I'd have to say that I agree with Amy Wax. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I experienced a typical parochial education of that time. It was highly disciplined and everyone learned to read, write and do basic math. There really wasn't any slack for anyone in regard to the basics. I took my education all the way through the PhD level and beyond and became a university professor. I am thankful every day, even now, that I had the foundational education that I had. It may not have been perfect, but I definitely would NOT trade it for any aspect of what is happening these days. I retired from university teaching in 2012. By that time I was already seeing the problems. Most students could read, although not necessarily at the university level. BUT, many could not write. They didn't know what a sentence was, and they could not sustain focus and create a minimally coherent paragraph. The math skills were already abysmal. The state university where I taught was lowering the standards to keep the tuition coming in and we were continuously encouraged to "retain" students by any means including lowering standards and inflating grades. I remember that they created a remedial "math" class that I called "numbers" just to get more people graduated. . From what I can gather, things are actually much worst now. So, yeh, maybe it wasn't perfect, but compared to what? What I mess we're in. So, yes, maybe the starting place would be to go back to what we know actually works and build from there. Or maybe it's just a matter of going back and "If it isn't broke don't fix it".
And this school system is creating the teaching system. They have to lower teaching standards when most are innumerate and semi literate and are not permitted to hold a classroom together and tyrannical children making learning impossible for other children.
Prof. Wax mentions that there was no ed school when she went to Yale. Right. In the 1950s, Whitney Griswold took the first steps to eliminate the Education/Teacher Training program at Yale. He said it was little more than a normal school. Kingman Brewster took the final step in the 1960s by abolishing the graduate program. He had little use for it. Even in the mid 1970s, he was still talking about the vacuities of the work coming out of the schools of education. Nowadays, they don't produce vacuities, they produce lunacies.
Can we talk about Yale systematically denying whites access? Weird nonwhites always got preferential treatment since i’ve been alive. Horrible antiwhite system we have.
Great conversation! I concur with basically everything Amy Wax had to say regarding the topic of education in America. I basically agree with all of Ron DeSantis politics in the field of education.
Interestingly, in the mid '70s when I was going through UCCA's admission process for university in the UK, all applicants for STEM field degrees had to pass a 'Use of English' exam at ordinary level at the same time they were sitting their advanced level exams for matriculation. The reasoning was that because the British school system streamed schoolchildren into 'arts' and 'sciences' and those in the science stream might have been ignoring basic communication skills because of preference for science and mathematic subjects. Although it was 'bah humbug' for me when I went through it, it made sense as you need language skills to understand scientific articles, and to be able to express yourself when documenting your project results.
Ed schools should be abolished. I'm 100% in agreement with Prof. Wax on this. Not only are the students not the best, the Ed.D.s who staff them are laughable. Prof. Wax is not the first to point this out. In the 1950s, two Columbia historians wrote on the problems in the Ed Schools. Jacques Barzun in "The House of Intellect" and Richard Hofstadter in "Anti Intellectualism in American Life". The problem has existed for decades. How you fix it is beyond me. These schools and the education establishment typically have state legislators in their hip pockets. To reform from the outside is beyond tough because ed school accreditation requires these schools to be autonomous. You can't reform them on the campus level. It will take a governor with the know how of a Ron DeSantis.
My education in the 1980s and 1990s was pretty darn good overall. We were educated to participate in our republic, with a great deal of the Great Works and Great Ideas, and, to know about the world and a variety of subjects.
A Great Lady. So of course she's being hounded out. Edit: I should've said they are trying to hound her out of her tenured position. Trying. She will probably outlast everyone. By God I admire her.
Ironically, John Dewey's ideas were in full practice by the 1950s, the period to which she wants to return. (She's not wrong about the quality of content in that time. It was objective and sound.) Civics needs to be taught again - rigorously. (8th grade)
Indeed, and also Piaget and Vygotsky! This lady has absolutely no idea what she is talking about, she just wants to hark back to the past rather than focusing on what is proven to work.
@@pmichael73 John Dewey is a mixed bag. His acolyte caused problems he did not intend. E.D. Hirsch discusses some of the problems propagated by Kilpatrick (William?), who had been a student of Dewey's. Like any prolific writer, Dewey is going to write some sage things but also some unwise or foolish things. It is up to us to blow away the chaff.
@@SkepticalTeacher So tell us what is "working". US schools have plummeted in international rankings in the last 50 years, despite being in the top 2 or 3 in the world in per student expenditure. Many high school graduates are borderline illiterate and innumerate. That was simply impossible in "the past" which you denigrate.
@@SkepticalTeacher Wax was clear that in her youth the teachers did not have degrees in "education." She targets the "school of education" in the Universities for removal and teachers' unions as cartels. She's also clear that schools should stick to core competencies and not waste time encouraging students to make statements of belief/debating contemporary social and moral matters (because they are ill equipped to do so at their ages and states of educational development). All of the foregoing has been proven NOT to work.
@payleryder45 you can't teach and shouldn't be teaching if you are not qualified, like any job. I just did a qualification and the uni was very insistent that we should express our opinions, for example, they included a video of Neil Oliver (right wing) talking about the nature of truth. Not all teacher training is biased, and there is definitely a big backlash at the moment within institutions against this nonsense and self-censorship. You cannot be a good teacher if you have not reflected upon your professional identity.
Here is another problem. Left thinks right is bad and right think left is bad. It should be middle ground the way it was in 70's ear prof Amy represents
Every time I see somebody with a degree in education, for me, it is a degree in Marxist Leninism. In the Soviet Union party officials to get promoted needed to take classes for 2 years to get a degree from Maxism Leninism University.
At about 21:50, Prof Wax reference Dewey . . . . Tom. She meant John Dewey. Tom Dewey ran for President. I agree that John Dewey really is the theoretician behind a good deal of our current mess. That means also that the mess we're in started decades and decades ago because Dewey's work was mostly done before WWII. The people who run the Ed Schools in this country uncritically glommed onto Dewey's theories of education with barely any understanding of the underlying philosophical presumptions. As Ross Perot once said, "The rest is history."
E.D. Hirsch would dispute that Dewey is entirely to blame. He lays most of the fault at the feet of William Kilpatrick, one of Dewey's very influential colleagues, who taught at Teachers College at Columbia. *The Schools We Need And We Don't Have Them. Dewey wrote extensively and is a mixed bag, but he really did want all students to be able to participate in our republic, in self-governance (rather than be ruled by others).
The current K-12 educational disaster was caused by U.S. teachers' colleges adopting Brazilian communist Paulo Friere's theories of "critical pedagogy.". (For the curious, don't bother looking him up on Wikipedia. It whitewashes him as a "Brazilian educator" failing to tell the reader that his heroes were Mao and Che Guevara.) In brief, under his theories, standard education simply prepared students to replicate the existing "oppressive" society and should be abandoned in favor of a curriculum designed to instill in students a "critical consciousness.". This would prepare them to be future activists and revolutionaries to overthrow that " oppressive society.". His theories were widely spread to U.S. teacher colleges by Canadian-American communist Henry Giroux and are now taught in virtually all U.S. teacher colleges. And that is why today Johnny can't read.
IMO, you got it 90% right. My only criticism would be Freire didn't have theories. He devised a method to program the children INTO the theories. Those critical theories, and post modernist theories, are not science. They are theories and shouldn't be taught to K-12. Pin Roger's comment
That is mostly propaganda. For one, the US does not have a monolithic system. And, there are way more factors than shoddy teacher education affecting whether kids can read or not. Among other things, a huge number of kids are in single parent families that struggle to provide consistency, resources (including quality food), values, and other elements necessary for kids to learn well.
As a teacher, I had to take a sabbatical, snd then a year after that bc it’s just absurd to cause such stress-then we teach to the test. I’ve been deduced to a robot and that’s not where a passionate teacher flourishes and positively impacts children’s learning. It’s so stupid. I do much better when I’m able to teach.
This lady, while making some good points, appears to lack insight into the history of education and also pedagogy. I would like to see her interviewed by someone such as myself with that kind of in-depth, expert knowledge who can push back against some of the statements she is making. The interviewer tries to a degree by referencing the Christian aspect of education, but there is a fundamental lack of knowledge on both sides here, and as such, the conversation is very shallow. The American system was developed by one man, Horace Mann, and influenced by many others. Mann based his on the Prussian model, which was developed in Prussia to provide universal education for boys and girls, in order to find the best ones to promote within the state hierarchy and military. They were also the first to introduce obligatory teacher training in the early 1800s. So there is a lot that could have been spoken about here, but instead, it is just a monologue for this lady's personal views. Disappointing from the Spectator.
I would, though, add that Mann cared deeply about our republic and the idea that all Americans should have an education so that we could defend and support our own self-governance. I think he and Thomas Jefferson would be in a great deal of agreement. Frederick the Great's Prussian model of education was more along these lines than the Prussians who came after him who were more focused on building obedient soldiers.
@emilymiller1792 exactly, that's the kind of nuance that unfortunately is absent in these debates. Everyone thinks they can teach, without understanding the depth of history and thought in our profession, just because they once went to school! Lol
@@SkepticalTeacher People taught children before there was a formal teaching "profession" and perpetuated the torch of human knowledge [teaching, strictly speaking, is not one of the three professions of law, medicine, and the clergy]. In fact, many teachers at the most prestigious private schools in the U.S. don't have teaching degrees. My sophomore chemistry teacher was a Ph.D. in Chemistry and former University department head. He did not, however, have a degree in "education." Poor me. I went to a European boarding school for a time as a teen and the teachers were subject matter experts, not education degree midwits. It fed students to the finest Universities in Europe. The education degree is an artificial barrier to entry feeding a public employee union cartel with its tentacles in the public treasury. It's also an ideological purity sieve that screens out people who are not part of the problem from entering teaching.
A side-effect of the mostly Republican NCLB was the decrease in a bunch of the curriculum so schools would try to mert the law's absurd expectations for test score improvement. History and art weren't measured, so they got sidelined.
My 57 year old mom said replacing the k word with the word unalived is stupid and ,replacing the ra word with graped is gonna have kids afraid of fruit in grocery stores wth and saying pew pew is so so dumb my mother was class of 1985 in Neptune High school in Nj she had 6 beautiful kids.
It doesn't help that teaching is sneered upon as some lowly profession only ignoramouses could do. Geez. I want the best and brightest communicators, teachers, of knowledge teaching my kids literature, history, art, science, etc. So many bright kids who'd make great teachers are steered into science/tech. Of course, perhaps a fair number choose other routes because they don't want to put up with a lot of nonsense getting piled on teachers over the last 25 years. Thankfully, there are still bright students who care about knowledge and learning choosing to become teachers. We need more doing so.
@@SaiKiran-fd3gqI like how the original commenter made an unbiased statement which you attempted to refute via a biased claim that actually supports the argument you are trying to disprove. Classic.
What's your point exactly? You mention high-achieving South & East Asians and then proceed to howl about the reality of racial difference. Don't you see the contradiction there?@@SaiKiran-fd3gq
I doubt most school boards are captured. Superintendents may be getting influenced by where they got their Ed.D., and, by the AASA and the Learning 2025 Commission. School boards may be going along with the guidance given to them by their superintendent. Are people attending their school board meetings, reading the agendas, policies, and agendas and talking to their elected representatives on school boards aboyt their concerns? Are they talking to their state or federal representatives about the standards, mandates, and other things that could be (are) detrimentally affecting local schools.
I watched any available video with Amy on the web over the number of years. I want to download all these videos and create a website. The reason I want to download videos is to be sure none of them will be shut down by TH-cam. I want to be wrong with my warries.
People interested in training to be teachers under a traditional system might wish to look at Hillsdale College's Graduate School of Classical Education.
Without the foundational skills of reading (which is being taught in some places by laughable methods), communication in writing and speech, and math, a student simply cannot progress to a higher level. Students who cannot achieve these need extra help and extra time (just like students who are normal/high IQ but autistic need extra help with social/emotional skills.) There comes a point when one classroom simply can't meet the needs of all students. I understand the reasons behind bringing students of all levels into one class, but that has, in many cases, shortchanged the academically-advanced students while at the same time depriving the struggling students of getting the help they need. Another issue in the schools that was different when I was young (1970s-80s) was presenting material and historical facts in a dispassionate way and expecting that young people NOT take everything personally. I think that was good training for critical thinking and holding civil debates. Finally, I think the entire university system needs to be seriously overhauled. I realize that that's probably impossible, but the universities and the professions they serve are in some cases actually keeping students from efficiently and economically gaining the information they (the students) need to do certain jobs.
I agree that classical education, or something more like what Mortimer Adler advocated for, ought to be taught to 1st - 12th students. However, I disagree with Professor Wax on several things. She said that states have plenary authority for education because students are not the age of majority. However, the taxpayers who fund education in their community and elect school board directors in their community ARE. A greater degree of control should be had by the local community--they pay the bills, they elect representatives for the school board from amongst themselves, and the education is for the kids living in their community. Further, Professor Wax declares that the state has plenary authority to determine a good share of the education of kids. The state sets the state standards for education. She said that students (as though this is happening everywhere) are getting indoctrinated and turned into activists. Considering all the state does to direct education, then wouldn't a large portion of this problem be coming from the state? Rather than the whole state education get swept up in political fights depending on which party is in power, wouldn't it make better sense for most of education to be controlled at the local level where politics shouldn't play a roll? School directors should not be elected according to a D or an R after their names. They should be elected based on how to best educate kids in a community. Politics should be avoided when it comes to kids' education.
I do agree that kids need acgreat deal more knowledge before they debate topics, especially major contemporary topics. However, kids can learn logic, logical fallacies, marketing and advertising strategies (i.e., the magician's tricks), persuasion and argument. Students need to learn the art of conducting research and considering sources, too. More advanced issues should wait for the rhetoric stage, in high school.
McMahon knows more about wrestling than education, it seems. I'm not confident she would only blow away the chaff; she is far too supportive of the republic-undermining charter school/voucher mantra. Susan Wise Bauer would be a far better person to tap for leading the Department of Education.
US public schools started crashing in the 1970s thanks to dumbing-down, permissiveness, "non-judgmentalism" and unions. Standards for students got lower and lower. Then, as the old qualified teachers faded away, they were replaced with new teachers for which standards were lower. Obviously there were exceptions, but overall the standards for both teachers and students are much lower. This is reflected in the international comparisons. Altho the US is in the top 2 or 3 in the world for expenditure per student, our performance is below 20th. And this is just in the standard subjects, doesnt even take into account the politicized indoctrination side of our schools now.
Many states do require teachers to obtain a non-education degree. This doesn’t seem to fix the problem. Perhaps paying teachers better and improving working conditions would bring “better” students into education. I agree with many of her points, but she doesn’t fully know what she’s talking about from her ivory tower.
@@emilymiller1792 It's only "important" to the extent that it concerns the welfare of children and the next generation of citizens. People with the wherewithal to teach, particularly elementary subjects, are not rare. The pool of people with the aptitude and interest to enter engineering is much smaller. An engineer is also responsible for his errors. If an engineer designs a bridge and it falls down under normal load, the engineer and his firm get sued and he may be subject to professional discipline. Do you support teachers being liable in civil lawsuits for their failures to teach students adequately?
@payleryder45 A great many teachers do not "get off work" at 3pm. They coach, grade, prepare lesson plans, meet with parents, have meetings with administrators or their team/grade level teachers, etc. Summers include preparing classrooms, preparing new lessons (especially if they've moved grades or courses), and sometimes summer activities (e.g., coaching).
In the name of diversity, merit is sacrificed. In New YORK schools, to get admission to SPECIALISED SCHOOLS, earlier performance in REGENT was the criteria. Now in the name of diversity REGENT EXAMS are cancelled to dilute the standard.
I agree that there should be mandatory foundational learning. But regarding sex i do not agree. Times are different and material is readily available. So directing the student in right way. Sometimes kids learn better with their peers in school and may not listen to parents. Ofcourse parents should contribute to it as well. If not done it will result in more teen pregnancy and many states not allowing abortions. Also we should admit that there is discrimination and some federal support is needed to pull the people up but at right place. Both folks on panel is all white and may not face the descrimination
The American K-12 system gets a D+ today. Kids today lack critical reasoning. They can't synthesize or analyze. We' re so concerned about equality of outcomes, personal behaviors, & identity. But we also don't meld people skills to be effective citizens in the work place. Instead we develop radical activists. Americans for the most part have little depth across the curriculum.
It isn't completely a monolithic system. That is not fair or accurate. Yes, the Feds took over a great deal of K-12 education, especially after No Child Left Behind. However, the States each have some degree of their own control (as she noted), and, there is still the local effect exerted by the families and taxpayers in a given community (how much do people care about learning and knowledge, how much do they aim achievement in their own lives, how much do they participate in making sure they maintain good schools in their communities, etc).
Classical education is not just a pile of facts. There are stories, ideas, debates and inquiry, observation, and learning to communicate clearly, even eloquently.
Not all Christians are literal creationists. Many Christians believe God created everything but do not read the Bible as a scientific explanation. It was written by pre-scientific method people. Genesis has great wisdom to convey regarding mankind in relation to God, His world, and to others.
The progressive mindset is incredibly entrenched in education colleges which train teachers and administrators. Getting it out if the US education system is going to be difficult to impossible.
As it turns out, K-12 have not caught up with current debates in science and the fact that evolutionary theory needs to be updated because it doesn’t sufficiently explain the origins of species anymore (by Darwin’s own measure). Amy Wax is right that it’s also too advanced to understand for school children.
I think the Bell Curve should be a mandatory part of the curriculum. I am not entirely sure if I am not serious about that point. Given how deranged public discourse is on matters of socioeconomic disparities, a clear eyed understanding of why equal group outcomes are totally implausible would be useful for everyone to be aware of.
@@KemetledAfrica Which is no argument against it at all. Its not a submission to an academic journal. And if you wish to claim that its claims are broadly disputed, you are just demonstrating your own ignorance. The large majority of the book does not discuss race and just talks about IQ, its heritability and the important socioeconomic outcomes it correlates with and continues to correlate with when applying significant environmental controls. If I recall, 4 or 30ish chapters discuss race. And yes, for political reasons, this subject is highly contentious. But as someone who has actually bothered to look into the matter (albeit without a great deal of statistical knowledge (which a lot of academics dont have either)), I will make a few observations: A) The fact that IQ is highly heritable within the general populations of Western nations is not seriously disputed by anyone who is not highly ignorant on the subject. B) The data consistently show large and durable gaps in IQ between races. Those who are advocating for a pure environmentalist position are overwhelmingly having to argue why, but for some confounding factor, groups would perform equally. They cannot point to sound data along the lines of "Hey, we controlled for all environmental factors and the groups perform exactly the same". C) As there is so much data from various sources, and it all points in the same direction (group differences), people drawing the obvious conclusion - that groups separated for tens of thousands of years of evolution in different environments are actually different - have a straightforward, plausible and parsimonious explanation for the data. Those who insist racial differences in IQ are solely attributable environment have to come up with a patchwork of explanations. Stereotype threat may be a (bad - let me know if you are interested in why this is) explanation for differences in performance on tests. But it sure as hell cannot explain why cranial capacity correlates with IQ AND also varies between races, in a manner consistent with how IQ scores vary between races. D) I alluded to this in my previous point, but the claim that people who evolved in geographic isolation for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS managed to nevertheless evolve identically with respect to the brain is utterly absurd. Just as a matter of probability alone, this cannot plausibly be true. Again, I can explain this more if you are interested later.
@notalefty999 How did Richard Lynn get his IQ scores for Equatorial Guinea In some cases it is simply through misrepresentation of the data. One egregious example is the score for Equatorial Guinea in central Africa. Its national IQ is supposed to be 59, which is the lowest in the world. But that’s based on one sole study, and if you examine that study you find out a couple of interesting facts: firstly, that the study was actually done on a sample of children with various kinds of cognitive deficits, some of them organic like brain damage, and some not; the second thing you find out is that the population being sampled was not actually from Equatorial Guinea. So that’s as blatant as it gets.
@notalefty999 In the Bell Curve Ethiopia IQ test score is given as 67. But Richard Lynn has never visited Ethiopia, so how did he get the score of 67. Well in the 1980s large numbers of Ethiopians Jews were airlifted out of Ethiopia and put in resettlement camps in Israel. There they were taught to read and write, and accustomed to modern life. It was these semi illiterate people that Richard Lynn garnered his IQ from, and not from Ethiopia capital Adis Ababa.
Every child will have their own AI tutor perfectly attune with that child's learning style and pace - Education is over in America - socializing of kids will be organized but not by schools
Neuroscience has proven that the minds of young adults aren't truly ADULT until age 25 - the age of 18 as an adult is fairly arbitrary - education should follow science FULL STOP
Why do some people (liberals) who rely on the government and humanist values to satiate all of their needs, also assert that creationism is blasphemy? They expect human derived systems (social services, welfare, the collective) to fulfill all of their base needs yet promote this anarchic, ‘return to nature’ world view Is religion and traditional western values not encompassed in human essence? Did the alligator or the tiger invent social security or was it a Christian, white male who did that? Charity? Vaccines?
@@emilymiller1792 Then that would still be teaching... evolution, with an addendum in RE class that some philosophically believe that that was Gods process. The point is you would still be teaching the science in that case.
Some of the "new math" is actually pretty intuitive and well designed. People are trouble by it less because it doesn't work, but because it's different from how the parents learned it.
@@MarkMackenzievortism Aspects of it do work. For example, practice exercises intuiting multiplication from first principles, without memorization, ultimately lead to memorization anyway, along with a better understanding of how numbers work.
Agree with every word she says. Except the issue about Israel who are ongoing overreacting butchers. Get over it. Even if wokesters have hijacked the Palestinian position, which is bad and sad for them.
FWIW I think as I understand it her lawsuit in preparation concerns removing constraints and punishments from Pro-Palestinian speech. It's not in favor of censoring Pro-Palestinian speech.
I'd have to say that I agree with Amy Wax. I grew up in the 50s and 60s and I experienced a typical parochial education of that time. It was highly disciplined and everyone learned to read, write and do basic math. There really wasn't any slack for anyone in regard to the basics. I took my education all the way through the PhD level and beyond and became a university professor. I am thankful every day, even now, that I had the foundational education that I had. It may not have been perfect, but I definitely would NOT trade it for any aspect of what is happening these days. I retired from university teaching in 2012. By that time I was already seeing the problems. Most students could read, although not necessarily at the university level. BUT, many could not write. They didn't know what a sentence was, and they could not sustain focus and create a minimally coherent paragraph. The math skills were already abysmal. The state university where I taught was lowering the standards to keep the tuition coming in and we were continuously encouraged to "retain" students by any means including lowering standards and inflating grades. I remember that they created a remedial "math" class that I called "numbers" just to get more people graduated. . From what I can gather, things are actually much worst now. So, yeh, maybe it wasn't perfect, but compared to what? What I mess we're in. So, yes, maybe the starting place would be to go back to what we know actually works and build from there. Or maybe it's just a matter of going back and "If it isn't broke don't fix it".
And this school system is creating the teaching system. They have to lower teaching standards when most are innumerate and semi literate and are not permitted to hold a classroom together and tyrannical children making learning impossible for other children.
Prof. Wax mentions that there was no ed school when she went to Yale. Right. In the 1950s, Whitney Griswold took the first steps to eliminate the Education/Teacher Training program at Yale. He said it was little more than a normal school. Kingman Brewster took the final step in the 1960s by abolishing the graduate program. He had little use for it. Even in the mid 1970s, he was still talking about the vacuities of the work coming out of the schools of education. Nowadays, they don't produce vacuities, they produce lunacies.
Can we talk about Yale systematically denying whites access? Weird nonwhites always got preferential treatment since i’ve been alive. Horrible antiwhite system we have.
Great conversation! I concur with basically everything Amy Wax had to say regarding the topic of education in America. I basically agree with all of Ron DeSantis politics in the field of education.
Interestingly, in the mid '70s when I was going through UCCA's admission process for university in the UK, all applicants for STEM field degrees had to pass a 'Use of English' exam at ordinary level at the same time they were sitting their advanced level exams for matriculation. The reasoning was that because the British school system streamed schoolchildren into 'arts' and 'sciences' and those in the science stream might have been ignoring basic communication skills because of preference for science and mathematic subjects. Although it was 'bah humbug' for me when I went through it, it made sense as you need language skills to understand scientific articles, and to be able to express yourself when documenting your project results.
the problem once again is antiwhiteism. your solution would help white well being, which is considered bad in contemporary society.
Ed schools should be abolished. I'm 100% in agreement with Prof. Wax on this. Not only are the students not the best, the Ed.D.s who staff them are laughable. Prof. Wax is not the first to point this out. In the 1950s, two Columbia historians wrote on the problems in the Ed Schools. Jacques Barzun in "The House of Intellect" and Richard Hofstadter in "Anti Intellectualism in American Life". The problem has existed for decades.
How you fix it is beyond me. These schools and the education establishment typically have state legislators in their hip pockets. To reform from the outside is beyond tough because ed school accreditation requires these schools to be autonomous. You can't reform them on the campus level. It will take a governor with the know how of a Ron DeSantis.
My education in the 1980s and 1990s was pretty darn good overall. We were educated to participate in our republic, with a great deal of the Great Works and Great Ideas, and, to know about the world and a variety of subjects.
Always enjoy your program. Keep it up!
Exceptional interview and common sense ideas.
It’s IQ !!
There should be a classical literacy as well as a numeracy test in order to graduate high school
40 percent would fail.
A Great Lady. So of course she's being hounded out. Edit: I should've said they are trying to hound her out of her tenured position. Trying. She will probably outlast everyone. By God I admire her.
Gotta like Amy Wax.
Ironically, John Dewey's ideas were in full practice by the 1950s, the period to which she wants to return. (She's not wrong about the quality of content in that time. It was objective and sound.) Civics needs to be taught again - rigorously. (8th grade)
Indeed, and also Piaget and Vygotsky! This lady has absolutely no idea what she is talking about, she just wants to hark back to the past rather than focusing on what is proven to work.
@@pmichael73
John Dewey is a mixed bag. His acolyte caused problems he did not intend. E.D. Hirsch discusses some of the problems propagated by Kilpatrick (William?), who had been a student of Dewey's. Like any prolific writer, Dewey is going to write some sage things but also some unwise or foolish things. It is up to us to blow away the chaff.
@@SkepticalTeacher
So tell us what is "working". US schools have plummeted in international rankings in the last 50 years, despite being in the top 2 or 3 in the world in per student expenditure. Many high school graduates are borderline illiterate and innumerate. That was simply impossible in "the past" which you denigrate.
@@SkepticalTeacher Wax was clear that in her youth the teachers did not have degrees in "education." She targets the "school of education" in the Universities for removal and teachers' unions as cartels. She's also clear that schools should stick to core competencies and not waste time encouraging students to make statements of belief/debating contemporary social and moral matters (because they are ill equipped to do so at their ages and states of educational development). All of the foregoing has been proven NOT to work.
@payleryder45 you can't teach and shouldn't be teaching if you are not qualified, like any job. I just did a qualification and the uni was very insistent that we should express our opinions, for example, they included a video of Neil Oliver (right wing) talking about the nature of truth. Not all teacher training is biased, and there is definitely a big backlash at the moment within institutions against this nonsense and self-censorship. You cannot be a good teacher if you have not reflected upon your professional identity.
“ Your system.” Which is built on what and the backs of who? That’s the real history you don’t want taught in schools.
Here is another problem. Left thinks right is bad and right think left is bad. It should be middle ground the way it was in 70's ear prof Amy represents
Schools should educate, not indoctrinate.
Every time I see somebody with a degree in education, for me, it is a degree in Marxist Leninism. In the Soviet Union party officials to get promoted needed to take classes for 2 years to get a degree from Maxism Leninism University.
At about 21:50, Prof Wax reference Dewey . . . . Tom.
She meant John Dewey. Tom Dewey ran for President.
I agree that John Dewey really is the theoretician behind a good deal of our current mess. That means also that the mess we're in started decades and decades ago because Dewey's work was mostly done before WWII. The people who run the Ed Schools in this country uncritically glommed onto Dewey's theories of education with barely any understanding of the underlying philosophical presumptions. As Ross Perot once said, "The rest is history."
E.D. Hirsch would dispute that Dewey is entirely to blame. He lays most of the fault at the feet of William Kilpatrick, one of Dewey's very influential colleagues, who taught at Teachers College at Columbia.
*The Schools We Need And We Don't Have Them.
Dewey wrote extensively and is a mixed bag, but he really did want all students to be able to participate in our republic, in self-governance (rather than be ruled by others).
The current K-12 educational disaster was caused by U.S. teachers' colleges adopting Brazilian communist Paulo Friere's theories of "critical pedagogy.". (For the curious, don't bother looking him up on Wikipedia. It whitewashes him as a "Brazilian educator" failing to tell the reader that his heroes were Mao and Che Guevara.) In brief, under his theories, standard education simply prepared students to replicate the existing "oppressive" society and should be abandoned in favor of a curriculum designed to instill in students a "critical consciousness.". This would prepare them to be future activists and revolutionaries to overthrow that " oppressive society.". His theories were widely spread to U.S. teacher colleges by Canadian-American communist Henry Giroux and are now taught in virtually all U.S. teacher colleges. And that is why today Johnny can't read.
IMO, you got it 90% right. My only criticism would be Freire didn't have theories. He devised a method to program the children INTO the theories. Those critical theories, and post modernist theories, are not science. They are theories and shouldn't be taught to K-12.
Pin Roger's comment
That is mostly propaganda. For one, the US does not have a monolithic system. And, there are way more factors than shoddy teacher education affecting whether kids can read or not. Among other things, a huge number of kids are in single parent families that struggle to provide consistency, resources (including quality food), values, and other elements necessary for kids to learn well.
I watch anything Amy Wax, never disappointed.
Its consistency and individualized difficulty curb for each skill. Video games do this and sports do this.
As a teacher, I had to take a sabbatical, snd then a year after that bc it’s just absurd to cause such stress-then we teach to the test. I’ve been deduced to a robot and that’s not where a passionate teacher flourishes and positively impacts children’s learning. It’s so stupid. I do much better when I’m able to teach.
This lady, while making some good points, appears to lack insight into the history of education and also pedagogy. I would like to see her interviewed by someone such as myself with that kind of in-depth, expert knowledge who can push back against some of the statements she is making. The interviewer tries to a degree by referencing the Christian aspect of education, but there is a fundamental lack of knowledge on both sides here, and as such, the conversation is very shallow. The American system was developed by one man, Horace Mann, and influenced by many others. Mann based his on the Prussian model, which was developed in Prussia to provide universal education for boys and girls, in order to find the best ones to promote within the state hierarchy and military. They were also the first to introduce obligatory teacher training in the early 1800s. So there is a lot that could have been spoken about here, but instead, it is just a monologue for this lady's personal views. Disappointing from the Spectator.
I would, though, add that Mann cared deeply about our republic and the idea that all Americans should have an education so that we could defend and support our own self-governance. I think he and Thomas Jefferson would be in a great deal of agreement.
Frederick the Great's Prussian model of education was more along these lines than the Prussians who came after him who were more focused on building obedient soldiers.
None of what you wrote is contrary Professor Wax's statements in the interview.
@emilymiller1792 exactly, that's the kind of nuance that unfortunately is absent in these debates. Everyone thinks they can teach, without understanding the depth of history and thought in our profession, just because they once went to school! Lol
@@SkepticalTeacher People taught children before there was a formal teaching "profession" and perpetuated the torch of human knowledge [teaching, strictly speaking, is not one of the three professions of law, medicine, and the clergy]. In fact, many teachers at the most prestigious private schools in the U.S. don't have teaching degrees. My sophomore chemistry teacher was a Ph.D. in Chemistry and former University department head. He did not, however, have a degree in "education." Poor me.
I went to a European boarding school for a time as a teen and the teachers were subject matter experts, not education degree midwits. It fed students to the finest Universities in Europe.
The education degree is an artificial barrier to entry feeding a public employee union cartel with its tentacles in the public treasury. It's also an ideological purity sieve that screens out people who are not part of the problem from entering teaching.
A side-effect of the mostly Republican NCLB was the decrease in a bunch of the curriculum so schools would try to mert the law's absurd expectations for test score improvement. History and art weren't measured, so they got sidelined.
My 57 year old mom said replacing the k word with the word unalived is stupid and ,replacing the ra word with graped is gonna have kids afraid of fruit in grocery stores wth and saying pew pew is so so dumb my mother was class of 1985 in Neptune High school in Nj she had 6 beautiful kids.
Don’t know about the H1-visas comments. I suspect US companies want cheap workers over everything else.
Agreed, the colleges of education are turning out some remarkably unimpressive young teachers
It doesn't help that teaching is sneered upon as some lowly profession only ignoramouses could do. Geez. I want the best and brightest communicators, teachers, of knowledge teaching my kids literature, history, art, science, etc. So many bright kids who'd make great teachers are steered into science/tech. Of course, perhaps a fair number choose other routes because they don't want to put up with a lot of nonsense getting piled on teachers over the last 25 years.
Thankfully, there are still bright students who care about knowledge and learning choosing to become teachers. We need more doing so.
Well said ! Need to do in all western country too.
Amy Wax is right about the reality of racial difference, too. An incredibly morally brave woman.
No she is not
Then how come anglo saxons were looked down by romans?They had a high opinion of persians and indians.
Look at who scores in math and science competitions in usa ,it is mostly indian americans and chinese americans not many of the other races.
@@SaiKiran-fd3gqI like how the original commenter made an unbiased statement which you attempted to refute via a biased claim that actually supports the argument you are trying to disprove.
Classic.
What's your point exactly? You mention high-achieving South & East Asians and then proceed to howl about the reality of racial difference. Don't you see the contradiction there?@@SaiKiran-fd3gq
I doubt most school boards are captured. Superintendents may be getting influenced by where they got their Ed.D., and, by the AASA and the Learning 2025 Commission. School boards may be going along with the guidance given to them by their superintendent. Are people attending their school board meetings, reading the agendas, policies, and agendas and talking to their elected representatives on school boards aboyt their concerns? Are they talking to their state or federal representatives about the standards, mandates, and other things that could be (are) detrimentally affecting local schools.
I watched any available video with Amy on the web over the number of years. I want to download all these videos and create a website. The reason I want to download videos is to be sure none of them will be shut down by TH-cam. I want to be wrong with my warries.
People interested in training to be teachers under a traditional system might wish to look at Hillsdale College's Graduate School of Classical Education.
Without the foundational skills of reading (which is being taught in some places by laughable methods), communication in writing and speech, and math, a student simply cannot progress to a higher level. Students who cannot achieve these need extra help and extra time (just like students who are normal/high IQ but autistic need extra help with social/emotional skills.) There comes a point when one classroom simply can't meet the needs of all students. I understand the reasons behind bringing students of all levels into one class, but that has, in many cases, shortchanged the academically-advanced students while at the same time depriving the struggling students of getting the help they need. Another issue in the schools that was different when I was young (1970s-80s) was presenting material and historical facts in a dispassionate way and expecting that young people NOT take everything personally. I think that was good training for critical thinking and holding civil debates. Finally, I think the entire university system needs to be seriously overhauled. I realize that that's probably impossible, but the universities and the professions they serve are in some cases actually keeping students from efficiently and economically gaining the information they (the students) need to do certain jobs.
I agree that classical education, or something more like what Mortimer Adler advocated for, ought to be taught to 1st - 12th students. However, I disagree with Professor Wax on several things. She said that states have plenary authority for education because students are not the age of majority. However, the taxpayers who fund education in their community and elect school board directors in their community ARE. A greater degree of control should be had by the local community--they pay the bills, they elect representatives for the school board from amongst themselves, and the education is for the kids living in their community. Further, Professor Wax declares that the state has plenary authority to determine a good share of the education of kids. The state sets the state standards for education. She said that students (as though this is happening everywhere) are getting indoctrinated and turned into activists. Considering all the state does to direct education, then wouldn't a large portion of this problem be coming from the state? Rather than the whole state education get swept up in political fights depending on which party is in power, wouldn't it make better sense for most of education to be controlled at the local level where politics shouldn't play a roll? School directors should not be elected according to a D or an R after their names. They should be elected based on how to best educate kids in a community. Politics should be avoided when it comes to kids' education.
I do agree that kids need acgreat deal more knowledge before they debate topics, especially major contemporary topics.
However, kids can learn logic, logical fallacies, marketing and advertising strategies (i.e., the magician's tricks), persuasion and argument. Students need to learn the art of conducting research and considering sources, too. More advanced issues should wait for the rhetoric stage, in high school.
McMahon knows more about wrestling than education, it seems. I'm not confident she would only blow away the chaff; she is far too supportive of the republic-undermining charter school/voucher mantra. Susan Wise Bauer would be a far better person to tap for leading the Department of Education.
isnt this smart lady afraid she will be fired and canceled for her logical ideas?
They certainly have tried
This woman would make a great villain in a Roald Dahl book.
Big talk coming from Temu Harry Potter.
Woke: the postmodernist religion of performative social justice
When is Freddy going to be editor of the Spectator?
US public schools started crashing in the 1970s thanks to dumbing-down, permissiveness, "non-judgmentalism" and unions. Standards for students got lower and lower. Then, as the old qualified teachers faded away, they were replaced with new teachers for which standards were lower. Obviously there were exceptions, but overall the standards for both teachers and students are much lower. This is reflected in the international comparisons. Altho the US is in the top 2 or 3 in the world for expenditure per student, our performance is below 20th. And this is just in the standard subjects, doesnt even take into account the politicized indoctrination side of our schools now.
Read the book, Dumbing Down America by Robert Skye.
Many states do require teachers to obtain a non-education degree. This doesn’t seem to fix the problem. Perhaps paying teachers better and improving working conditions would bring “better” students into education. I agree with many of her points, but she doesn’t fully know what she’s talking about from her ivory tower.
How much should teachers be paid?
Can you quantify it with a number, and not just "more"?
@peterbills4129
Closer to an engineers' salary.
It would probably help if people didn't sneer at this really important, sophisticated profession.
@@emilymiller1792 It's only "important" to the extent that it concerns the welfare of children and the next generation of citizens. People with the wherewithal to teach, particularly elementary subjects, are not rare.
The pool of people with the aptitude and interest to enter engineering is much smaller. An engineer is also responsible for his errors. If an engineer designs a bridge and it falls down under normal load, the engineer and his firm get sued and he may be subject to professional discipline.
Do you support teachers being liable in civil lawsuits for their failures to teach students adequately?
How many people who work full time do you think get off of work at 3 p.m. and have summers free?
@payleryder45
A great many teachers do not "get off work" at 3pm. They coach, grade, prepare lesson plans, meet with parents, have meetings with administrators or their team/grade level teachers, etc. Summers include preparing classrooms, preparing new lessons (especially if they've moved grades or courses), and sometimes summer activities (e.g., coaching).
In the name of diversity, merit is sacrificed. In New YORK schools, to get admission to SPECIALISED SCHOOLS, earlier performance in REGENT was the criteria. Now in the name of diversity REGENT EXAMS are cancelled to dilute the standard.
I agree that there should be mandatory foundational learning. But regarding sex i do not agree. Times are different and material is readily available. So directing the student in right way. Sometimes kids learn better with their peers in school and may not listen to parents. Ofcourse parents should contribute to it as well. If not done it will result in more teen pregnancy and many states not allowing abortions. Also we should admit that there is discrimination and some federal support is needed to pull the people up but at right place. Both folks on panel is all white and may not face the descrimination
“John” Dewey, not “Thomas.”
👍👍
The American K-12 system gets a D+ today. Kids today lack critical reasoning. They can't synthesize or analyze. We' re so concerned about equality of outcomes, personal behaviors, & identity. But we also don't meld people skills to be effective citizens in the work place. Instead we develop radical activists. Americans for the most part have little depth across the curriculum.
It isn't completely a monolithic system. That is not fair or accurate. Yes, the Feds took over a great deal of K-12 education, especially after No Child Left Behind. However, the States each have some degree of their own control (as she noted), and, there is still the local effect exerted by the families and taxpayers in a given community (how much do people care about learning and knowledge, how much do they aim achievement in their own lives, how much do they participate in making sure they maintain good schools in their communities, etc).
Refreshing to hear common sense takes for a change.
So back to teaching facts.
Classical education is not just a pile of facts. There are stories, ideas, debates and inquiry, observation, and learning to communicate clearly, even eloquently.
@emilymiller1792 All pointless without facts.
@@stephfoxwell4620
We are in agreement.
Facts, based on whose points of view?
That is not an entirely accurate summary of the entire American education system.
Not all Christians are literal creationists. Many Christians believe God created everything but do not read the Bible as a scientific explanation. It was written by pre-scientific method people. Genesis has great wisdom to convey regarding mankind in relation to God, His world, and to others.
The progressive mindset is incredibly entrenched in education colleges which train teachers and administrators. Getting it out if the US education system is going to be difficult to impossible.
Hillsdale or bust.
I love Amy Wax
What's wrong with Christianity and the Holy Bible compared with fairies at the bottom of the garden?
As it turns out, K-12 have not caught up with current debates in science and the fact that evolutionary theory needs to be updated because it doesn’t sufficiently explain the origins of species anymore (by Darwin’s own measure). Amy Wax is right that it’s also too advanced to understand for school children.
My first thought at the opening clip was "wow, Lionel Shriver suddenly looks a lot older?"
I think the Bell Curve should be a mandatory part of the curriculum.
I am not entirely sure if I am not serious about that point. Given how deranged public discourse is on matters of socioeconomic disparities, a clear eyed understanding of why equal group outcomes are totally implausible would be useful for everyone to be aware of.
The bell curve has never passed and never will pass peer reviews
@@KemetledAfrica Which is no argument against it at all. Its not a submission to an academic journal.
And if you wish to claim that its claims are broadly disputed, you are just demonstrating your own ignorance.
The large majority of the book does not discuss race and just talks about IQ, its heritability and the important socioeconomic outcomes it correlates with and continues to correlate with when applying significant environmental controls.
If I recall, 4 or 30ish chapters discuss race. And yes, for political reasons, this subject is highly contentious. But as someone who has actually bothered to look into the matter (albeit without a great deal of statistical knowledge (which a lot of academics dont have either)), I will make a few observations:
A) The fact that IQ is highly heritable within the general populations of Western nations is not seriously disputed by anyone who is not highly ignorant on the subject.
B) The data consistently show large and durable gaps in IQ between races. Those who are advocating for a pure environmentalist position are overwhelmingly having to argue why, but for some confounding factor, groups would perform equally. They cannot point to sound data along the lines of "Hey, we controlled for all environmental factors and the groups perform exactly the same".
C) As there is so much data from various sources, and it all points in the same direction (group differences), people drawing the obvious conclusion - that groups separated for tens of thousands of years of evolution in different environments are actually different - have a straightforward, plausible and parsimonious explanation for the data.
Those who insist racial differences in IQ are solely attributable environment have to come up with a patchwork of explanations. Stereotype threat may be a (bad - let me know if you are interested in why this is) explanation for differences in performance on tests. But it sure as hell cannot explain why cranial capacity correlates with IQ AND also varies between races, in a manner consistent with how IQ scores vary between races.
D) I alluded to this in my previous point, but the claim that people who evolved in geographic isolation for TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS managed to nevertheless evolve identically with respect to the brain is utterly absurd. Just as a matter of probability alone, this cannot plausibly be true. Again, I can explain this more if you are interested later.
@notalefty999 How did Richard Lynn get his IQ scores for Equatorial Guinea
In some cases it is simply through misrepresentation of the data. One egregious example is the score for Equatorial Guinea in central Africa. Its national IQ is supposed to be 59, which is the lowest in the world. But that’s based on one sole study, and if you examine that study you find out a couple of interesting facts: firstly, that the study was actually done on a sample of children with various kinds of cognitive deficits, some of them organic like brain damage, and some not; the second thing you find out is that the population being sampled was not actually from Equatorial Guinea. So that’s as blatant as it gets.
@notalefty999 In the Bell Curve Ethiopia IQ test score is given as 67.
But Richard Lynn has never visited Ethiopia, so how did he get the score of 67.
Well in the 1980s large numbers of Ethiopians Jews were airlifted out of Ethiopia and put in resettlement camps in Israel. There they were taught to read and write, and accustomed to modern life. It was these semi illiterate people that Richard Lynn garnered his IQ from, and not from Ethiopia capital Adis Ababa.
Every child will have their own AI tutor perfectly attune with that child's learning style and pace - Education is over in America - socializing of kids will be organized but not by schools
Neuroscience has proven that the minds of young adults aren't truly ADULT until age 25 - the age of 18 as an adult is fairly arbitrary - education should follow science FULL STOP
Why do some people (liberals) who rely on the government and humanist values to satiate all of their needs, also assert that creationism is blasphemy? They expect human derived systems (social services, welfare, the collective) to fulfill all of their base needs yet promote this anarchic, ‘return to nature’ world view
Is religion and traditional western values not encompassed in human essence? Did the alligator or the tiger invent social security or was it a Christian, white male who did that? Charity? Vaccines?
She was doing so well, then she justified creationism.
Depends on what sort of creationist. There are many people who believe God created everything, but that we can observe His process (e.g., evolution).
@@emilymiller1792 Then that would still be teaching... evolution, with an addendum in RE class that some philosophically believe that that was Gods process. The point is you would still be teaching the science in that case.
Some of the "new math" is actually pretty intuitive and well designed. People are trouble by it less because it doesn't work, but because it's different from how the parents learned it.
It doesn't work.
@@MarkMackenzievortism Aspects of it do work. For example, practice exercises intuiting multiplication from first principles, without memorization, ultimately lead to memorization anyway, along with a better understanding of how numbers work.
Remove the woke educator and staff away from school.
What ?
Agree with every word she says. Except the issue about Israel who are ongoing overreacting butchers. Get over it. Even if wokesters have hijacked the Palestinian position, which is bad and sad for them.
FWIW I think as I understand it her lawsuit in preparation concerns removing constraints and punishments from Pro-Palestinian speech. It's not in favor of censoring Pro-Palestinian speech.
Read “Mania” by Lionel Shriver for an eye opening account of the dumbing down of education.