Peterson on the Ed Schools

 

You want the truth? Resentful radical leftists took over the Faculties of Education in the 1960s.

Now they control the entire K-12 system and half (half!) of all state budgets.

The Ed schools are among the worst faculties in the increasingly demented universities. Every bit of the "research" they have conducted in the last sixty years was a lie: whole word reading, multiple intelligences, self-esteem. Nothing but destructive.

Their students are by and large lazy, unintelligent, uninterested and ideologically captured.

The worst of them become administrators.

These are the people to whom we give our children, and much of our tax money. And we've done it for four generations, with no end in sight.

The Faculties of Education should be eliminated. They have done a worse than terrible job, and they are destroying our culture. Intentionally. Starting with your kids.

Jordan Peterson on X (Twitter)

All true; I agree 100% and have been saying the same thing for some years. We must abolish the Ed Schools. Having graduated from one should be a disqualification, not a qualification, as a teacher. They deliberately teach how to teach badly, so that any homeschooler can actually produce better results than their "professionals." And this is measurable. 

The Need for Smaller Class Sizes

A new study suggests that classroom size does not affect student results: smaller classrooms are not better. But this has been known for years. Many previous studies have shown the same. It is an eternal surprise only because teachers’ unions eternally assert the opposite.

They do so, I imagine, because a larger class demands the lecture format, whereas a small enough class can be run as a seminar, a group discussion.

The currently fashionable education philosophy, “constructivism,” holds that truth is not a constant, there is no objective truth. Knowledge is “constructed” in groups, making the seminar approach mandatory. If the group decides that China is in Europe, then it is in Europe. If they decide the sun goes around the Earth, then the sun goes around the Earth.

Constructivism does not account for what happens if groups in contact with one another arrive at different conclusions. Might makes right seems the inevitable, necessary approach: you pass a law or fight a war and force submission.

This is how fascism works. And this is how our schools currently work. Increasingly, under the influence of the schools and constructivism, this is how our society works.

The attraction for the teaching tribe, however, is that running a seminar takes no effort on their part. There is no need for them to either actually know anything about the subject, or know how to explain it. They just get to sit in judgement over the conclusions the students come up with in their seminar. And on what basis can they judge, given that there is no truth? The only possibility is to object if any group comes to an opinion that differs from that of the teacher. Meaning the teacher has no responsibilities, but gets to be the absolute dictator in the classroom.

It's a good life, as long as the money keeps pouring in.