51–60 of 209 posts
Today, parents routinely teach their kids things like reading and arithmetic.
The best teachers I had were professors at university, and they never had a day of teacher training. They simply knew the subject material.
What skills a masters degree in education confers is a mystery to me.
As a former high school teacher, I am in favor of reduced requirements to enter the profession; however, I taught in two states that supported these types of on ramps, and they didn’t seem to make a notable impact on applicant numbers (that is, out of the hundreds of educators I worked with over the years, I knew only one who came in via a non-traditional pathway after working in a different field (engineering)). Tha…
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I was completely unschooled prior to college and while I did fine in school I was generally very poorly adjusted. I actually don't know a single homeschooled person who came of age nearly as prepared for the world as anyone I know who went to primary school.
Can you expand on how you felt unprepared? My experience doesn't mirror yours.
I'm glad you had a good experience, and I am sure there are a lot of people who do when their relatively well adjusted parents commit to homeschooling their children. I just suspect most homeschooling experiences aren't like yours. I've met several families from very different backgrounds with a similar outcome to mine.
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Law? Medicine? Engineering? Would you want the bridges to be designed by anyone with any degree? I realize there's lots of sillyness in degree programs, but certainly the rigor is worth something, right?
This isn’t a realistic worry. Someone about to plunk down hundreds of thousands or millions for a bridge will exercise more due diligence than random selection.
The problem with the system is that the political leaders are spending other peoples money and they'll make decisions that don't always line up with the bridges staying up.
The advantage of degree programs is that they add another layer of bureaucracy to mix. Yeah, that's a pain but it might be necessary with the political system.
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You interacted with a homeschooled student who made it to college. Huge difference compared to the average homeschooled student.
Can we please not get into the homeschool flame war here again? Every time it comes up it turns into a pointless war of anecdotes, because the data on outcomes simply isn't strong enough for it to be anything else (trust me, I've tried).
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Because the people best placed to assess a candidate for a role are those who know the duties of that role in detail. Much of what's taught at university has marginal benefits beyond a core, much smaller, cirriculum. Take something fairly complex like game development, say. Now: do some linear algebra, geometry, programming, etc. assessment in a wholistic way. Maybe a quick quiz for initial filter, then a hackathon w…
I don't disagree, but that doesn't seem to address the point. If a hiring organization doesn't bother to assess that now, why would the above-proposed change make a difference?
I'm more concerned about how universities have positioned themselves gatekeepers to the employment market backed by state-granted degree awarding powers.
I think this is an extremely artifical situation with extremely negative social concequences. Vast amounts of money are being funnelled into universities for little gain.
They are, if you like, the App Store of the jobs market. Taking a 30% cut on just getting hired. It's insane, unsustainable, economic madness, and social madness.
Makes sense to me. I attended public school all my life. Everyone I knew more or less had the same out look on formal education, means to an end, can I just get the spark notes, thanks. In college I interacted with a strange life form called a "homeschooler". Almost without exception they were smarter, better read, and had a desire to learn. Educating children seems to be far more than degrees, licenses, and CE credi…
another issue is that teachers get promoted based on years in the system or by getting more useless degrees, rather than on how well they actually teach their students