This lecture (published as a booklet) was delivered by Rita Kramer on December 12, 1991, as a part of the Ashbrook Center's Major Issues Lecture Series "Striving Towards Excellence in Education." Rita Kramer received national acclaim from her 1991 book, "ED SCHOOL FOLLIES: The Miseducation of America's Teachers," which was based on her observations while visiting schools and departments of education in colleges and universities throughout the country during the 1988-89 academic year. Kramer's study struck at the heart of why education failed: Teachers were trained HOW to teach with little knowledge of WHAT to teach. Method without content equals ignorance.

Note: We find it disturbing that ED SCHOOL FOLLIES is out of print... And we wonder if the education establishment had anything to do with it. So, another decade of education decay went by, largely unnoticed...

>From THE EDUCATION OF TEACHERS booklet:

"Stripped down to the essentials, when we talk about the success or failure of the schools, what we are talking about is the success or failure of teachers... it is no wonder that teacher preparation programs have developed an overwhelming emphasis on techniques, models, methods, "instructional strategies" -- everything but knowledge itself. And no wonder that they turn out men and women who know a lot about how to teach but have little or nothing on which to exercise that expertise...

...The problem is that out teachers don't know enough math and science to teach it to their pupils. They themselves are products of the system that requires little of its high school graduates and little more of its baccalaureates, whose education courses then train them to be social workers rather than develop the meager intellectual skills they bring with them to graduate study, and beyond, to the classroom... The problem of teacher ignorance is the problem of college graduates who don't know what they should because they were graduated from high school without knowing what they should, having come from elementary school with poor reading skills and inadequate content knowledge..."