Quote of the Day (Jonathan Zimmerman, Calling for ‘An Entirely Different System of Teacher Education’)

“What American teachers need now is not love, but a capacity for deep and disciplined thinking that will reflect—and respect—the intellectual complexities of their job. It won't do to simply strip away our insipid accountability systems and leave everything in the hands of present-day teachers, who are mostly unprepared for the tasks we have set before them. The US badly needs to design and develop an entirely different system of teacher education, stressing cognitive skills above all else. Anything less will leave our teachers languishing in ‘intellectual stagnation,’ as Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Susan B. Anthony, and our schools mired in mediocrity.”— American historian of education Jonathan Zimmerman, “Why Is American Teaching So Bad?”, The New York Review of Books, Dec. 4, 2014

Quote of the Day (Jonathan Zimmerman, on Quests for Purity, of the Left and Right)

“The mostly left-wing quest for cultural purity bears an eerie echo to the right-wing fantasy of national purity, which peaked during the so-called 100-percent-American campaigns in the early 20th century.”— University of Pennsylvania historian Jonathan Zimmerman, “On ‘Maybellene’ and General Tso’s Chicken,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Apr. 7, 2017