“I’m a tenured professor at our School of Education,” a colleague announced at a meeting. “As I’m sure you all know, the field of education is known for its outstanding. . . erm. . . lack of rigor and . . . erm . . . exceptional intellectual shallowness.”
I laughed so loudly that the windows rattled. Everybody else looked embarrassed at stared at the table in front of them.
Clarissa's Blog 
If you can’t get into med school, try ed school.
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It’s been my experience that, alone among all PhD holders, only people with PhDs in education insist on being called “doctor” everywhere they go.
Has anyone else noticed this?
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Well, people have got to compensate some way. 🙂
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I can rant about applied linguistics for hours.
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Have you noticed how extraordinarily politically conservative people in applied linguistics all are? Every figure of authority for them is a deity never to be questioned. I wonder what causes it.
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What does linguistics get applied to, if not intelligence (in the other sense)?
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Applied linguistics people are in enormous demand these days. They teach a vague selection of vague courses about vaguely defined teaching methodologies. Sometimes, they also teach parts of speech and phonemes. They also detest research and applaud every initiative of the administration.
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I think I need to look at what “applied linguistics” means now because this doesn’t sound like anything I’m familiar with.
The applied linguists I knew were doing stuff like developing tools for literacy and education for speakers of minority and/or indigenous languages.
I suspect that now that it’s been coopted by the ESL (English as a Second Language) or remedial English people.
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I admire your Education colleague’s honesty. It far outstrips anything I’ve seen from say, Social Work.
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Just to be unpopular I’ll mention a couple of people I’ve known who credited education classes with helping their teaching.
One was a close friend who was a TA for a mixed graduate/undergraduate class that people were forced to take (and which they dreaded because it was really hard).
As a TA they got glowing reviews from the students (far better than the professor’s evaluations which made life a little complicated). Many of them credited the TA’s work not only for helping them pass but for actually making them interested in a topic they thought would be horrible and boring going into the class.
The TA told me they just applied what they had learned in classes about teaching 6 year olds, repeating everything in different ways, breaking down hard tasks into smaller easier ones, lots of visual and other heuristic aids, positive reinforcement whenever possible etc.
The second was a few years ago. I had been asked to observe a class taught by a visiting American. They were originally supposed to be a TA but then given the class to do on their own (I was supposed to report if I thought they could handle it).
When I observed, they were phenomenal in class, exhibiting levels of patience and methodicalness that I can only dream of. I started being reminded of my old friend. While we were talking after class they did relate that they were using what they’d learned in early education class.
I think there’s a valuable core in education but it’s not really prone to a lot of new developments and the academic environment is inherently hostile to any set knowledge. Therefore there’s a huge amount of busywork and useless fluff added onto the core of valuable information.
It’s similar in translation where is mostly a small body of necessary theory and a lot of interesting case studies. But to stay in academia translators have to inflate the theory component withe a lot of empty nonsense and endless new formulations of things that people figured out 50 years ago.
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I’m writing a separate post in response to this great comment.
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