anything.
SG: Can you teach me calculus?
XX: No, I didn't study math.
SG: Can you teach me philosophy?
XX: Look, I didn't study that either. But if you want me to teach it, I can do a better job of teaching it once I learn it than someone without my degree can...
SG: So why can't someone who's educated in something else learn to teach and then teach as well as you can...
...etc until one of us has a class... |
On a more concise level, my best teachers (and the best teachers of those who I've tried to corroborate with) in high school were never those who had education degrees -- but rather those singular oddballs who had a masters (in high school I never had a teacher with a Ph.D). So, just wondering, was your best teacher educated in education, or were they a specialist in their field? (If they were "both," do you feel that their expertise contributed to your learning more or less than their teaching compentency?)
Addmittedly, EFL has a get-out-of-jail card on this one, as we persumably already know our teaching subject to a certain degree. And in that respect, let me say that I'm not at all opposed to TEFL certificates, as English teaching is a trade at least as specialized as, say, shoe making. (In any other kind of teaching, your students are expected to be able to understand your natural speech, for example.) It is only a matter of degree, then, that I feel a MA TESOL is overkill. But my condemnation of a BA or MA in Education is nowise exempted.
My final condemnation of teaching education, however, lies in the fact that it is not something that is born of a latent desire in the educational community (most teachers of "real" academic subjects spend the gross majority of their time thinking about their subjects, compared to how they will teach them). Rather, the desire for B. Ed degrees is something driven by the marketplace -- a mark of confidence from the public on the idea of education itself leads them to want better teachers, and so the simple solution is to have teachers who have specifically studied education. Instead of the educational community thinking about this proposition from a moral or even educational grounding (thinking about, perhaps, the hyrda-like self perpetuation that teaching teaching must lead to) they respond to the market and generate, instead of learned individuals, people whose backgrounds are no different from those who attended technical school, or perhaps some government run skills-for-jobs program.
By the way, I mean this post in the nicest way. I'm as aware of the hand that feeds me as anyone else -- and if you're too invovled in the teaching teaching ladder to be able to contribute fairly impartially to the thread, perhaps it's better if you didn't. But then, perhaps not... |
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