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About That Doctorate. . .
She also can't pronounce bodegas, despite the doctorate in education. https://t.co/y1Lz1tDjrF
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) July 12, 2022
Well, we can summarily reject this candidate.
I think you should reconsider.
What? Her thesis is one sentence: “Me a docter.”
But it is very well researched.
What!?! She misspelled ‘doctor.’
You obviously didn’t look at the footnotes.
Footnotes? It’s one sentence!
Yes. There are 132 notes. Note one is a copy of her marriage certificate. The rest are descriptions of every grant and payment to the university from the US government. You should pay special attention to note 22.
Hmmmm…On further consideration, I think you’re correct. Doctorate granted. I do have one question, though. What are we going to do if someone wants to look at her thesis?
No one’s going to do that.
Still, if someone looks at it, we could be in trouble.
Okay, okay. Get a paper from one of your other students and slap her name on it. No one will be the wiser.
But I just teach undergraduates.
So what? It’s a doctorate of education, who cares?
Published in Humor
Hello there @Seawriter. Ok, so I read over your response to my post several times—did you read my post as carefully as I read yours? I wonder if you skipped over, “On the other hand, the credentialing classes I took were, ah, not that helpful and I think that a doctorate in Education is no guarantee that the holder knows anything useful.” That was me questioning the value of classes in Education and the significance of a doctorate in Education. We don’t disagree on that point although I wouldn’t go so far as to say, “The whole education school thing is a farce and a scam.” Some people may benefit from the classes.
As for homeschooling, it wasn’t a topic that I raised and, since I never claimed that someone had to have teacher training to be a good teacher (“In my experience, people either have a skill for teaching or they don’t …”), your homeschooling example doesn’t refute anything I said.
About the only thing we disagree about is whether teaching is a calling. Ok, ok, it isn’t for every teacher, but if you ask teachers when they’re two drinks in, you might be surprised at what you hear. What do you think those two professors of yours at the University of Michigan would have said about teaching? Would they have said, I’m just here for the paycheck until something better comes along, or would they have sheepishly admitted that they find teaching rewarding over and above the money?
Oh, and I liked the shot about a lot of educators being “pretentious snobs.” I taught in an adult school in a minority working class suburb of Los Angeles. I thought of us as the red headed stepchildren of the K-12 system. There was a definite lack of pretense and snobbery among the teachers there.
Some of them are not only pretentious, they are humorless.
There are different forms of pretentiousness. That includes “Look at me! I am bringing knowledge to the savages and unwashed..”
I did adult education too. Doesn’t mean I am special. My mom was a teacher. So were two uncles, a brother and sister-in-law, and about six of my parents first cousins. A grandfather was a professor. None of them felt the need to place education on a pedestal of holy calling. It was a job. Some of them enjoyed it. Some of them didn’t. (My grandfather left academia to become a farmer.)
There is nothing unique about finding a job rewarding above and beyond the money. I’ve known machinists and auto mechanics who love the work they do for its own sake. I have enjoyed virtually every job I have had – which includes teaching, but also includes space navigation, technical writing, and e-commerce consulting – rewarding over and above the money. I took a pay cut to take my current job because it was rewarding over and above the money. If someone doesn’t find their job rewarding over and above the money they need to find a new job. Life’s too short to spend forty hours a week doing something you loath, or even barely tolerate.
Thanks, @MiMac, for citing Kyle Smith’s hilarious NR articles about Jill Biden’s doctorate! Leaving aside the First Lady’s educational attainments, I think it worth noting that the purpose of a doctoral degree, whether an Ed.D. or Ph.D., has changed over the past half century, as has the kind of accomplishment it represents.
Until the 70’s, a Ph.D. was a vocational degree, like the J.D. or M.D., which people pursued with the intention of working in their chosen field. That work was two-fold: the advancement of knowledge through scholarship and the imparting of that knowledge through teaching and writing at the post-secondary level. The cost and difficulty of the process were serious bars to entry. As a result, few people made the attempt and the market for university-level educators and researchers was never glutted.
Credentialism has hit the education industry as hard as any other. Public and private K-12 schools boast of the number of faculty MA’s and Ph.D.’s. Mere possession of an advanced degree is often enough to distinguish a resume from those of equally-qualified BA/BS recipients. Moreover, most public and private schools offer a salary bump for advanced degrees. Some schools will not consider a candidate for principal or headmaster who cannot claim a doctorate of some kind. The result is that pursuit of the Ed.D. and Ph.D. has become a means of career advancement. As this has occurred, more colleges and universities–both not-for-profit and profit–are offering graduate programs to meet the demand for these credentials. The result is inevitable: the quality of work required for the credential has decreased, as has the quality of candidates.
In her lack of both accomplishment and scholarly ambition, Jill Biden represents the norm for recipients of doctoral degrees of any abbreviation. For many, perhaps most, it is a career move. The more notable fact is that Biden evidently pursued the degree so she could have an honorific before her name to equal her husband’s. This shows how little effort her degree required of her.
I do not at all mean to say that all doctoral degrees are worthless vanity projects. Consider the following example. In the library of my alma mater sits a dissertation of nearly 600 pages on the late Byzantine soldier. To produce it, its author needed to complete two years of coursework for the master’s degree, and then another year after that. Perhaps he wrote a master’s thesis, which would have run about 50 pages. Then he had to sit for rigorous exams in general and specific historical knowledge, and demonstrate reading knowledge of French, German, Latin, and Byzantine Greek. Finally, there is that dissertation, which alone took half a decade in collaboration with scholar-mentors to produce. The whole process would have required from 8 to 10 years of full-time labor. Vanity and a questionnaire would not have sufficed.
We have and have had some excellent teachers in my family. My grandmother taught my oldest brother Latin, from which he developed a love of language and became fluent in French. She may have had a bachelor’s in education, but almost certainly no graduate-level training. My brother taught English to advanced engineering students in Lyon even though he had yet to graduate from university (in international business).
What has happened in Education schools is a reflection and source of what has happened in education generally. Namely, with few exceptions, not much real educating is going on. And with the bastard child of political correctness — woke ideology — in ascendance, it’s not just Education schools suffering from a lack of meaningful education. . .
One of the first songs I was ever taught was in Latin.
I may be old.
This go-around or a previous one?
This go-around. Probably previous ones, too.
Thanks. I remember reading that when it first came out, but you reminded me to look at it again. This resulted in a coda to the original post.
I have no opinion about Jill Biden’s doctoral work. I have a BA in English, a teaching credential, and decades teaching high school English.
I taught remedial English for several years and am grateful for the experience. Teaching it well is hard work and it made me a better teacher. I learned more teaching those classes than I did from my credential classes.
My sis-in-law teaches remedial English. She’s the best teacher I know.
All the more reason to hire and promote teachers based on their actual knowledge and achievement, especially in the actual classrooms; not just on their credentials.
But the real bottom line is that there simply aren’t enough brilliant geniuses available to teach everyone’s kids. And even if there were, I would argue that they have more important things to do. Most of education, most of the time, needs to be done by more or less automatons working from tried and true methods, not a bunch of… oh, i dunno, maybe dilettantes… each trying to prove their own pet theories of education.