The non-policy reasons Trump alarms many educators
Many educators have expressed deep concern about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a Michigan billionaire who was chosen despite having no experience in the world of education other than being an advocate for school choice. But educators are also alarmed with President Trump for reasons other than policy.
In this post, Mike Rose, a respected research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, explains why Trump’s disregard for the truth, displays of historical ignorance and other behaviors are of such concern to many educators.
Rose is the author of books that include “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,” which demonstrated the heavy cognitive demands of blue-collar and service work and what it takes to do such work well despite the tendency of many to underestimate and undervalue the intelligence involved in such work. Other books he has written include “Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education,”“Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America,” and “Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.”
By Mike Rose
In his May 3 column in The Washington Post, conservative commentator George Will wrote a sentence that I can’t get out of my head. Will is trying to pinpoint what he sees as the “disability” that makes Donald Trump unfit to be president. “[T]he problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” I’m not typically in agreement with Will, but his insight here is, I think, stunning — diagnostically astute but also exceedingly relevant to those of us in education.
Knowing what it is to know something is a key concern in epistemology, that branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of knowledge and methods of analyzing knowledge. Epistemology can get pretty heady, and, to be honest, I quickly find myself in the weeds when I try to read deeply in it. But the general concerns of epistemology are central to The non-policy reasons Trump alarms many educators - The Washington Post:
