Certified Eloi

Terrence Moore points out one job that could not be found on Alan Greenspan's brightest post-Fed horizon, and why. It's very simple. Photon Courier pulls a slammin' graf:

"Perhaps more egregious than such appalling ignorance of the basic facts in subjects education majors propose to teach your children is their failure to understand that such ignorance should be a disqualification for entering the field of teaching altogether. To education majors, knowing the basic outline of World War II, including some details of the life of that 'other guy' Winston Churchill, is wholly unnecessary. In the mind of the typical ed-school graduate, the substance of what one is to teach students--whether history, math, science, or grammar--is just something a teacher 'looks up' moments before teaching a subject, or dresses up with some gimmick because the teacher does not imagine young people could have a natural interest in a subject he has no fondness for himself."

"Their failure to understand..."

These people don't know that they're the Eloi. (Hell: I write that sentence, and then I wonder how many people reading this will know what I'm talking about.) They have no serious idea what it ought to take to qualify for this particular work. But what they do know is that they have a piece of paper issued by people making the pro-forma assertion that they (the Eloi) should be permitted to teach.

Let me tell you of a darkly curious sensation. It has happened to me more often than I can remember. It's the sensation of having someone or other listen to me go on about some point of history or (after a bit of warm-up) economics or philosophy, stare wide-eyed for a moment, and then ask me, "Why aren't you a teacher?" It hits me as if someone had asked, "Why don't you beat yourself in the head with a ball-peen hammer?" These people also have no serious idea: of how one actually becomes a teacher, now. I almost never bother to answer in detail, pointing out that I could not be bound and dragged through the intellectual humiliation required in order to be granted permission to pass knowledge to youngsters, now.

Moore sees a lot. But he doesn't look far enough:

"What virtually all politicians and pundits are unwilling to say, however, is that the leading cause of this failure is the incompetence of the nation's teachers, and that incompetence is guaranteed by the monopoly of ed-school certification."

(shrug) What's a "leading cause"? (Compared to what? Who knows?) I am convinced of this: in a market for education, nobody serious about their children's education would even think about hiring these strutting dolts. They wouldn't get in the front door long enough to be thrown out on their asses.

Horace Mann and John Dewey be goddamned: get governments out of this market.