Bottom Line

[Dave Monroe]

Terrance, did you read that Cary Nelson article you posted a link to
(pardon mon terminal preposition, but ...)?  I believe his argument was
that qualified university instructors, tenured professors, even, are
indeed needed in institutions of higher learning, that there's even a
demand for them, but that the (increasingly corporate, commercialized)
universities are instead meeting that demand with part-time, grossly
underpaid (esp. as students are not known to be big tippers ...)
graduate (if even) students, esp. in composition and literature courses,
and he's right.  And I think you admit as much in your post, but ... but
I also think you accept the situation as given, as unchangeable, as
perhaps even worsening (though I'll agree on the last point).  And no
matter how "pragmatic" Dewey was, how "realistic" you are, I can't
imagine either of you would want to concede that such a situation should
be merely, resignedly accepted, capitulated to (again, pardon mon ...)
... frighteningly, working in the lower reaches of the so-called service
industry, I seem to make more money than my entry-level PhD
acquaintances (the most talented of which, in particular, having been
recently ordained), but will I continue to do so as they quite possibly
advance?  The odd opportunity to post on lists, in forums such as this,
alas, provide my few moments of any real interest during the work day
until I can at least get out of here and get some reading done--if only
I could get piad for reading the books, writing the papers, spouting off
on them to a paying audience ...

Terrance wrote:

> 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