„Education Schools Teach Teachers How to Indoctrinate, Not How to Teach”
Columbia Prof. John McWhorter: „Education Schools Teach Teachers How to Indoctrinate, Not How to Teach”
On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s „Real Time,” Columbia University Associate Professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter stated that „schools of education, too often, don’t teach anybody how to teach students things,” and „so often, it’s all tied up in how to teach students to be good leftist activists” and „all about social justice.”
While discussing failures within the American education system and a student suing her school over the quality of her education, McWhorter stated, „It’s partly the schools of education. It’s one of those things where, if you went to the typical education conference, you might be very surprised at how little people are taught how to educate. Instead, so often, it’s all tied up in how to teach students to be good leftist activists or how to teach students to be nice or there’s a code for all of this, empathy. And so, it’s all about social justice. And the people mean well. But what they’ve forgotten, and this really goes back to the 70s, but it’s extreme now, like so many things, is that schools of education, too often, don’t teach anybody how to teach students things, and that includes how to read.”
He continued, „And until we fix that, we’re going to continue to have cases like this. And it really is – it’s an American tragedy and nothing really ever seems to make a dent in it. Nowadays, we’re beginning to know about phonics, that, big surprise, to teach people how to read, unless they live in book-lined homes, you have to teach them how to sound out the words, boy, rocket science there. That’s something. But we’re going to keep getting that girl until education schools teach something called education”.
John H McWhorter is an associate professor in the Slavic Department at Columbia University. He earned his B.A. from Rutgers, his M.A. from New York University, and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford. Professor McWhorter has taught the seminar “Language in America,” a study of American linguistic history that considers Native American languages, immigrant languages, creole languages, American Sign Language, Black English and other speech varieties– their development, interactions, and preservation. He has also taught the seminar “Language Contact,” which focuses specifically on the mixture of language in North America, and studies the development of creoles, pidgins, koines, “vehicular” languages, and nonstandard dialects. Both seminars consider perceived legitimacy of languages, and the standing of language mixtures in media and education. Professor McWhorter also teaches various other courses for the Linguistics Program and Music Humanities for the Core Curriculum program.