How Mass Hysteria Spreads In Education
No other discipline — medicine, engineering, accountancy, judiciary, architecture . . . — is so rife with fads and fallacies as in education. Of course, the case to be made is that because it is SO undisciplined, education should not qualify to be called a discipline or profession at all!
This little essay will not go into listing all the fads that have beset education — the ita alphabet, the self-esteem movement, learning mathematics through “discovery”, learning to read through guessing, (reading is “caught” not “taught”) etc., etc. I will go into the “why’s”.
One may wonder why a field, which purports to be a helping profession, so frequently goes chasing after one passionate belief after another, trying new theories and experiments without any proof of positive results and to actually keep persisting long after something has been undeniably discredited. Can’t this do harm? Can’t this be open to malpractice suits?
Very few have pondered the “why’s” of the matter so as to circumvent future faddishness. Professor Patrick Groff (1924-2014) who wrote on how to prevent reading failure had a few points to make on the topic of why so many teachers adopted Whole-language in so many countries, despite contrary evidence of effectiveness.
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 . . . ”
Add to Groff’s insights the information of how groupthink occurs and you have the ingredients of mass hysteria that the author of this Huffington piece claims overwhelms the education field. Coming down the pike are some very serious, calculated efforts to install what seems like yet another fad — Social-Emotional Learning — and we should be prepared to closely examine the validity of this effort and and not fall for yet another passionate fad.
[Above is the comment made to the Huffington story. Also sent to Education Consumers Clearinghouse Aug 09,’16]