Bottom Line

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> > the
> > majority of postgraduates are not prepared, qualified, nor
> > licensed to teach in our primary or secondary schools.
> 
> And this is meant as a defence of ... ?

Yeah, what is my position? The bottom line? No. The
intrinsic value of education?  Maybe there is book in this
class. Does Academic Freedom include the right not to take a
position Either-Or? The right Not be political, black or
white? Teachers, like taxi cap drivers and philosophers like
to think in terms of extreme opposites. Oh they don't like
to admit it so they dance on the heads of pins while they
play with language and abstractions. What do I mean by this
or that? Who defines what is capital, intellectual, real? Oh
come now, there may be water on Mars but until we have
schools up there we should not get our selves so up, up, and
AWAY,  from the woman on the street. "There is no
educational value in the abstract." Dewey said that,  in his
Experience & Education. Required reading.  

Have things improved from Dewey? 


There may be some truth in your Morality in Venice post, but
isn't there something terribly wrong about graduate schools
that continue to encourage students to work on research
degrees when they know perfectly well that the vast majority
of all their graduates will never find a tenure-track
position? What will these new scholars and often outstanding
teachers do? If they're lucky they may break their asses as
adjunct professors at minimal pay, without benefits or vote,
in a continual scramble for short-term contracts that have
only the benefit of required travel, not easy when you have
to lug those loans with you. Well, they could teach in the
high schools, but  is that a justification for running up
say several tens of thousands of dollars in student loans
for degrees in English or Philosophy or other Humanities
disciplines? And as you say, a Ph.D. or MA does not qualify
one to teach primary or secondary Ed. So, while some schools
may accept a Ph.D. or MA and even fund the necessary
continuance of education, many will not. This is here in the
States and it's rather complicated, mostly by the bottom
line. 

 More Dewey:  The School and Society: being three lectures
by John
Dewey supplemented by a statement of the University
Elementary School. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. (1907) 


"Consider the training schools for teachers -- the normal
schools. These occupy at
present a somewhat anomalous position, intermediate between
the high school and
the college, requiring the high-school preparation, and
covering a certain amount of
college work. They are isolated from the higher
subject-matter of scholarship, since,
upon the whole, their object has been to train persons how
to teach, rather than
what to teach; while, if we go to the college, we find the
other half of this isolation 
learning what to teach, with almost a contempt for methods
of teaching. The college
is shut off from contact with children and youth. Its
members, to a great extent,
away from home and forgetting their own childhood, become
eventually teachers
with a large amount of subject-matter at command, and little
knowledge of how this is related to the minds of those to
whom it is to be taught. In this division between what to
teach and how to teach, each side suffers from the
separation. 

It is interesting to follow out the inter-relation between
primary, grammar, and high
schools. The elementary school has crowded up and taken many
subjects
previously studied in the old New England grammar school.
The high school has
pushed its subjects down. Language and "advanced math" have
been put in the upper grades, so that the seventh and eighth
grades are, after all, about all that is left of the old
grammar school. They are a sort of amorphous composite,
being partly a place
where children go on learning what they already have learned
(to read, write, and
figure), and partly a place of preparation for the high
school. The name in some
parts of the States these upper grades was " Intermediate
School." The term
was a happy one; the work was simply intermediate between
something that had
been and something that was going to be, having no special
meaning on its own
account. 

Just as the parts are separated, so do the ideals differ --
moral development,
practical utility, general culture, discipline, and
professional training. These aims are each especially
represented in some distinct part of the system of
education;  and with the growing interaction of the parts,
each is supposed to afford a
certain amount of culture, discipline, and utility. But the
lack of fundamental unity is
witnessed in the fact that one study is still considered
good for discipline, and
another for culture; some parts of arithmetic, for example,
for discipline and others
for use, literature for culture, grammar for discipline,
geography partly for utility,
partly for culture; and so on. The unity of education is
dissipated, and the studies
become centrifugal; so much of this study to secure this
end, so much of that to
secure another, until the whole becomes a sheer compromise
and patchwork
between contending aims and disparate studies. The great
problem in education on
the administrative side is to secure the unity of the whole,
in the place of a sequence
of more or less unrelated and overlapping parts and thus to
reduce the waste arising
from friction, reduplication and transitions that are not
properly bridged. 


> 
> They lament the lack of availability of such training or their own
> negligence in not seeking it?


Yes, of course. 

(B)tuttle