It occurs to me that we may need to start on this blog a "Quick and the Ed Watch" category. It's not that we want to, you see; it's that somebody needs to.
The reason is exemplified by Kevin Carey's latest post about John McCain, in which the blogger is upset by the following sentence, from McCain's speech to the NAACP, that laments that talented people without proper certification are barred from teaching in public schools: "They don't have all the proper credits in educational ???theory' or ???methodology'--all they have is learning and the desire and ability to share it."
Carey is exercised by the inclusion within quotation marks ("contemptuous quotes," he calls them) of theory and methodology. Such punctuative liberty is "ridiculous," Carey writes. Furthermore, he continues, it "is garden variety anti-intellectualism and doesn't speak well of Senator McCain's approach to policy or other matters."
But are we so sure that knowing about educational theory and methodology, be they quoted contemptuously or not, is a necessary condition for effectively running a classroom? Is it not true that much of this theory and methodology is a relatively modern invention, one that did not exist a half-century ago, when fine teachers surely did? And knowing what we know about the education school curriculum, knowing what we know about the impenetrable, jargon-ish, gobbledygook that goes by the names theory and methodology, is it so ridiculous that McCain would choose to surround those terms with quotation marks, as if to say, "This is what they call it. But who knows what it is in actuality."?
I think not. Nor do I think that Carey puts forth anything close to a convincing or logical or evidence-based argument to support his umbrage. Nor do I understand his last two paragraphs:
This is garden variety anti-intellectualism and doesn't speak well of Senator McCain's approach to policy or other matters. One could imagine, for example, that having a lot of knowledge about war and a desire to conduct wars but lacking a larger theoretical understanding of geo-politics and the methods of statecraft might lead one to actively support a ruinous foreign war and then continue to support it even after its ruinousness has become obvious for all to see.
In theory.
Alas, what are we to make of these meaningless lines, which unfortunately drip with a sort of un-clever, too-righteous, too-self-serious sarcasm that calls to mind the rantings of those sign-waving folks that one must occasionally dodge when attempting to execute a relaxing jog on the National Mall? We wonder: Can this impugnation of Senator McCain's war plans be somehow related to attracting to classrooms qualified teachers, or to education in any way? Are Carey's observations by any objective standard humorous or informative? Sadly, we cannot help but also wonder: Does this blogger even have a damn clue about the substance behind the words he so casually flips on to the screen?
This is all a??real bummer for me, too, you see. I'd be ever so willing to take more vacation time??this summer, but I'm??concerned that were certain bloggers to discover my imminent virtual absence, they would??hastily prepare bucketfuls of posts like the one noted above and then would, once I had boarded my overpriced flight to Tonga, let fly with a barrage of blog blather like none yet seen, safe in their assumption that their ill-founded fulminations would go unopposed.??Alas, I believe in accountability, and??for that??reason I remain firmly ensconsed behind my desk.