Educationists and Their Vanities: One Hundred Missives to My Colleagues.

Overview & Synopsis

This volume collects 100 short essays written from 1957 to the present on the study of education and the training of teachers. The essays appear in the order in which they were originally written because they deal with issues and events that occurred at the time they were written. They embrace a range of themes including the art of teaching, the human sciences, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, postmodernism, and particularly the study of education itself. Throughout, the aim is to recall the university to its true mission: to seek knowledge and pass it on, to teach as well as to research, each process stimulating the other. A balanced, discipline-based undergraduate education is advocated as opposed to a mix of electives common on many campuses. Throughout, there is a focus on the large problems facing education and a critique is offered of schools of education which are held responsible for many of those problems. In particular, it is charged that schools of education use their lock on teacher training to promote naive reforms of little or no demonstrated value to public education. As a corrective, it is encouraged that educators draw on history, philosophy, and literature along with cultural anthropology to use the tools of interpretation that have in the past served the student of human nature. (JB)