Education's smoking gun: how teacher colleges have destroyed education in America.

• Author: Keisling, Philip

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

Education's Smoking Gun: How Teacher Colleges Have Destroyed Education in America. Reginald G. Damerell, Freundlich Books, $17.95. If you judge the man by his prose, Reginald Damerell is a crank. He raves and denounces so frequently and insistently that it is hard to believe he's on an even keel. Unfortunately, this manic streak intrudes so much as to blight the book. It's a shame because so much of the substance of his criticisms rings painfully true.

The subject is the theory and teaching of teaching, and Damerell minces few words: Education degrees "are empty credentials . . . The education field is devoid of intellectual content, has no body of knowledge of its own, and acts as if bodies of knowledge do not exist in other university departments.' This denunciation is spoken with some authority; Damerell spent twelve years in the belly of the beast as an associate professor of education at the University of Massachusetts. Damerell's specialty was in educational media, and his account of what passes for scholarship in that field is disturbing to say the least. One student, Mary, is nearly illiterate and can't even operate simple audiovisual equipment; she receives a master's by studiously littering her transcript with independent studies, "practicums,' and weekend courses. Comedian Bill Cosby, no less, manages to obtain a Ph.D. in a similarly dubious manner. The title of his dissertation, The Integration of the Visual Media Via "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,' in the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Increased Learning, suggests something about the rigor of that academic...