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School Daze: The Disruptive Effects of Teacher Training
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10020 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
1,964 Words |
| Author
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Carl W. Salser
Carl Salser is executive director of Educational Research
Associates and National Book Company. He was recently named by
President Reagan to a position on the National Council for
Educational Research. |
EDUCATION'S SMOKING GUN
How Teachers Colleges Have Destroyed Education in America
Reginald G. Damerell
New York: Freundlich Books
312 pp., $17.95
When it came to writing Education's Smoking Gun, Reginald Damerell's background in advertising proved both a blessing and a curse. The author spent twenty years in the advertising business before becoming a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts. This background was a blessing because it meant that his insights were relatively unsullied by any prior exposure to the murky world of so-called "teacher training." Its curse was that in no way did it prepare him for the intellectual dishonesty that pervades our schools of education.
True, we often think of advertising as a frenetic, unreal world of wham, and sometimes, even shame; but compared to the labyrinthian improbity of teacher training, good advertising agencies are the epitome of honesty and detached scientific application.
Damerell points out that when he arrived at the University of Massachusetts he had a full head of hair, which had receded only slightly from where it had been in his youth. Then, in the middle of his first semester as a faculty member, he began to lose it. Indeed, within two weeks, he had lost all of his hair--including eyebrows, eyelashes, and facial hair. A dermatologist diagnosed his problem as alopecia universalis.
Although Damerell no doubt looked upon the loss of his hair as a problem, he nevertheless recognized that it was less of a problem than it was a symptom of a much greater problem. It was not until some seven years later that he finally admitted to himself what he probably had recognized from the very beginning: that the university's School of Education was not only "unredeemed mindlessness," but also the cause of his alopecia universalis. He had repressed that knowledge in order to continue as a faculty member.
He admits that, "With numbness of mind, I foundered from one course to another during my first three or four years. (And then,) through my fourth to seventh year, my numbness of mind slowly but surely thawed." Even so, it was another four or five years before he took the necessary steps to sever his ties with the unreal, unproductive, and unprincipled world of teacher
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