Separate Department of Communications

Kramer's (1991) sojourn among more than a dozen campuses in 1988, as depicted in The Miseducation of America's Teachers, was designed to flesh out the workings of "the ed school establishment." Accordingly, Kramer writes that

knowledge--real knowledge in the form of facts, not "thinking skills" or feelings of self-worth--is about the least concern of the professional education industry. It despises "mere facts," chronology, traditions, rules, memorization, practice--all of which are dirty words in education today. It prizes "cognitive skills," self-determination, creative thinking. As though anything really creative could go on in an empty head.

Although Kramer's discussion is pointed directly at the process which trains individuals to be primary- and secondary-school teachers, it has broad implications for the post-secondary educational process at large. For as Kramer (1991) writes, "No amount of restructuring o

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her reducing the amount of time devoted to students. Kramer (1991) sees this as the devolution of the educational process from "the task of transmitting the common culture . . . [into] an agency of social change." As the R-TV-F discipline is merged into the school of fine and performing arts, serious tussles over resource funding are inevitable. Students studying watercolor or oil painting can readily be asked to provide their own canvases, brushes, and paints, while the campus merely provides "studio space." Similarly, theater students can endure the economic challenge of the availability of limited resources for sets and props, while the school provides the stage. But no art or theater chairperson is going to sit still in department budget meetings as the chairperson of the R-TV-F sequence asks for $50,000 for a Betacam SP VTR, $100,000 for an AVID Film Composer, $15,000 for a half dozen portable DAT recorders (not to mention a maintenance budget!), so that the students can work with the "state-of-the-art" tools which comprise their trade. Radio, television, and film are not inexpensive fields; students in these fields cannot be expected to provide the hard materials of their craft--the cameras, tape machines, and p
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Approximate Word count = 1522
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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