On the Erosion of Education and the Eroding Foundations of Teacher Education (or Why We Should Not Take Student Evaluation of Faculty Seriously).

Abstract

thought, the school should make every effort to push them in that direction and to develop in them what is intrinsically lacking in their own development. In the current practices of special schools for retarded children, we can observe a beneficial shift away from this concept of concreteness, one that restores look-and do methods to their proper role. Concreteness is now seen as necessary and unavoidable only as a stepping stone for developing abstract thinking-as a means not as an end in itself.4 For proper education to take place, we must begin where learners are and then move them to where they shouldbe. American schools and society have discovered that they can achieve great success in the former (i.e., beginning where the child is). On the positive side, it has resulted in respect for the individual (including his ethnic identify, religious belief, sexual preferences, etc.) On the negative side, we have often failed to go beyond this point, which has resulted in pandering to some of our baser impulses, glorifying the commonplace and banal, and creating a consumeristic society where the customer is always right. We have idolatrized the concrete and immediate and our personalities, society, and educational system are suffering a severe case of arrested development.