The Blame Game!

Via Speed of Creativity, I came across this post at Engines for Education about the Seven Evils of Education.

According to George Schank the original six evils of education are:

Parents -- who oppose all change and want school to be like they imagine it was in their day
Publishers – who spend all that money on wrong-headed textbooks and do their best to keep new ideas away
Press – who print minute test score differences as if they are world-shaking events causing everyone to panic
Politicians – who really don’t give a hoot about education and just like to say how accountable everyone is because of their silly tests and standards
And Princeton (twice)
Princeton -- as in any top university that decides on which courses and which tests all students must pass thus making it very difficult to innovate in high school
Princeton— as in the Educational Testing Service and all the other testing companies getting rich on killing our schools

I will ignore these (for now), but even more ridiculous than the first six, is his new evil "P", professors. Yes professors, as in College Professors. You see the reason kids have to take boring unimportant classes like "math" is because Professors are lazy:

Universities dictate curricula to high schools to make professor’s lives easier. If everyone takes physics and calculus and most never use it, well, professors claim it was good for the students anyway when in fact it was only good for making sure professors don't have to teach it in college. As long as professors don’t have to teach the basics it is okay that high school students are forced to study stuff they will never use in their whole lives. We have ruined an entire generation of high school students who don’t like learning and think the subject matter is irrelevant because professors only want to teach the good stuff.

We sacrifice the joy of learning for an entire generation so professors can have an easier time teaching incoming students.

(Calm down Right Wing Prof. No one could possibly take this guy seriously or could they?)

It's the new game show called the Education Blame Game. We started out with students, and then blame the parents... now its those evil evil professors who expect their students to have basic skills when they get to college. The winner of the game is the one who can blame education failure on the most outside factors (besides for the schools of course).

Ironically, George Schank is an ex-professor.