Allie Winegar Duzett, October 4, 2010
A recent study by Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett should strike fear into the parents of students across America.
This new study, entitled “Cracks in the Ivory Tower?: The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010,” takes an in-depth look at how today’s education professors view their role in society and in preparing the future teachers of our nation’s children. The results are distressing. Observe this nugget from the study’s key findings:
Asked to choose between two competing philosophies of the role of teacher educator, 68 percent believe preparing students “to be change agents who will reshape education by bringing new ideas and approaches to the public schools” is most important; just 26 percent advocate preparing students “to work effectively within the realities of today’s public schools.”
It would appear as though the people teaching tomorrow’s teachers believe that it is more important for future teachers to be “agents of change” than to be “effective” teachers within “the realities of today’s
public schools.” As if that isn’t enough, the study also found the
following:
The vast majority of education professors (83 percent) believe it is absolutely essential for public school teachers to teach 21st century skills, but just 36 percent say the same about teaching math facts, and 44 percent about teaching phonics in the younger grades. You read that correctly: only about a third of the professors teaching our children’s future teachers think teaching math facts isessential. And less than half view teaching phonics to younger children as essential. Meanwhile, 83% view “21st century skills” as essential. Those skills are defined in the study as “critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and global awareness.”
Yes: “global awareness” and “collaboration” are apparently viewed as being more important than math and reading.
Meanwhile, the study points out that “Just 37 percent say it is ‘absolutely essential’ to focus on developing ‘teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom.’” This is despite the fact that discipline in the classroom and student management is, as Jay Mathews at the Washington Post calls it, “the hottest topic among young teachers.”
In case we were wondering why our public schools so often perform so dismally, we may have found our answer.
Allie Duzett is the Director of Strategic Operations for Accuracy in Media, Accuracy in Academia’s big sister group.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
Replies
Paul Haubner, a specialist for the N.E.A, stated: "The schools cannot allow parents to influence the kind of values-education their children receive in school; that is what is wrong with those who say there is a universal system of values. Our (humanistic) goals are incompatible with theirs. We must change their values."
Listen to Professor Chester M. Pierce, M.D., Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard: "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well - by creating the international child of the future."
William Z. Foster, National Chairman of the American Communist Party (1933-44, 1945-57), in Toward Soviet America, in 1932, said: “Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are...[a] National Department of Education...the studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic, and other features of the bourgeois ideology. The students will be taught the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.”
Karl Marx said: “The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Joseph Stalin said: “Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
Follks, the majority of what is wrong with America is fomented in the public education monster. We simply HAVE to take back education if we are to Restore Liberty.
indoctrination, er schools, and learn in freedom! Your children and grandchildren will be thankful! You do not have to re-create a "school" atmosphere at home, but make home a place where curiosity comes natural and learning will follow. It doesn't take a whole lot of money to homeschool. You can homeschool on a shoestring. If anyone is going to do the indoctrination, you ought to have full control of it! Pass along your values and passions to your kids instead of letting others do it in your stead. Don't give them over to someone else who doesn't have their best interests at heart!