Sometimes I'm A Raving Lunatic

I don't think much of schools of education. It has always seemed to me we would all be better off if all of the education departments were closed and every education major forced to get a degree in another subject. I've never met a single teacher who didn't say their education degree program was largely a waste of their time. This is over and above the reputation most schools of education have garnered in academia as intellectual jokes, though well-tolerated jokes. The vacuous nature of these places is an open invitation to the sort of "post-modern neo-socialist social justice engineering" that some bloggers have noticed of late. (See here and here.)

But for the sheer inanity of it all you have to see what such folks are doing with mathematics. From Kathy over at Big Cat Chronicles: Teach math by the numbers and not the leftist agenda

I invested years of my life in learning a multitude of arithmetic and mathematics, much more so than most mortals because geophysics is my undergraduate degree which, as I describe it, is geology on math steroids. Thus, in addition to learning the basics all kids learn like multiplication tables and basic formulas, I've delved deeply into algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and rather weird math like Fourier theory (a fancy schmancy form of transformational calculus that jumps between frequency and time), and complex numbers (which I can't explain now because I couldn't in college either).

And do you know what? Never in all the years of classes and years of applying mathematical theory have I ever viewed math as a political field of study. Thus, color me with boiled blood too, like Barry Kearns at VekTor, over the crackpot theory to teach mathematics to school children by smothering learning in social justice theory...

To illustrate her point she posts a table of contents of a book promoting such "teaching." It includes:

• Teaching Suggestions: Corporate Control of U.S. Media Line Graph
• Sweatshop Accounting
• Teaching Suggestions: The Global Capitalist Economy Cartoon
• Globalization, Labor, and the Environment: A Linear Programming Unit
• Teaching Suggestions: Map of Territory That Mexico Lost to the United States
• Deconstructing Barbie: Math and Popular Culture
• Fast Foods, Junk Foods, and Advertising: Analyzing the Barrage of Advertising Aimed at Children
• Libraries, Books, and Bias: Using Math to Raise Issues of Representation

I'd like to think such nut jobs are few and far between; Very vocal, really loud, pretty damn obnoxious, but unlikely to be in your neighborhood school. However, they are in somebody's schools. I have serious reservations about subjecting any child of mine to such crapola. I'll hope to maybe avoid it by sending them to Catholic schools. But, if that isn't an option (based on where we are living at the time) I wouldn't rule out home-schooling if I felt the local public schools were too damn crazy.

Maybe some public schools can compete for students by mandating that their teachers be 100% free from Eductation School education. You'd have parents fighting to get their kids into those schools.