Education's Smoking Gun: How Teachers' Colleges Have Destroyed Education in America

By Reginald Damerell

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881910252
• ISBN13: 9780881910254
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Freundlich Books
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One man's discovery of ed school silliness

The "smoking gun" in the title refers to the search for the ultimate cause of the anti-intellectual, fun and games approach to education. Damerell (like many others) pins the rap firmly on ed schools. He was a top creative person in a large New York ad agency, who was lured to join the faculty of an ed school. What he found was a shocking lack of scholarship. Damerell is at his most entertaining when telling the first person story of Bill Cosby's acquiring of an Ed.D. degree. It becomes clear that Cosby's work for the degree was pathetically shallow, but not much more so than many other Ed.D. efforts. Much of this book is devoted to specifics (events, methods, personalities) that Damerell encountered in his own ed school. As such, it's an interesting slice-of-life as yet another person discovers the truth behind American education. But overall, Rita Kramer's "Ed School Follies" is a wonderful and much more complete dissection of the problem (and a joy to read!), and Maureen Stout's "The Feel-Good Curriculum" more directly challenges the shallowness and affective teaching mantras of ed schools today.

An Excellent Intro to What's Wrong with America's Schools

I read this book several years ago, and it completely changed the way I understood the profession of teaching to be. Ever wondered why a high school diploma was once considered a real achievement and today is hardly worth anything? It's become simply a ticket to get into college, where you then can earn the right to say you're educated and can hold a "real" job. Even now the bar is being raised to a graduate degree as a measure of one's employability or potential for success- just a bachelor's degree is no longer anything special. The reason why is that students are not taught how to think before they reach college. It is assumed that, before a child enters the first grade, that he should already be able to read and know his letters and numbers. And why is this, when most people of my generation learned all this in kindergarten or first grade? Because the child WILL NOT learn to read in school. Primary, Middle and even High School are now only glorified forms of day-care. Much of the blame lies with our social values and with the parents; the teachers can only bear a small part of the responsibility. While Mr. Damerell spends a lot of time writing about the paucity of the teachable knowledge pool in university education programs [he says there basically isn't one], these programs do administrate the process of training teachers to teach, even if only arranging for practice teaching. Teaching is a vocation, and it requires a gift. You can't teach someone those things, but you can nourish their development. Unfortunately, modern American society hardly nourishes anything at all, and values only money-- no respect is given to teaching as either a profession or as a vocation. Unfortunately, simply paying teachers more will not solve the underlying problem of our attitude towards them. Very many of the most "called" and gifted teachers get driven out of the profession by the end of the first three to five years. And of course, there is the bare and unpleasant fact that America is a place where only the strongest and the most aggressive survive. The very young, the old, the weak or infirm or less-able are hourly trampeled on, abused and marginalized. The weirdness of America is that we are in complete denial that we're doing it. The problem with education today is that we have this weird schizophrenia about what the real value of our children is and do we really care about the future. If we really cared about either of those things, we would sacrifice, save and plan- something Americans are not noted for doing for very long. I recommend this book to get you thinking about who we are as Americans today, and where we should try to go as we move into a new century.

Cultural origins of education difficulties

Damerell writes an engaging story about his experiences as an outsider when a teacher. He presents some evidence that cultural pressures on minority students may reduce their chances for success. This is an interesting book that asks penetrating questions.