I think the research of education (and therefore, teacher education) is a big problem. It's one of those soft sciences where rhetoric and fads are more importan

I think the research of education (and therefore, teacher education) is a big problem. It's one of those soft sciences where rhetoric and fads are more important than what's actually true. The critical pedagogy page on wikipedia is as mind-blowing as the postmodernism one, and not in a good way. I'm not saying that hard reductionism is a good idea in all fields, but things have to either be grounded in theory or reality, and the theory of education (as taught in a lot of universities) is neither theoretically sound nor realistic. See - learner styles (debunked, still pretty fashionable), MBTI (debunked, still pretty fashionable), and the huge amount of poorly-defined waffle. Tell 'em, show 'em, and make 'em do it themselves is still pretty much the gold standard. At the other end of the scale, there's the way education is treated by policy makers. Teachers come from a wholly ivory tower, into "teach them how to pass the next test" grinder. Which is fine, if the tests were valid, but they generally aren't. For the vast majority of students, the best way to improve their marks (in the short term) is to help them exploit weakness in the test, not properly teach them the material they should be learning. Write lots of words on written response tests, and have a few widely applicable "big words" or "big phrases" ("Despite these not inconsiderable factors, the balance of evidence seems to suggest that ..."). "Science" is even easier to hack, as there are very predictable questions, and a shallow memorisation of the process of "solving" the problem is sufficient to pass (and easy to teach to the students who won't really "get it"). Sure, they are learning an important lesson - "work the system", but I don't see how the system (society) really benefits from this.