EDUCRATS & EDUBABBLE

Yesterday's Waterloo Region record carrys an article by Paula Crooks of the Community Editorial Board titled "Students ill-served by the latest fads in education". Paula suggests that fads starting in the 60's included open area concept "learning rooms", progressed to whole language versus phonics english teaching and the latest is now learning math "by discovery" rather than by rote or memorization of the basics. All of these fads produced by education bureaucrats are short on scientific proof and long on edubabble. She suggest that education bureaucrats or educrats are simply "overzealous". It is my opinion, not Paula's, that they are overzealous to justify their six figure salaries considering that they deliver exactly zero into the classroom settings. That's for the real teachers to do although the educrats can be confident that between union discipline and union/board sweetheart deals there will be little open revolt no matter how ridiculous the new wave theorys of the day are.