Colin Jory’s recent post in which he rather pejoratively labeled psychology, social work, education, etc., “sub-humanities” provoked some reaction from readers (me, among them). While his label is indeed provocative, it’s not really much more pejorative than my own, “pseudo-sciences” (Not About Education, September 2012). My interest was education; Colin focuses more on psychology. Something happened to me in 1986 that involves both “disciplines” and exemplifies the problem I have with education, and to some extent, the problem Colin has with psychology.

 

I had been teaching English at a university out of state for a number of years, when I decided to leave academic life and return to my native Georgia. For several reasons (the need to buy groceries, for one), I wound up pursuing a certificate to teach in Georgia public high schools. Although I’d already been teaching out of state for six years, I was told by Georgia’s Department of Education that I must undergo a year-long internship, gain 60 hours in education courses, and six additional hours in teaching reading. Transcripts, evaluations of experience, letters of recommendation, advanced degrees—nothing stands in the presence of Sovereign Bureaucracy—everything must kneel. 

 

The University of Georgia said that I might at least partially fulfill that requirement for six hours in reading instruction by doing an independent study with a Dr. Blank, who was a Professor of Reading. Right. Okay. Well, Dr. Blank didn’t know what to do with me except to take advantage of the situation, so he assigned me a new book to review (for him, of course). I struggled with the tedium until I came to a section on “How to Teach Literature.” Wow. Poetry, the authors said, (they always write en masse in that crowd) is still best taught by the “classical” method of having students tell what the poem “means” to them, thus making them “relate” to it.  But they were so excited by a recent research project in teaching fiction and drama that they could hardly control themselves to report it: Apparently, a team (another one) of educational psychologists had conducted a vast in-depth research project in literature and discovered that it has a pattern.  They had figured this stuff out, and if teachers would just decode it according to the pattern they’d discovered, teaching literature would be a piece of cake. The results of their vast research project (taxpayer-funded, of course) revealed that fiction and drama consisted of three parts: the part in which some problem or other is laid out, the part in which that problem is solved, and the part in which the consequences of that solution are revealed. Wow. What a discovery. They were understandably thrilled. (There will be no apology for sarcasm here, no point in waiting for it.) 

 

What I learned in meeting the state’s requirements is that the single greatest problem in education is that educators are uneducated. I also learned that the experts in charge of education actually despise it. And I learned that the business of psychology is to spend a great deal of time and money conducting research in order to prove the patently obvious.