April 9, 2011 - 10:05 am
This sign adorns Phillips Hall at the University of Southern California’s School of Education. It’s so…provocative. And radical. Click to enlarge.
As edgy as the school depicts itself, it being in California means the vast majority of its graduates will end up as government employees with union collective bargaining rights.
I was born in California and always hoped that my destiny would return me to the Golden State someday. I don’t dream that anymore.
Why do teachers always feel the need to be “revolutionary” or “provocative”? Why isn’t just teaching the children the three Rs good enough?
One problem with our society is the exhaltation of the new and different over the tried and true. Obama exploited this prejudice very well in the last election.
Provocateur? Instigator? Revoulutionary? They’re letting the TEA Party into USC Rozier?
is this really a surprise ? when i go to teacher confrences about my boys each and every one has to make a comment , whether passing or not , about “christie ” and what he has done . i want to tell them to ..well shut up and do your job with what you have are you so stupid to know that you are saying to me ..basically.. pay you bastard! and am i supposed to be .. yes I will !! No i will not . make do ..teachers
The Tea Party in USC Rozier? Horrors! We want radical instigating revolutionaries on the LEFT, please. Revolutionaries on the right are so racist. And icky.
In fairness, it should be acknowledged that USC is a private school. . . . .
I attended USC in the 1950s and it was a pretty conservative place. I could not tell you the political philosophy of any of my professors. I think I got a pretty good education although the engineering school was weak in those years. Now, it is another matter. My wife graduated from the education school and worked for a few years as a teacher. Most of her senior year was teacher training in a Los Angeles school. The theory courses were mostly a waste of time. The difference now is that women have many more career choices and the people who choose education are the bottom quintile of college students.
Radical Thinkers Welcome? You mean, people with ideas like “Socialism sucks” or “Government is the problem, not the solution?” Well, I guess there’s radical thinking and then there’s RADICAL THINKING! And only one is really welcome.
Nothing more utterly f’ing useless than an Education degree. This is the source of all the fail in our schools.
That and graduates of the University of Spoiled Children …
These three look far too well fed to be any of those things…
That’s pretty funny.
The Left in America hasn’t been provocative or revolutionary for at least forty years. Sticking with the same obsolescent concepts for decade after decade could be a lot of things, but provocative or revolutionary, it ain’t.
Do you know what is definitely not provocative, instigating nor revolutionary? Marketing that uses three stock photography head shots including one black person, one white person and one Asian person. In fact it is conventional, banal and bourgeois. It is nothing but formulaic boilerplate.
Isn’t that the building where those kids were having sex on the roof?
They weren’t too keen on either instigators or provocateurs when the frat guy was screwing the girl on top of one of their buildings.
Thug!
Ha, it’s the School of Education, which means it will be the most cult-like group-think place on campus with zero originality, as can be seen by this very sign with the oldest diversity cliche in the book: one black, one white, one asian.
All we need is more “revolutionaries” with bloody hands.
I give up. I spent way too much time mouth-breathing through your comment to be able to figure it out, so riddle me this: what the heck are you talking about? We have enough Leftists with baby blood on their hands thanks to gov’t education or did you mean we need more union thugs to beat black protagonists senseless? Or maybe you meant posting this was the act of a revolutionary, who is bloodying his hands by beating the snot out of the cliche bourgeoise who hauled that incredibly expensive banner onto that building? Yoda says,”Stumped, I am.”
BTW, I really did get it, I just wanted to give a bunch of possible answers.
LAUSD union drones with USC education degrees, how many drop outs have you produced today?
I cringe when I think how much that banner must have cost. What a waste of money.
Good Lord! Can two SCSOE students pass each other on the street without dying laughing?
Charlie
Who are the three individuals pictured on the banner hanging from a building at a tier 3 university’s school of education?
I am a graduate student in Education, and frustrated to no end. Years ago, an uncle showed my his right wrist. He said “When I had carpal tunnel surgery on this hand, I had stitches from here to here and there to there. When I went into the doctor and asked about scheduling the left wrist, he said wait 6 months. Six months later on the left wrist I had 2 stitches here, 2 stitches there, and 3 more here.” Nothing like that is going to happen anytime soon in American education. My best hope for radical change is to start my own, non-accredited school. Educational researchers write for other researchers: those actually teaching in the schools are too busy to read research which really isn’t written with them as the intended audience anyway.
Education in American is very socialist: a government funded and regulated industry. When businesses start to realize that they can hire capable people who haven’t wasted their time on college, then colleges will shape up or disappear. Unfortunately, Whites still dominate college graduation ranks. If employers make a college degree a condition of employment, they can get around affirmative action restraints.
People with credentials require those credentials as a way of validating themselves. Everybody on the Supreme Court is from Harvard or Yale. So they insist all their clerks come from Harvard and Yale, because gosh darn it, those schools are so selective, so superior, heck that’s where I went. But it ain’t so.
Two things lead to current situation where a bachelor’s degree is required for jobs which do not require a college degree to perform. The 1st is affirmative action related judicial activism, and the second is the continual decline of the American public school system.
In Griggs versus Duke Power Co. the USSC held that no aptitude test could be used to screen prospective employees if that test had a disparate impact on racial minorities. In practice, this means no company will countenance an aptitude test due to fear of lawsuits based on this wholly invented doctrine.
So instead of testing IQ, companies require credentials. Now, it used to be a high school diploma meant a person could read, write, do basic math, and was capable of applying himself to a task without constant supervision. In short, a diploma meant he was a competent person who could be trained to perform a job. Nowadays of course, many so called graduates are functionally illiterate, and so the bachelor’s degree has replaced the high school diploma as this minimum requirement. It doesn’t matter what the bachelor’s is in, because the only purpose of the bachelor’s degree is to show that the applicant can read, write, and perform tasks in an independent manner.
You are right. That is why I home-school.
Do you know how teachers spell “change”?
cha cha cha cha change?
Hilarious! The very weakest of all students attend education school. When we eliminate tenure and install a merit system these “provocative, instigating revolutionaries” would be teachers will be wearing polyester uniforms and paper hats. “Would you like fries with that?” In short, poo.
I was discussing the GRE with someone at work. We always disagreed on everything, but agreed with me that the GRE was a bad test. The reasons why we disagreed: I got a B average in my engineering grad school but GRE of 98%, and thought the test was too easy, he got 50% on GRE but straight A average in grad school and thought the test was too hard.
So I asked him: Was your graduate program Business or Education?
Remember the big ol’ poster is newspeak –
Provocateur = Shill of the Establishment.
Instigator = Advocate of the status quo.
Revolutionary = Unwilling to accept change.
TYVM,
Q
I’m a high school economics teacher who promotes free markets and small governments. I’m also religious, an American patriot, a gun owner, and a teetotaler.
Furthermore, for the many years that I taught in an inner city school district, I was virtually the only man many kids had ever known who was loyally married and raising a family.
I survived school with those Ed school types so I could do what I love. They are, on the whole, the most unread bunch of nitwits you can imagine. After all, once you have adopted the multicultural all-truths-are-equal fantasy, you kind of don’t have any reason to actually learn anything, don’t you?
You know what all that makes me? A revolutionary.
Your comment makes me sad, but gives me some hope. I’m glad that you’re in the school system teaching about market economics, and I’m glad you’re setting a good example as a loyal family man. But can’t help but be discouraged that you didn’t mention any other “exceptions” within your fellow Ed school alumni. Is it really that bad?
I have two little daughters, and am already seeing what a mess the edu system is… Every 6 weeks of school, there’s an entire week off. The teacher takes a half day for parent conferences. If it weren’t for my wife’s work as a nurse, we’d be overwhelmed with all of the days off. I do not know how most families cope with the amount of vacation days if both parents work full time.
On top of that, I am concerned that my kids face a future of being taught by imbeciles, if your experiences were representative of a widespread problem.
Well, my experiences aren’t totally typical, as I taught in inner city schools. There actually are conservative teachers out there, but we definitely are a minority. One of my daughter’s (female) teachers was an official in the local Republican Party.
Ironically, even some of the union reps at the campus level were conservatives. They were often encouraged to the positions, actually, because they were “get ‘er done” types, rather than mamby-pamby “wait for someone else to solve everything for us” types. However, those higher up in the unions are all progressives.
Then again, notice that I’m saying all this in the past tense. I now teach overseas in a private school for expats. So maybe I’m not in a position to offer you much reassurance.
Given the hostility to unions around here, that comment begs elaboration. My experience was that, at the ground level, the union served an ironic purpose of protecting us from the education establishment (in other words, union) types who dominated at the district level. Quite a dilemma, really, and high on the list of reasons that I’m glad I’m not in public education anymore.
One look at the graphics (typography, color, drawings, and we see there’s nothing revolutionary about it). Drearily bureaucratic, iffen ya ast me.
I cringe when I think how much that banner must have cost. What a waste of money.-J.R. Woolsey (19)
Cringe again. USC Rossier School of Education is also pouring bucks into radio spots in LA plus the capital cities of Sacramento and DC.
Who are the three individuals pictured on the banner hanging from a building at a tier 3 university’s school of education?-RM3 Frisker FTN
The three people depicted in the banner are USC Rossier professors. From top to bottom they are Associate Professor Darnell Cole, Associate Professor Tracy Poon Tambascia and Professor Guilbert Hentschke.
Tier 3? Hint: sometimes Hugh Hewitt is kidding. USC Rossier claims to be ranked #14 among schools of education.
http://rossier.usc.edu/futures/FuturesMag_Spring2011.pdf
Seems Hentschke also advocates for-profit control of schools claiming it is revolutionary. He also sits on boards of several for-profit companies (director of some) and is advisor to the National Resource Center for Charter School Finance and Governance. I don’t think that he would be the poster child for teacher unions.
Have to wonder about those large grants (over 3 million dollars) his research company has gotten for research assessing schools for the government, while sitting on the board of these companies and a charter school itself.