I know that I have blogged a lot on the poor state of education in the USA and here goes another one.
The primary objective of any public education system is to prepare their young people for the future. We hear similar statements like this all the time, so one would expect that we all understand the meaning and significance of the statement. Wouldn't you? Well, I don't think we do. Not only is our education system supposed to prepare our children for life, but for college too. This last point is the objective of this blog.
Think about it this way. If one of the main objectives of our public schools is to prepare out kids for college and professional careers, wouldn't you expect the teachers in our public schools to know something about what is needed to prepare our kids? Yes, you would. Here is where the rub comes in. Over 90% of our teachers have never taken a class in college that would have prepared them for anything but being a teacher, but it gets worse. Most of the majors in our colleges are nothing more than "fluff". The majors do not prepare the kids for any kind of professional career except teaching in out public schools. If that is the case, how would you expect one of these types of "teachers" to prepare your kid for a career in Medicine, Engineer or any of the sciences? Over 90% would have been rejected from these majors because they were not qualified or smart enough. Starting to see the problem?
If you confront one of our public school teachers, they will tell you that they have taken classes on how to counsel your kids toward these majors . For my money, that is all BS. If you were to read a book or take a class on what it is like to play professional football or be a brain surgeon or an engineer, do you really think that you could prepare a person for the above? I don't think so and the same thing applies to professional college majors. What do you think the batting average is for teachers who coach football or baseball who have never played either sport? In a rare case, you may find one or two, but those are not the kind of odds that we should be betting the future of our kids on.
It has been my experience and that of most of my friends that when a college student can not cut it in one of the professional majors, they gravitate to teaching where there is a much lower standard. I have interviewed teachers and asked them about real science or math classes that they had to take as part of their teaching majors and all come back with the names of the classes they had to take. When I dig deeper, I find out that these "so called" college math and science classes are so watered down that I don't think some would even meet the high school standard.
The USA would be doing its public education system a favor by closing down all teaching colleges. That's right, close them all down and select the public school teachers form the other "real" college majors. That is the way most of the world does it and their results speak for themselves. I know that a lot of kids would not end up as public school teachers and that is "good". We don't need any more second rate rejects teaching our kids. The defense of many teachers would be that to teach, all you need is to "know" more than the kids. I think it is a little more complicated than that. I think that you need to be smarter than the average intelligence of the class you are teaching. I know that the average IQ of a typical public school class is "100". I also know that the average IQ of our public school teachers is "below" that of their class. How can an arrangement like that ever work?
Historically, the teachers were among the smartest people in the community and that is the way it is in most of the world today, but not in the USA. We have a system that systematically funnels many of our least intelligent people into teaching and that needs to stop. I would have rather attended a class under a tree where all the students sat on the ground, but where the teacher was one of the smartest people in our community rather than a posh class room with an air head teaching the class. How about you?
We all know what we are doing is not working and in fact, it is getting worse. Rather than keeping on doing the same thing over and over and just throwing money at the problem, why don't try something new and dump all our teacher's colleges??
PS--Here is another way to look at it. Less than 5% of the teachers have a high enough SAT score to get into most of the professional college majors, yet at least 15% of the kids in their classes do! Does that tell you something? We all know that if you hang around with dumb people, your are not going to get very smart. Getting the message?
The primary objective of any public education system is to prepare their young people for the future. We hear similar statements like this all the time, so one would expect that we all understand the meaning and significance of the statement. Wouldn't you? Well, I don't think we do. Not only is our education system supposed to prepare our children for life, but for college too. This last point is the objective of this blog.
Think about it this way. If one of the main objectives of our public schools is to prepare out kids for college and professional careers, wouldn't you expect the teachers in our public schools to know something about what is needed to prepare our kids? Yes, you would. Here is where the rub comes in. Over 90% of our teachers have never taken a class in college that would have prepared them for anything but being a teacher, but it gets worse. Most of the majors in our colleges are nothing more than "fluff". The majors do not prepare the kids for any kind of professional career except teaching in out public schools. If that is the case, how would you expect one of these types of "teachers" to prepare your kid for a career in Medicine, Engineer or any of the sciences? Over 90% would have been rejected from these majors because they were not qualified or smart enough. Starting to see the problem?
If you confront one of our public school teachers, they will tell you that they have taken classes on how to counsel your kids toward these majors . For my money, that is all BS. If you were to read a book or take a class on what it is like to play professional football or be a brain surgeon or an engineer, do you really think that you could prepare a person for the above? I don't think so and the same thing applies to professional college majors. What do you think the batting average is for teachers who coach football or baseball who have never played either sport? In a rare case, you may find one or two, but those are not the kind of odds that we should be betting the future of our kids on.
It has been my experience and that of most of my friends that when a college student can not cut it in one of the professional majors, they gravitate to teaching where there is a much lower standard. I have interviewed teachers and asked them about real science or math classes that they had to take as part of their teaching majors and all come back with the names of the classes they had to take. When I dig deeper, I find out that these "so called" college math and science classes are so watered down that I don't think some would even meet the high school standard.
The USA would be doing its public education system a favor by closing down all teaching colleges. That's right, close them all down and select the public school teachers form the other "real" college majors. That is the way most of the world does it and their results speak for themselves. I know that a lot of kids would not end up as public school teachers and that is "good". We don't need any more second rate rejects teaching our kids. The defense of many teachers would be that to teach, all you need is to "know" more than the kids. I think it is a little more complicated than that. I think that you need to be smarter than the average intelligence of the class you are teaching. I know that the average IQ of a typical public school class is "100". I also know that the average IQ of our public school teachers is "below" that of their class. How can an arrangement like that ever work?
Historically, the teachers were among the smartest people in the community and that is the way it is in most of the world today, but not in the USA. We have a system that systematically funnels many of our least intelligent people into teaching and that needs to stop. I would have rather attended a class under a tree where all the students sat on the ground, but where the teacher was one of the smartest people in our community rather than a posh class room with an air head teaching the class. How about you?
We all know what we are doing is not working and in fact, it is getting worse. Rather than keeping on doing the same thing over and over and just throwing money at the problem, why don't try something new and dump all our teacher's colleges??
PS--Here is another way to look at it. Less than 5% of the teachers have a high enough SAT score to get into most of the professional college majors, yet at least 15% of the kids in their classes do! Does that tell you something? We all know that if you hang around with dumb people, your are not going to get very smart. Getting the message?
