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| Those who can't do teach | |
Anyone who attends a university where they train teachers will tell you
that the trainee teachers are the only group dumber than the PE
students. Except the trainee teachers themselves of course, who will bristle at
the suggestion. Of course they also bristle at the suggestion that they regard
themselves as the intellectual
elite. Apparently someone who has a government charter to tell other people
what to think doesn't qualify as the intellectual elite. Go figure. But some other university intellectual elites have produced a study which
shows that
teachers are actually a pretty dumb lot. In particular, it reports that
the academic achievement of women entering teaching has declined substantially.
You mean all those feminists who became teachers through
affirmative action aren't really that smart? Who'd have thought? The study actually confirms what the rest of us have known all along. The
feminisation of the school curriculum alienated a generation of boys from the
education system, and did nothing for the girls beyond giving them a sense of
entitlement to affirmative action. Allowing the teachers unions to run the
education system has simply resulted in a slow deterioration of teaching
standards. And driving male teachers out of the profession through affirmative
action and subtle innuendos about men being pedophiles has been a disaster. But it's not like the teacher's unions don't have a solution to the
problem. They are demanding that teachers be paid more money. The argument is
that better, and smarter teachers will be attracted to the profession if it
pays more money. Can you imagine any organization other than a union demanding more money
because they are doing such a poor job? ** Of course the teachers unions have always fought the concept of
performance-based, or merit-based pay. Across the board pay rises have always
been the demand in the we-are-all-equal culture of the socialist-rooted elites. They have even resisted Little Johnny's demands for standardized report
cards. There have been many squishy arguments against this, usually based
around the notion that all children are different, and their needs can only
really be assessed and met by Trained Professionals (ie increasingly dumb
women teachers). The real reason they are resisting the standardized report cards is because it
will create accountability. Teachers are terrified of actually having to admit
that they have only managed to get Junior's reading level up to the bottom 20
percentile because then their teaching performance (or lack of it) would be
obvious, and parents would be able to compare schools and might (horror of
horrors) actually demand a choice in how their children are educated. Next,
parents might actually demand an education voucher system. Oh the horror, the horror. It's ironic, that in the state education factories, in which the teacher's
unions have tried so hard to create uniformity, their argument against
standardized report cards is based on individuality. It's also ironic that the favored slogan of the teacher's union is
State education: it's our future. Now that's horrifying.
** Actually yes, I can: the government. It does this all the time.
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