'Sprockets' Style Education

Here's an article that makes the case that the boredom of educators with the tried-and-true is what drives the use of worthless, trendy teaching techniques, which cheat children out of learning the three R's. From everything I've been able to gather (I was taught with phonics, thank Heavens), the "whole word" method treats English as if it were a bunch of Chinese pictograms rather than something that can be easily "sounded out" when a word is unfamiliar. Can you imagine having to memorize the overall "look" of hundreds of words, rather than figuring out what they sound like from the letters they use?

Anyway, the article reminds me of the old Mike Myers Saturday Night Live sketch where he plays 'Dieter', the host of the East German talk show called 'Sprockets':

"Your education grows tiresome. NOW IS THE PART OF THE SCHOOLDAY WHEN WE DANCE!!"

excerpt:

As the 20th century unfolded, composers became bored with the classical forms of the past, bored with tonality, bored with harmony. Thinking that beauty was played out, composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Elliot Carter, or Pierre Boulez wrote atonal works that sounded to most people like a collection of wrong notes. Or think of John Cage's infamous piece "4:33," which merely consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of absolute silence: What could more perfectly display an attitude of boredom towards the very idea of music?

You see the same phenomenon in architecture, where modern architects aren't content to replicate the great, beautiful, human-friendly buildings of the past. Instead, because they are bored with beauty and usability, architects such as Frank Gehry busily set about creating disjointed, monstrous eyesores, as James Howard Kunstler regularly points out (see here, here, and especially here).

The same phenomenon may explain why so many education professors (and hence public school teachers) gravitate towards trendy educational methods that deny children a good foundation in reading. Not necessarily because of ill-will, stupidity, or ignorance. Boredom is the thing to look for.

...

But the purpose of education is not to satisfy education professors' desires for grand, tenure-worthy theories. Nor is the purpose to give teachers a chance to experiment with their own creativity. It would be far closer to the mark to say that education -- at least learning to read -- is about (1) finding a method that works, and then (2) repeating it ad nauseam for every group of children who come through the classroom. Similarly, any obstetrician does her best to deliver babies in a routine and normal fashion; she would never deliver a baby head first just because it was a creative thing to do.

It's a sad state of affairs when educators have become bored with the very methods that are effective. At least when classical composers become bored with beauty and write a piece whose raison d'etre is trendiness, the worst that can happen is that people refuse to listen to it. But when educators reject an effective method because they think it is too mundane or boring, their choice of new and unproven methods can ruin people's lives. As Martin Haberman of the University of Wisconsin notes, "Miseducation is, in effect, a sentence of death carried out daily over a lifetime. It is the most powerful example I know of cruel and unusual punishment and it is exacted on children innocent of any crime."