Educated…and Bored suggests that education professors are bored with the old-fashioned teaching techniques that work:
My old guitar teacher has a saying: “You can educate yourself into boredom.”What he means is that you can study the classical guitar repertoire so thoroughly and for so many years that you simply become bored with it. This happened to another teacher of mine, a lovable, gruff, old German immigrant, a professor of organ and harpsichord. Having spent upwards of 50 years studying the great works of the Renaissance and Baroque, he became bored with classical music, sold his harpsichord, and took up Oriental painting.
Indeed, the same things happened in classical music more generally. As the 20th century unfolded, composers became bored with the classical forms of the past, bored with tonality, bored with harmony. Thinking that beauty was played out, composers such as Schoenberg, Webern, Elliot Carter, or Pierre Boulez wrote atonal works that sounded to most people like a collection of wrong notes. Or think of John Cage’s infamous piece “4:33,” which merely consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of absolute silence: What could more perfectly display an attitude of boredom towards the very idea of music?
You see the same phenomenon in architecture, where modern architects aren’t content to replicate the great, beautiful, human-friendly buildings of the past. Instead, because they are bored with beauty and usability, architects such as Frank Gehry busily set about creating disjointed, monstrous eyesores…
The same phenomenon may explain why so many education professors (and hence public school teachers) gravitate towards trendy educational methods that deny children a good foundation in reading. Not necessarily because of ill-will, stupidity, or ignorance. Boredom is the thing to look for.
The “Follow Through” study looked at 700,000 students between 1967 and 1995 and compared several types of educational models. “Direct Instruction” (a rigorous, skill-based method that uses phonics when teaching reading) certainly seems effective if you look at The Washington Times‘ chart of the study’s results.