http://www.wellingtongrey.net/articles/archive/2007-06-07–open-letter-aqa.html

I read this article today about a Physics teacher in England who is lamenting the state of education in their state (or is it a province?) While this stuff us usually a bit skewed to conservative cultural alarmism, a la Theodore Dalrymple, a kind of academic “uphill both ways in the snow” snobbery that has been going on in perpetuem, one note, comes out about the author that perhaps illustrates his point even better than his arguement:

It is first evidenced in the second paragraph:

I am a physics teacher. Or, at least I used to be. My subject is still calledUK Department for Education and the AQA board changed the subject. They took the physics out of physics and replaced it with… something else, something nebulous and ill defined. I worry about this change. I worry about my pupils, I worry about the state of science education in this country, and I worry about the future physics teachers — if there will be any. physics. My pupils will sit an exam and earn a GCSE in physics, but that exam doesn’t cover anything I recognize as physics. Over the past year the

I graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in physics and pursued a lucrative career in economics which I eventually abandoned to teach. Economics and business, though vastly easier than my subject, and more financially rewarding, bored me. I went into teaching to return to the world of science and to, in what extent I could, convey to pupils why one would love a subject so difficult.

Here he pretends phyics is more difficult than economics and business and claims to understand both, but probably neither, and by which, gives evidence that he might not understand other fields over which he claims mastery, e.g., physics.

My point of which is to demonstrate the lack of education among educators in general, by focussing on that of this particular pedant who is admittedly above his peers in identifying his field’s own weaknesses.

Thusly, that if there is a lack of phyics teaching, and that is what he truly loves, that unless the accumulation of sufficent lucre to sustain his hobby so utterly bores him to prevent him for obtaining sustenance therewith, that he should start a business teaching physics, thereby enabling him to accomplish his goal of sharing his joy with students (in a currently still socially acceptable way) and maintaining his integrity, whilst (notice the Britishist slang — it makes me whinge) lining his pockets with lucre that if somnism doesn’t overcome him first, could be spent however he chooses, even in expanding science, or charging his students less.