Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
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FYI
Schools would quickly be better off for the hiring of advanced degree teachers (where the degree is in the same subject that the teachers teach.) But it still will take time to overcome the decades of seniority system damage done by the teachers unions. However if Hanson's proposal is accepted, the teacher's union would lose one of their argueing points, that we have to have certificates. Maybe after this arguement is in the trash heap we can discuss how much good (or harm) the union system does to education.
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read later, thanks.
So where can I get one of those 7,000 lb. SUV's? My Dodge Ram 4x4 diesel longbed 3/4 ton pickup is big, but not anywhere near 7,000 lbs.
The Hanson comment that caught my eye was:
The most critical but ignored issue in education is credentialing.
To put it another way, the most critical issue in education is the preponderance of teachers who are supposedly qualified to teach because they have a degree in "education". Kids can't learn math because their teachers don't understand math, because their teachers didn't understand math, and so on all the way back to the "new math" in the 1960s, which was a miserable effort to foist mathematical number theory on kids who needed to learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
Teachers should be subject matter experts first -- and then teachers. My best teachers were the math teachers who really dug math, the history teachers who were amateur historians, and the English teachers who knew how to perform, not just read Shakespeare.
If you get beyond the truly evil stuff, my big gripe about society is how many people are "underutilized". There are millions of people out there, some of them very close to me, who are not living up to even 10% of their potential. The working world somehow can't figure out how to make use of their capabilities. I realize that some blame rests with the individuals involved, but when I think about how much wasted potential is out there, I have to believe that there are structural reasons for it.
One such structural reason is the one that Hanson points out -- that people who would be perfectly good teachers, for example, are legally prevented from doing so. I wonder how many others there are, and whether some relatively simple changes could turn this around. Foundations across the country, including the Virginia G. Piper Trust in Phoenix, are starting to think about this in the context of the projected mass retirement of the baby boomers. Piper's Life Options Blueprint has some interesting things to say. Perhaps activities such as this will make a difference.