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A Word About Education Courses
Education courses are one of the favorite targets in
educational reform. The critics, especially on the
conservative side, are fond of recommending that education
courses be reduced or scrapped altogether as a requirement
for certification. As a former professor of education, I
naturally don't like the implication that the courses I
taught were worthless, even though a few of my own were
worth less than worthless; they presented analyses on
important issues that I later regarded as characterized by
major mistakes. Nonetheless, let me offer a few observations
on the issue, for what they may be worth.
Parenthetically, the issue is one that would disappear
from public consideration if we had a competitive education
industry. In this respect, the issue is like tenure and
merit; it is a secondary or even tertiary issue in the big
picture. If we had a competitive education industry,
teachers in some schools might have taken several education
courses; teachers in other schools fewer or none. The market
would resolve the issue; perhaps the resolution of the issue
would not make any difference, or perhaps it would depending
upon what courses, if any, were taken instead of education
courses. Nonetheless, inasmuch as prominent critics treat
the issue as extremely important, let us consider it without
any thought or purpose of a change to a competitive
education industry.
My first reaction to the criticism is curiosity. At both
the undergraduate and graduate levels, our institutions of
higher education offer courses on all of our major social
institutions and several minor ones: our political system,
our economic system, our judicial system, and so on. On the
face of it, there is no obvious reason not to include
courses on our educational system as a building block of
general education. About one in every four persons in the
United States is involved full-time in education. Who gets
educated, how much and why, how, and when are important
issues, at least if media identification of the most
prominent issues in the 2000 elections is anywhere near the
mark. A large number of our political leaders have asserted
that how well our educational system functions will be the
most important influence on our future. It is not necessary
to believe these things to agree that education as a social
institution should be part of everyone's education, at least
if study of our social institutions is a part of a "liberal
education."
We are told that one of the reasons why teachers don't
know the subject(s) they teach is that they are required to
take too many education courses. This is absurd on the face
of it. The average teacher devotes about one year of
academic work to education courses. Elementary teacher
typically take more than secondary teachers because the
former are supposed to know the methods of teaching reading,
writing, arithmetic, music, and so on; whereas, secondary
teachers are required to study only the methods of teaching
the subject they are preparing to teach.
What is puzzling is why hard questions are not raised
about the three full years of undergraduate work that most
teachers take. If teachers don't know the subjects they
teach, the reason can't be inadequate time in their
undergraduate programs. The reasons is much more likely to
be the poor programs in the subjects themselves. Everyone
concedes that knowledge of the subjects taught is very
important. Also, we can tell whether individuals know their
subject by testing in the subject. After all, all the
professors do this in the institutions that prepare
teachers. In fact, the interesting question that is
virtually never raised is this: instead of requiring a
certain number of course credits in the subject to be
taught, why not simply require teachers to take a state test
in the subjects they plan to teach? Who opposes or would
oppose such a simple, straightforward way of finding out
whether prospective teachers know their subjects well enough
to teach them? Not the professors of education -- it's the
professors in the subjects to be taught. The reason is
simple enough. If this procedure were adopted, everyone
would know immediately which institutions were preparing
teachers in their subjects and which ones were not. To avoid
any such accountability, professors (most of them in the
arts and science departments) oppose state tests to
ascertain teacher preparation in the subjects to be taught.
There is much more to be said on these issues and I will
try to say a bit more about it next week. In the meantime,
let me emphasize that I am not trying to defend each and
every education course, including my own. Valuable subject
matters can be taught by incompetent teachers, but that is
not the issue here. The critics are not saying, "We need
competent teachers of education courses." They are saying,
"Eliminate the education courses."
Next week, I will try to explain how and why this state
of affairs materialized.
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Building a Competitive Education Industry
