Nnnno you really don't.
I can only think of three cases in the past year or so where I've gone off half-cocked and spoken with authority on something I was wrong about: state ID's ARE a valid proof of citizenship under 1070, the guy who flew his plane into the IRS WASN'T a right-winger, and Opera NO LONGER allows text-only zoom. In all other cases, I am fairly confident I have used my full cock.
Anyway, my criticisms of Shinra WERE one little extra kick, but they're also perfectly germane to the discussion. I believe the general population is deficient in the ability to read a source, evaluate it critically, and understand the data it provides, and I believe that's a failure of American schools -- perhaps the single most important one. Paco brought this up a little earlier.
Trouble is, "critical thinking" is nebulous, tough to gauge with a multiple-choice test, and, not to put too fine a point on it, charter schools are at least as bad at teaching it as public schools are.
Now, a multiple-choice test COULD have given you samples of those articles, asked what the average hourly salary for a teacher in America is, and then evaluated your answer -- but teaching the skill to answer correctly (or hell, even just in the ballpark) is trickier, and finding the flaws in a given interpretation is trickier still.
Woefully late to the thread but there are a couple of things I felt like chiming in on.
Eh, not THAT late.
Surgery is largely a matter of physical capability. While the job of surgeon in this country requires a lot of education, the Simpsons episode with Lisa shouting directions to Dr. Nick and it working is closer to reality than I think a lot of people would be comfortable thinking about. You can be dumb and be a good surgeon. You can be a bad doctor and be a good surgeon. Teaching is HARD.
While you can't ignore that manual dexterity is integral to being a good surgeon, I can't really agree with your dismissal of the intelligence involved. Not just the large amount of knowledge of anatomy and pathology, but the ability to make split-second decisions -- and the temperament to deal with failures that have serious consequences.
Teaching IS hard, though, and Lord knows I dealt with plenty of people over the years who weren't very good at it. The ones I remember most fondly, I remember for their passion more than their teaching methods -- but having just one or the other is insufficient. (On the whole I'd argue that, if I had to choose either kindness or competence from an instructor and couldn't have both, I'd choose the former for K12 education and the latter for college.)
I work in retail management, and I deal with a large number of issues every month due to people not having basic math skills. Even with calculators and adding machines in the count room, and good POS systems with giant touch screens and easy inputs, people fuck up all kinds of numbers that knowing basic arithmetic instead of treating it like a magical computer program that tells you the right answers would fix.
On the one hand, hell yes it's important to understand basic arithmetic and it's reasonable to expect adults to have their multiplication tables memorized.
On the other, in the scheme of things I think American education overemphasizes mathematical precision and rote memorization compared to other types of knowledge. I know plenty of guys who are good at solving math problems but don't have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of Aristotelean logic, and really there's no excuse for that given the similarity of the principles.
I went to high school with kids who didn't know what Vietnam was. A friend of mine had a neighbor, as a freshman in college, who thought Alaska was next to Hawaii. This kind of shit isn't on the SAT, and if it were, it would crowd out some other important piece of information, because you can't realistically test people on every basic piece of information they should know over the course of a few hours.
Anyhow, I feel like I've veered a bit here. Point being, there are a lot of problems with American education, but I'm pretty confident that reducing teachers' salaries and job security will not actually result in a huge number of highly qualified people clamoring for jobs in the profession.
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Topic: Schoolteachers and Tenure (Read 3381 times)