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So, you're saying that all of those in our government responsible for determining what requirements are needed for public education are wrong, and that the decades and decades of experience they have in determining what should be required mean nothing? Loads of teachers dedicate themselves to educating themselves as teachers and taking on student loans for no reason and then never say anything about it? It's all just a big lie?

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I teach and that more or less sums up my current view on the subject. Academic departments and journals of education produce a large amount of crap that later turns out to be poorly researched. This results in nonsense educational fads like learning styles, when there is no good evidence for them:

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.p...

I'm in agreement with Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, that the college education major should be abolished. Instead students who aspire to be teachers should get a degree in any other field, and take a few courses on classroom management.

The requirements are partly political, and accurately certifying competence for the number of people required to teach is not a solved problem.

Teachers dedicate themselves to teaching for numerous reasons. They don't take on student loans for no reason whatsoever; the credentials they get are part of the price of going into a system with intentional barriers to entry.

Don't confuse a system of "reject some of the good, weed out most of the really bad, and usually get ok results" as something which is an entirely accurate indicator of competence. The shortcomings of the current system don't make it a lie, obviously - but putting decades into a process doesn't necessarily make it better, either.

I think we agree that the requirements for primary education, as determined by government are important, but we disagree that the presence of trained educators is necessary for a child to learn those materials.

I'm saying that in many cases, if suffices for a parent to simply understand what subject materials their children need to learn, and then teach them to read well at an early age, after that parents do not necessarily need to be knowledgeable about those materials because the books contain the knowledge.

I think what I'm describing is nearly synonymous with the hacker mentality that I would expect to be held in high regard in this forum.

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