Why Is The Education Industry Such A Breeding Ground For Fads ?
Why do we despair that education — unlike medicine, engineering, architecture, or practically any other field of human endeavor — is so immune to research-based best practice? Experimentation of all sorts prevails — untested and without any protocols and safeguards to protect the young, captive audience aujects. Will there ever be a huge law case to sue for damages and harms? Why is research that clearly proves sheer and unmitigated poor outcomes ignored? How can costs keep escalating without any demonstrable benefits to students? Questions proliferate about the contradictions — how impervious the industry is to rational change — how persistent some practices remain regardless of their poor results. On, and on, and on, flow the questions.
I’ve written earlier about the theory that GROUPTHINK SYNDROME might explain some of the contradictory and sometimes downright malignant behaviors seen in education — http://www.parentsteachingparents.net/2015/09/malicious-group-think-in-education/
Some people hope that common sense may someday prevail: Not likely! Others think that technology will bring effective practices forward to help our young people gain a good education.
Well, beware! Here are explanations provided by Professor P Groff why Whole-Language (a very shaky teaching of reading method) gained such a rapid and lasting following — http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/whole-language-vs-phonics-instruction#special
“The Special Attractions of Whole-Language (WL)
1 . . . educators historically have been notorious for their inability to resist the lures of educational innovations, regardless of whether or not they have been empirically validated.
2 . . . WL relieves educators of much direct personal accountability for the results . . .
3 . . . WL appeals to many educators’ romantic and/or humanistic interpretations of what is healthy child development . . . honoring children’s freedom and dignity is held to be more essential than how literate they become.
4 . . . in the past, educators have ignored or rejected most of the empirical findings in practically all aspects of their field of endeavor.
5 . . .the apparent simplicity of WL is alluring for teachers . . . With WL, teachers do not have to submit to pedagogical discipline that a prescribed course of direct and systematic instruction demands.
6 . . . educators who have liberal social, economic, and political views doubtless are charmed by WL’s decidedly left-wing agenda . . . ”
Groff goes on to mention these other factors — monopoly control of public schools, grade inflation, absence of rigorous examinations of teachers seeking certification, and parents’ seeming indifference towards the schools as “conditions [that] create a breeding ground for the emergence of empirically unverified educational innovations . . .”
[SQE 20151004]