Criticism
Traditionalist scholars have been critical of the status quo within most schools of education. Prominent figures contributing to this school of thought include E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, and Lynne Cheney. Common assertions made by these critics include that the typical school of education has a Left-wing political bias, favoring Socialist philosophies such as Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy and the "Teaching for Social Justice" movement, and are of lower academic standards and include "Mickey Mouse" courses. They also argue that many schools of education are academically, professionally, and socially inhospitable toward students whose political views do not conform to the predominant Left-leaning ideology and that the field's interest in educational equity sometimes crosses over the line between academic research and political activism.
In March 2009, Katherine Merseth, director of the teacher education program at Harvard University, described graduate schools of education as the "cash cows of universities". Another criticism is that earning an advanced degree in education, specifically a master level degree, doesn't seem to actually make someone a better teacher. In October 2009, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that “by almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.” He characterized many education schools as "cash cows" for American universities.
Read more about this topic: School Of Education
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)