Let's Close the Education Schools

I got hell over xmass for proclaiming that "non-academic" subjects do not belong at Universities. This was a belief held by my family's dead leftist patriarch, Tom Philpott Sr. Here's a commentary printed today calling for the closure of "Education Schools", a call explicitly made by Tom Sr. As for closing Nursing Schools, Tom Sr. and I merely call for moving them out of Universities, and back to trade schools, which ought to be respectable institutions in their own right, as they used to be here in the US, and remain so in Europe.

To clarify my position about non-academic subjects at Universities, I place these subjects into two catagories:

(1) Those that warrent relegation to training seminars: Social Work, Education, Criminal Justice, Business, etc.

(2) Those that warrent their own institutions of study and certification outside of the "university" structure: Nursing, Physical Therapy, Respitory Therapy, Photography, Accounting, Social Work, culinary arts, hotel and restaurant management, auto mechanics, Computer Aided Design, etc.

Sadly, "high" schools and "universities" have degraded to where no standards govern what can get scotch-taped to their curricula; anybody who argues against including a subjects gets (as I did) lambasted roundly, loudly, and instantly (and incorrectly) as having denigraded that subject. Yet, if I were to propose adding degrees in basketball and animation to the Cullinary Institute of America, nearly everybody who cares about the CIA would reject my proposal, and do so without having denegraded the worthwhile pursuits of basketball and animation.