How do community colleges or high schools ensure that they don't get stuck in the 1980s? Teaching is, or at least could be, its own profession with its own duty to stay current.
We are really debating a line drawing exercise. Scholars have to teach Phd students because they are the only ones that know the material that phd students are learning. Even if a particular scholar or scholars in general are bad at pedagogy it doesn't matter, there's no other option. On the hand high school American history can be taught by people that aren't themselves historians. We can select people that are good at and like teaching instead of having no choice but to use the people whose passion is investing the marriage rituals of late 17th century puritan farmers.
My contention is that the vast majority of undergraduate coursework is on the high school American history side of the line. Those arguing on the other side don't generally argue that e.g. intro to partial differential equations -- a sophomore / junior level course for majors -- needs to be taught by someone publishing in the field of mathematics. That only someone on the cutting edge understands it well enough to teach it to others. Rather they make some rather mystical and anecdote driven claims about how such professors are inherently superior at imparting this knowledge than would be professors that were selected for, and spent their time honing, their skills in teaching rather than their skills in publishing.
It's a rather extraordinary claim that selecting for exactly the qualities we are looking for would produce inferior outcomes to selecting for some other tenuously related quality, so it requires a fair bit of evidence.
We are really debating a line drawing exercise. Scholars have to teach Phd students because they are the only ones that know the material that phd students are learning. Even if a particular scholar or scholars in general are bad at pedagogy it doesn't matter, there's no other option. On the hand high school American history can be taught by people that aren't themselves historians. We can select people that are good at and like teaching instead of having no choice but to use the people whose passion is investing the marriage rituals of late 17th century puritan farmers.
My contention is that the vast majority of undergraduate coursework is on the high school American history side of the line. Those arguing on the other side don't generally argue that e.g. intro to partial differential equations -- a sophomore / junior level course for majors -- needs to be taught by someone publishing in the field of mathematics. That only someone on the cutting edge understands it well enough to teach it to others. Rather they make some rather mystical and anecdote driven claims about how such professors are inherently superior at imparting this knowledge than would be professors that were selected for, and spent their time honing, their skills in teaching rather than their skills in publishing.
It's a rather extraordinary claim that selecting for exactly the qualities we are looking for would produce inferior outcomes to selecting for some other tenuously related quality, so it requires a fair bit of evidence.