Okay, let me clear up a misconception. I am not a teacher. I have thought about taking up 'the family business' but except for two stints, neither longer than a year and a half, have I taught as my job. I teach computer literacy classes--or did before I went back to school--but I'm not an educator. I wrestle with myself whether or not I will ever be an educator. My heart says yes, yes, yes. My very strong desire to eat says 'no, no, no'. Even at the university level (where I would want to teach) it is hard to find jobs with benefits nowadays--that is a powerful inducement *away* from teaching. Teaching in the public schools is pretty right-out for me. In many school districts teaching the subject of evolutionary biology--and I would teach biology if I taught anything in public schools--is just right out. In many more, one has to walk around the word saying everything BUT evolution. That would stay entertaining for me for all of about 10 minutes and then I would say something along the lines of "this is biology class. I wouldn't teach nor would I give serious time to astrology in an astronomy class and I'm not going to give it to creationism in a biology class for the same reasons." My time at that school would, at that point, be measured in days. If it were not for that, I would probably consider teaching at the high school level but there is that.
I hate to say it but I'll be honest, I don't *like* little kids enough to teach anything below high school. I liked my kid. I like my granddaughter (well, two year olds are hard NOT to like if you don't have to live with them all day...
). Other people's children? Not so much with the like.
What would I do? Having grown up with a professor of education, pedagogy was just in the air. I would move away from teaching to the test. I believe that if you have *standards* then you can, actually, assess within a reasonable level of approximation what a student knows by asking them to demonstrate that knowledge. For example, I presume that when I write about evolutionary biology I sound like I know what I'm talking about. When I have taught I could tell which students were getting it and which weren't simply by the questions they would ask (whether they spoke them in class, after class or called me over). But in order for something like that to work you have to have the emotional fortitude, as a teacher, to say that certain papers are well written and show knowledge of the subject and that research was clearly done (and documented) and certain papers do not. As long as there is any hint in the academy, at any level, that just turning in a paper--good, bad, incomprehensible--is sufficient for a student to feel good about themselves we'll have no choice BUT to teach to the test.
Don't get me started on educational issues, Rufusboi it is a passion of mine. I saw such a poignant example of the difference between the life of an educated man and the life of an uneducated man and the difference that it made in their children that I consider classrooms truly sacred spaces and teaching a vocation. Education almost but not quite rises to the level of a religion for me.
Cheers
Aj
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rufusboi
I agree that we need an educated and informed populace. You get no argument from me here. I will state, as a side note, that the founders envisioned a white male educated populace. So their definition of an educated populace wasn't that everyone needed to be educated, only certain people. It would be interesting to find out the percentage of the population that didn't know certain "givens" or "core knowledge" in 1800 versus today.
The concept of mass literacy is pretty new. I'm thinking late 1800s in Europe but it could have come about earlier in the US.
That brings me back to your next statement, and again, this is where we disagree. You think "many" (maybe this is where I got the "most" idea I had in my head) do not want to be either educated or informed. This is where we part ways. Maybe I am naive, maybe you are cynical. But I don't think "many" prefer being uneducated or uninformed. I think many are trying everyday to fix that in whatever way they can. Can I prove this? No. I can point to college enrollment stats, book purchasing stats, library card stats just as you can point to the same stats to make your argument.
The two links Msdemeanor provided were basically two opinions/intepretations of Neilson rating data. For me they showed and proved nothing. Just two writers giving me their interpretation of Neilsen data.
The stats you find tell you that people are wallowing in their ignorance and like it down there. The stats tell me that our education system is failing all of us. And cultivating cirtical thinking would put a pretty quick stop to the influence of "emotionally satisfying jingoism."
I don't know whether you teach in a public school, a private school, High school, or college (you mentioned business school) but as an educator, what are you going to do? How do we fix this lack of basic knowledge? And as an educator, why do you think people are ignorant and uninformed? To me, it goes a lot deeper than people just prefer being ignorant and uniformed.
Rufus
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