[mjdwitt]

Similarly, at least in much of the US, teaching special needs teachers requires extra certification on top of a normal teacher's license. Without all kinds of extra classes on the various psychological and physical disorders that they deal with in their classrooms, the extra classes seem pretty justified.

[kitsune_]

Of course you need extra certification for teaching special needs. That's not the point. My question is, do you need a college degree for it?

I used this example because it relates to my mother, who recently got a master in this field. First of all, I'm proud of how my mother pulled that off at that age, while still working at her old job!

That said, the courses were largely theoretical mixed with a minuscule amount of practical studies. How many of the graduates will be able to pursue an academic career in this field after this degree? Maybe 1% (Note, this number is pure guesswork). The rest will actually end up assisting kindergarten teachers with their "disorderly" children.

In many cases, they should function as a buffer, protecting the child from overzealous kindergarten teachers who want to get rid of the troublemakers asap. This is important because a lot of developmental "deficiencies" are not there forever or can be mitigated. I digress. From my point of view, the actual theoretical work was frankly substandard. I don't think it has to do with me applying the standards of "hard science" to a "soft field". No, simply put, those professors didn't know that much to begin with and neither did many of the students.

[sgt101]

The purpose of a University Degree (even a post graduate one) has never been to allow an academic career. It has always been the case that these degrees are necessary but not sufficient for an academic career but in the vast majority of cases Masters and Ph.D's go off and do other things instead - like practice in their field. In terms of educational psychology there is a very active and inquisitive community of research developing a number of strands of theory. I don't know very much about it at all, but some of what I have seen with respect to cognition, learning and development is impressive. Some is less so - but all of the people who I have met who are working on this agreed and wanted to change that, which I view as healthy.

As an aside if you were to (honestly) think about almost all fields of inquiry (maths may get a pass, possibly) then I think that you would have to agree with the statement "those professors didn't know that much to begin with and neither did many of the students". We are pretty ignorant about more or less everything when you look closely.

[kitsune_]

I think you misunderstand me. I didn't use this phrase in a philosophical way. I'm talking about professors teaching statistics and not knowing the difference between the median and the mean. I'm talking about that level of incompetence.

Imagine a course on compiler design where the professor doesn't know what top-down parsing and lexical analysis is. I'm certain that you would call that class a failure, or not?

[mjdwitt]

Of course that class would be worthless. Not all (and in my experience, almost no) classes, however, are like that when one selects a college which has a quality program for the degree of interest. Furthermore, I would go so far as to lay much of the blame for a poor education on the student who fails to select a good school for their degree.