March 16, 2006, 8:07 a.m.
Schools of Education
They’re not the place to get one.

By Peter Wood

It is not unusual for conservatives to complain about schools of education. Well, not to toot my own horn, but I have actually done something on this score: I closed one.

It wasn’t a big ed school, but it was an SOE. Last year, as provost-elect of The King’s College in NYC, I announced that the college would discontinue its undergraduate bachelor’s degree program in childhood education. I met with the freshmen who had expressed interest in the major and explained that to offer an undergraduate education degree in New York meant having to comply with state regulations. These regulations mandated that we offer dozens of intellectually vapid courses far below the College’s standards for the rest of the curriculum. Moreover, I pointed out that while New York (and many other states) sets all manner of requirements for undergraduate education degree programs, New York (and many other states) has also rendered these programs redundant by requiring every teacher to earn a masters degree in education to be eligible for “professional certification.” (A student who graduates with an undergraduate degree in education may receive “initial certification,” which confers permission by the state to teach in public schools for no more than five years, during which time he must earn a masters degree or leave the field.)

I wanted my little college to cease feeding the monster. Schools of education mis-prepare would-be teachers in many ways. They deprive those would-be teachers of the opportunity to learn more important, substantive things during their undergraduate years; they require students to take hugely time-consuming courses of dubious intellectual value; and they inculcate would-be teachers in the educrats’ pernicious ideology. It’s an ideology that insists that virtually all of America’s social problems derive from institutionalized prejudices; that most knowledge is “socially constructed;” and that children are best taught by allowing their natural creativity to flourish, rather than by actually trying to teach the habits of self-discipline and mindfulness. Substantive knowledge and real skill in areas like mathematics, reading, and writing are clearly tertiary concerns at best for most teachers, because they are less than tertiary concerns for SOEs.

I urged the freshmen to consider staying at my college and to major instead in our interdisciplinary politics, philosophy, and economics (PPE) program. I also told them that I intended to create a new five-course “concentration” within PPE, where they could explore the history of American education, study classic philosophical works that bear on education — such as Rousseau’s Emile — and examine how the state creates education policies. This concentration, however, would not lead to teacher certification. We were getting out of that business — and its attendant regulation — altogether.

Some students left. Others, however, were excited by the new approach. Then New York State officials got involved. At first, they couldn’t believe that we would just walk away from their precious undergraduate education major — a major they had perfected through long years of careful cogitation. So the regulators hit on the idea that I must be pulling a fast one: tricking the students into thinking that the proposed five-course sequence would somehow get them New York State initial teacher certification. In October, one of the state bureaucrats went so far as to accuse me of “fraud” by misleading the students this way. He backed down when we confronted him with the plain record of what we had done. But I still sense incredulity on the part of a lot the New York educrats, who can’t imagine anyone having a principled objection to preparing would-be teachers according to their recipe.

The educrats did, however, have one more arrow in their quiver. We can adopt the five-course sequence with courses such as “The History of American Education,” “Philosophy of Education,” and “Educational Policy,” but we absolutely cannot call the sequence a “concentration in education.” That would be misleading. On reflection, I came to agree. To offer intellectually rigorous courses of a substantive nature about education and then to classify them under the same term that New York applies to its approved pablum would indeed be misleading. So we are calling our new concentration “propaedeutics,” a nice word that means, loosely, preliminary study in preparation for more advanced learning. Where the graduates will find that more advanced learning, however, remains an unsettled question.

A message to fellow provosts, college presidents, deans, and college trustees: let’s ring down the curtain on the SOEs. You have nothing to lose but your least-promising students and a cohort of faculty members who veer between giddy and grandiose ignorance. The students and faculty members worth keeping can find their places elsewhere in your college.

— Peter Wood, provost of The King's College in New York City, is author of Diversity: The Invention of A Concept.