Here’s an excellent article by Bruce Deitrick Price at American Thinker. For all the worship of teachers you’d think there’d be more than a few of them to organize a revolt. Since there isn’t, it has to be judged mostly a failed profession.
During the 1500s, the Spanish came to America (we were told in history classes) for “gold, glory, and gospel.” Merchants made money; soldiers distinguished themselves in war; Catholic priests spread religion. The three Gs were a handy way to understand why people ventured across 3,000 miles of dangerous ocean in little boats.
Surprisingly enough, when we jump forward four centuries, we find that we can use this mnemonic to understand our Education Establishment, one of this country’s more peculiar and inscrutable subcultures.
GOLD: Professors of education make excellent salaries without having special abilities or skills, other than being enthusiastic enforcers of the party line. H.L. Mencken sized up the big picture all the way back in 1928 (from “The War On Intelligence”):
To take a Ph.D. in education in most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window dressing. … Most pedagogues … are simply dull persons who have found it easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out. At this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or folly, and always with enthusiasm. The schools reek with this puerile nonsense. Their programs of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols[.] … Or examine a dozen or so of the dissertations … turned out by candidates for the doctorate at any eminent penitentiary for pedagogues, say Teachers College, Columbia. What you will find is a state of mind that will shock you. It is so feeble that it is scarcely a state of mind at all.
GLORY: Education, in its progressive forms, attracts people who think that making a Brave New World is an accomplishment — never mind how much you have to hurt people when forcing them into their new roles.
Read more: American Thinker
