14 review for Education's Smoking Gun: How Teachers Colleges Have Destroyed Education In America

1. 

   5 out of 5

   Carolyn Kost – Aug 21, 2020

   This is an extremely important book that explains how we arrived where we are. I took 10 pages of notes. Damerell disparaged teachers’ colleges for using their platform to implement a misguided social agenda in schools rather than transmit essential knowledge and skills. Anyone unconvinced should view "Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZ3R... Damerell referenced Harvard Education Professor Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot's book, The Good High School This is an extremely important book that explains how we arrived where we are. I took 10 pages of notes. Damerell disparaged teachers’ colleges for using their platform to implement a misguided social agenda in schools rather than transmit essential knowledge and skills. Anyone unconvinced should view "Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJZ3R... Damerell referenced Harvard Education Professor Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot's book, The Good High School (1983) and wrote: “At St. Paul’s [Concord, NH],…[Lightfoot] quotes a black female student as complaining, ‘We have to do all of the stretching and changing. They will always remain the same whether we’re here or not.’….[Lightfoot’s critique:] ‘It is expected that the unusual [minority] students, not the curriculum or pedagogy will have to be transformed.’ Lightfoot misses the point that this is what education is. The student is transformed. Without the transformation, there is no education. To make schools over into the likenesses of children, whoever the children are, is to destroy education.” Our nation, communities, and schools all have norms that the dominant group values, takes for granted, transmits, and expects to be accepted unquestioned. It is akin to asking a fish, “How’s the water?” when that’s the only matrix it knows. That is not injustice, but rather the very nature of a society. Part of the job in transmitting cultural capital is to identify what students need in order to thrive in the places to which they will go after ours. There is a downside. Many of us have had the experience of returning home after college unable to relate to the friends and family we left behind. As Damerell wrote, “That is a high price to pay but is not nearly so high a price as remaining ignorant and uneducated for a lifetime.” Educators Bettina Love and Jamilah Pitts are actually supporting RE-segregation, but with better funding for Black schools than under "separate but equal", since the NEA's foundational text White Fragility makes it clear that non-Black people are irredeemably racist and can never be anything but racist. Bestselling author Ibram Kendi [How to Be an Anti-Racist] insists that "Through lynching Black cultures, integrationists are, in the end, more harmful to Black bodies than segregationists are." STUNNING WORDS! Research from Black academics gave rise to many universities' initiatives like U Connecticut's Scholars House just for Black males. The graduates of US Historically Black Colleges and Universities are wildly successful (40% of the Black members of US Congress, 12% Black CEOs, 40% Black engineers, 50% Black lawyers, 80% Black judges). The graduates of women's colleges are similarly disproportionately represented. If the research bears out that the increased support in a homogeneous environment outweighs the benefits of diversity, what then? But wait, there's more! The Governor of the State of California this week signed into law that every student in the CSU system (500,000) must take Ethnic Studies, the characteristics of which are the following components: "affirmation of their cultural identity [not American, of course, but their ethnic group and only certain ethnic groups, not mine, which is decidedly marginalized], external attribution for difficulties [!!!], forewarning about stereotypes, etc." We must be clear and precisely define our intention when we hold up diversity and inclusion as our values. Do we intend to challenge structural inequality? Do we want to curate an experience? Do we sensitively transmit cultural capital and other skills according to students' needs so that they will be able to effectively interact in the dominant culture wherever they may go after graduation? We do transform our students and in turn, we send them off to transform the world.

2. 

   5 out of 5

   Volkert – May 26, 2017

   Former Madison Avenue adman and Associate Professor of Education attacks the "educationist" establishment in teachers colleges as the main culprit in the decline of the American education system. Although some of this reads like a vendetta, some of it rings true. He believes that the social agenda of "equality" has caused a lowering of standards, not improvement of teaching. His background in media brings some interesting insights for me as a library-media specialist. Former Madison Avenue adman and Associate Professor of Education attacks the "educationist" establishment in teachers colleges as the main culprit in the decline of the American education system. Although some of this reads like a vendetta, some of it rings true. He believes that the social agenda of "equality" has caused a lowering of standards, not improvement of teaching. His background in media brings some interesting insights for me as a library-media specialist.

3. 

   4 out of 5

   Alberto –

4. 

   4 out of 5

   Wendi Wanders –

5. 

   4 out of 5

   Grammarbroad –

6. 

   4 out of 5

   Francesca –

7. 

   4 out of 5

   Jocelyn –

8. 

   5 out of 5

   Kate –

9. 

   4 out of 5

   Emily Stephens –

10. 

    5 out of 5

    Katy The Sleepy Reader –

11. 

    4 out of 5

    Amber –

12. 

    4 out of 5

    Karl –

13. 

    5 out of 5

    Christian V –

14. 

    5 out of 5

    Margaret –