Saturday, February 05, 2011

Credentialed vs. educated

The Anchoress has a post up: Uncredentialed Wonder.

I like Instapundit's summary:

There’s educated, and there’s credentialed. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they don’t.


This goes to the heart of homeschooled.  By and large public schools claim that only the professionals, those with credentiuals, can teach.  Homeschoolers keep showing them wrong.

4 comments:

C T said...

"Credentialed teachers" are neither necessary nor actually responsible for doing the job they have been hired to do. As evidence, I point to:
1) The current education mantra of "be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage" lessens the importance of a teacher's own education level. Education departments insist upon training prospective teachers to refrain from "transmitting" knowledge to students and promoting the idea that students should "construct their own knowledge". Students can do that with any babysitter present.
2) Teachers' unions fight measures to assess teacher effectiveness and penalize ineffective teachers.
3) In blog comments and conversations on the subject of teacher quality, individual teachers try to shift all the blame for academic failure to students, parents, and society. If parents are going to be blamed, no matter what, they might as well be the ones in charge of teaching children.
I apologize for the negativity towards educators. With a nod to the Mary Poppins movie, although I love some teachers individually, as a group they're rather stupid for claiming exclusive power to teach while rejecting responsibility to see that learning actually occurs.

Luke Holzmann said...

[smile]

~Luke

Rikkey said...

Nice Article .
http://mzhuanda.blogspot.com/

kat said...

I ditto CT's assertion that public school teachers attempt to shift the blame for failure onto admin, students, and parents. Yes, there is plenty of blame to go around, but with all parties in government schools spending a child's entire educational career shifting blame, the child comes out less motivated and not much smarter at the end. I saw this early in my student teaching and decided then and there to homeschool. The buck stops with me, if my kids don't learn then there is no one else to blame so I make sure they do learn. I believe this responsibility is the direct cause of the success of homeschooling, no matter the methodology.