Re: USA "Teaching Colleges" Teach How, Not Why

From Osher Doctorow mdoctorow@xxxxxxxxxxx

The result of all this is that, for example in California, students at
almost all levels tend to fall behind European, Asian, and other
nations' students. Since Secondary and Middle Schools and Elementary
Schools use similar methods to "Teaching Colleges" in the USA,
but the Bureaucrats in "Teaching Colleges" have more power, the public
usually finds out that something is wrong at the lower Secondary or
Middle School or Elementary levels, where there's more
national/international testing and comparison thanks partly to Testing
Corporations/Testing Services.

Once the public discovers that their students are behind "everybody
else", schools usually have a "Quick Fix" in which they claim to
suddenly improve methods, followed by an "x percent improvement in
scores" (where x is positive). Remember, these are Method specialists,
so they can't figure out what is wrong ("Why"). So how do teaching
methods magically improve and scores magically increase? And why do
they go down again when nobody is looking anymore? This has a simple
explanation, but unfortunately a very deep one. Since the teachers
themselves tend to be Extreme Extroverts and Actors/Actresses, they are
experts in "putting on a Show" and "Lying with Statistics" (see the
book How To Lie With Statistics, which is out of print but still in
some Public Libraries and occasionally discussed on the internet).
The "improvement" in scores may be often not any longer in comparison
with other nations' students or other States' students but in
comparison with their own past performance. Or the "best" students
are selected for testing and the worse students have a "holiday". Or
sometimes in desperation they ask Research Universities how to improve
and conduct temporary "National Emergency" rapid training sessions in
which students actually get more valuable content and are brainwashed
into studying harder, after which everything goes back to before when
the public is happy again. Liaisons with News Media help tremendously
in this - Actors go together with News Media like protons go together
with electrons.

If this reminds you of the Mafia, it is no surprise. I call it the
Educational Mafia. They produce they Political Science majors and
History majors who become lawyers and then politicians and Big
Government and Big Corporation "leaders" with few exceptions.

Osher Doctorow

.