Please make it stop.

Has everyone in education gone mad?

“Academic kindergarten”?

It’s worse than it sounds.

Is anyone else stunned-numb at this? This edu-speak? This academic newspeak that oozes out of these clinical dissections of how children learn?

It never stops.

Another day, another brain-bruising study … and another tried-and-true bit of educational common sense tossed away because it doesn’t fit the new orthodoxy of grind and grimace.

Actual real-life educators are left to wonder what new bit of absurdity hides in these startling studies. It’s shocking that career educators keep falling for this pedagogical idiocy. And it’s especially disturbing that all of this is absent that indispensable human connection between teachers and students … who move into each other’s lives every year.

These psycho-educators are the newest wave of nonsense authorities to sit and stare at youngsters … then let loose a baffling spew of impersonal, antiseptic deductions based on their detached, plexiglass observations … as if kids going about the business of learning are as mechanical as what’s under the hood of a car.

The last decade has produced waves of goofy experts who’ve informed us that recess is a detrimental waste, the arts a poor use of educational time, and that reading should be an over-chewed activity that bruises the patience of a saint.

These same wacky gurus have produced third grade testing recommendations that last longer than bar exams, generate equal anxiety … and instill in 100 month old children such out-sized fears of being left-back that some emotionally crumble.

Then … then these almost-brand-new human beings are tsk-tsked for being a bit short on grit … and not facing up to rigor. At the mighty age of eight.

Who learns anything but survival under such circumstances?

And, of course, these wordy riffs on learning reveal that education has been in some wandering funk for … for centuries, I guess … until these pedagogical messiahs rescued us from our compulsive educational routines.

And that now … in this moment of extra-special, didactic tutelage … they are rewriting nearly all of mankind’s understanding of learning because … because they had an epiphany. Behind the plexiglass. While never once getting on the classroom floor with a very, very young child … or playing with them at a water table … or joining them in a playground game.

And then there are those state guardians of education …. and local superintendents … and neighborhood principals … who wrap their heads around this sort of slop … unwilling, it seems, to listen to their own inner voices that whisper that this is scholastic madness.

And their silent acquiescence invites even more farce …. more irrationality. And more ruin of childhood. And more damage to an essential institution.

How can a profession as historical … and essential … as education be so easily seduced by clinicians who pie chart and graph what goes on in the minds … and souls … of little humans?

How does that happen?

Why have we been so easily Coleman-ed? So quickly Duncan-ed? So Pearson-ed?

And why have we allowed this profession to be crushed by the weight of head-spinning acronyms that challenge the mind of the best informed? And why does this nonsense never visit surgeons? Or engineers? Or writers? Or baseball managers?

Know why?

Because they’d laugh at these smuggers … right in their faces. And tell them to get lost.

And that’s what should be done when these classroom-allergic analysts pile this stuff high and deep … and declare that learning is a linear activity that can be manualized … like the instructions to change a tire … or like dropping a chuck steak into a slow-cooker.

Real-deal educators should start protecting their profession … and the children they profess to love … from these dangerous saboteurs. Or perhaps they’ve already gone over to the dark side.

Denis Ian

 

 

H/T Teri Sasseville 

Washington Post Article via Teri Sasseville