A G K Y R A

According to his website, “Obama will require all schools of education to be accredited.” It’s just a single sentence, easily passed over. It sounds benign. We don’t want unlicensed (meaning untrained) physicians trying to diagnose diseases, and we shouldn’t want untrained teachers teaching, right?

It’s not as benign as it looks. Credentialing standards for teachers aren’t set by the federal government, they’re set at the state and local level. This means that if Obama gets his way, a teacher in New York wouldn’t be able to get a teaching credential unless he went through a credentialing program at a school of education accredited (thus controlled by) Obama, presumably through the Department of Education. The goal here is to give the federal government control over the supply of teachers. Washington D.C. gets to dictate to people in Colorado whom they may and may not hire to be a teacher. No federal accreditation, no legal school of education, no valid state teaching credential. Unless, of course, the states want to kiss their weekly allowance from Washington goodbye.

So it’s a major encroachment on state’s rights and the right of the people of each state to govern themselves. I’ll leave you to ponder how it also rubs away at our freedom of association. Just one more step on our journey to Dystopia.

I’ve been meaning to share these links for some time. The Warring States Project at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has some fun and helpful advice for students and scholars, and some methodological tidbits for historians.

The Project itself has to do with research in ancient Chinese history, but the historical methodological tidbits are fun reading for any kind of historical work.

Their page of advice to students has helpful and witty tips for junior scholars as well.

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