Ed School Humbug

Brian Anderson, chief editor of City Journal has just forwarded me an advance copy of Sol Stern's article that appears in the summer City Journal entitled "The Ed Schools' Latest and Worst Humbug." This is a timely article, and not only because it recounts Steven Head's important saga when he was thrown out of San Jose State University's education school for disagreeing with the extremist views of one of its many left wing professors.

The article is about the rise of social justice education that has been advocated by Maxine Greene, Bill Ayers, and Eric Gutstein, education professors at Teachers' College and the University of Illinois. Greene, Ayers, and Gutstein are bent on turning the public schools into brainwashing institutions. They seem to be unaware that China has dropped their ideas because they failed and that more than one hundred million people have died because their ideas (the ideas advocated in the social justice schools) do not work. Stern also quotes Angela Calabrese Barton, who argues that science should be politicized. Gutstein argues that all education is political.

Let's take Profssor Gutstein at his word. Then (1) tax exemption ought not to be permitted to education, since political advocacy is not permitted under section 501(c)(3) that permits tax exemptions. (2) The public ought not to provide resources to education, since it is politically biased and the public ought not support politically biased institutions. (3) The University of Illinois ought to be closed, since the public should have no interest in subsidizing political propaganda. Teachers College should receive no government support.

Not surprisingly, wealthy bozo Bill Gates seems to agree with the education field's cabal of cranks. He funds high schools committed to "social justice", such as the Leadership Institute on Webster Avenue in the Bronx. Of course, the definition of social justice in this boondoggle and in the education schools that integrate "social justice" into their mission is but advocacy of failed state- and central planning-type interventions that have repeatedly crippled the poor, decimated local economies, and feathered the nests of liberal industrialists like Gates, Buffett, the Ochs Sulzbergers and JP Morgan.

Stern points out that teaching social justice to students without teaching them rigorous math, reading and writing skills is bound to cripple them, and the ones that the education school quacks and Gates are aiming to cripple are the poor inner-city ones. Stern also makes the excellent points that this problem cannot be solved from within the education system because it is too entrenched and that a political solution is necessary.