philosophy, Belonging, and other stuff

"Since the 1980s, right wing and conservative educational theorists have both attacked colleges of education and called for alternative routes to teacher certification. They have emphasized the practical and experiential, seeking to gut the critical nature of theory, pedagogy, and knowledge taught in colleges of education as well as in public schools and university classrooms. In effect, there is an attempt to deskill teaches by removing matters of conception from implementation. Teachers are no longer asked to be creative, to think critically, or to be creative. On the contrary, they have been reduced to the keeper of methods, implementers of an audit culture, and removed from assuming autonomy in their classrooms. According to conservatives, the great sin teachers colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice—and by 'theory,' they mean critical pedagogy and other theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledge, practices, and modes of governance within wider historical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. Conservatives wants public schools and colleges to focus on 'practical' methods in order to prepare teachers for an 'outcome-based' education system, which is code for pedagogical methods that are as anti-intellectual as they are politically conservative. This is a pedagogy useful for creating armies of number crunchers and for downgrading teachers to supervising the administration of standardized tests, but not much more. Reducing pedagogy to the teaching of methods and data-driven performance indicators that allegedly measure scholastic ability and improve student achievement is nothing short of scandalous. Rather than provide the best means for confronting 'difficult truths about the inequality of America’s political economy,' such a pedagogy produces the swindle of 'blaming inequalities on individuals and groups with low test scores.' The conservative call for practicality must be understood as an attempt to sabotage the forms of teacher and student self-reflection required for a quality education, all the while providing an excuse for a prolonged moral coma and flight from responsibility." | by Henry Giroux