And some still doubt that the goal of the right is to make Joe Citizen stupid

good luck with that

have you spent much time with nuns lately? even the retired nuns living in the same retirement home (the regional mother house was sold and the property developed - those nuns are serious financial whizzes) as my dad are all multi-degreed. Science/math/politics/social work/education, those nuns have bags of degrees.

I'm sure they vary a great deal just as do people in other groups. My memories of Catholic school are all very good. There were a couple of rather sour, mean nuns, but they were the exception to the rule. Most were cheerful and very kind. They did understand that teaching and explaining was what they did, and that learning (which they constantly reminded us is an active verb) is something we did.

We bounced beteween homes in Detroit and Washington in my elementary school years. In Detroit, a very middle class environment, we had the Dominicans: in Washington, in a much more establishment environment, it was the Sisters of Providence. Very different systems of discipline; the Dominicans did punishment without guilt; the Sisters of Providence did guilt without punishment. I liked the Dominicans better.

I do recall in the 4th grade asking an Irish nun if Protestants can go to heaven. Well, she said after a moment's thought, "Yes, if they're very good".

Later I encountered the Jesuits in an all boy environment. I loved it, though I had some discipline problems, getting a lot of what they called "JUG", which was an acronym standing for 'Justice under God ' ( 3 hrs of memorizing Latin and other poetry after school. As we used to say "there was goddamn little justice in JUG". It turned out to be a pretty good preparation for the Naval Academy.

Could be. My personal experience with nuns going back many decades is that they were highly educated women. Very few of them would have taken down-market jobs like teaching.

The first 'former' nun I met back in the late 1960's was a woman who had studied physics at the Max Planck Institute. The portion of her education not covered by scholarships was covered by the mother house.

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They didn't have nuns as teachers in our local school system - unless those nuns had completed their education qualification. Teachers in the Catholic system were Catholics who'd gone to teachers college, which people could attend straight out of high school in the 1960's. Since the nuns in the system tended to be university grads vs college grads, they were the department heads and principals.

Don't get me wrong. Those I encountered were nearly all very capable, confident and very effective. Farmerman's earlier statement about their relative capability was right on. They were formidable, but what I remember most is their cheerfulness and their kindness.

Leaving aside the broader question whether Republicans are stupid or not: When I think of the grown-ups from whom I've learned a lot as a teenager, and compare them with the grown-ups in my life who were licensed teachers, I see some overlap, but it's by no means the same set of people. If I lived in Wisconsin, I would be open to giving teachers without a degree in education a try.

PS: I find it hard to believe that this is a new idea. There ought to be jurisdictions that have already tried this. What does the empirical evidence say about them?

So they should even be better today than they were when I went to Parochial School. I wonder if the nuns today, spend all that time learning "teaching skills" or "A subject to teach"

I must remind you that I meant that the nuns were not loaded up with "ed" degrees. They were trained at some aspect of their crafts. I recall my art teacher in 4th Grade (Sister Mary Consollata). I later found out that she had anart History degree and an MFA (I had no idea what that meant in the 4th grade and we had another name for the abbreviation when I was in 6th grade).

MFA as a studio artist, not some one loaded down with teaching "Theory".

Why is it that, teaching in colleges requires NOTHING other than excellence in your field? NO requirements for any ed theory or psych of kidies.

That was pretty much the way it was in Catholic School. Course my memory dims in my advancing years, and I mostly remember the good things. I tried to repress the bad.

My personal experience which also goes back many decades is that nuns vary.
There was Sr. Mary Anthony that told us that enjoying sex in marriage was wrong. This would be unlikely today, but I remember her saying it, even remember where I sat in the room, and was more confused than I already had been after reading the Ligorian magazine.. which my parents probably subscribed to, to let me know what not to think and thus not to sin.
This would have been around 1957. A kind of strange catholic communication process.
Maybe boys had it looser than girls back then.

One of the best teachers I ever had was a nun, back in '53. Another, not just one but a community of good ones at a catholic college I went to before university.

I do figure the world's nuns vary.

I went to catholic schools in the 40's and early 50's and very few of the nuns had collage educations but they were a hell of a lot smarter than the run of the mill of todays teachers. For one thing they had all the kids respect which many of todays teachers do not have.

I always wanted to know how to make those collages. It's a real knack, I've heard.

Your opinion is based in the story of the article, not so in the "real story"

I will give you the best example: Homeschooling.

In Homeschooling parents can have no academic skills at all, they might not even have college, and some finished their high school with lower grades.

But, this fact has been established by experience: When you teach you learn.

This gives a corollary: the more you teach, the more you learn.

I'm witness of homeschool students who after finishing high school at home have been successful (3.5 and over) in college and universities.

Plus, I can bet that a parent who is a bank teller and teach his sons at home (homeschooling) can solve more easily quadratic equations, while a doctor having his sons in the best universities won't remember much how to solve them.

The point is that if the individual qualifies for teaching -even when has no pedagogic degrees- he can teach one, two, twenty, thirty or more students.

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On the other hand, the "liberals" -who always fake protecting minorities but in reality they want to protect their low style of life- have managed to influence in some schools to teach that "there is no gender in humans". Their motto is to promote that there is not such thing as boys and girls.

Their goal is the acceptance of transgender in society.

Such is not ridiculous but a crime against nature and against humanity.

A transgender is an individual who believes that he belongs to the opposite sex, and try to become a member of the opposite sex doing make ups, including cosmetic surgery.

A male transgender still is a man regardless of how deep is his belief thatr he is a woman, and regardless of how much cosmetic changes he has made in his body.

Comparing the GOP initiative of allowing people without special degrees to teach in schools, with the liberal initiative that "there is no gender", lol, the result is that the GOP is doing right... while the liberals are no more than a bunch of lunatics.... literally speaking... lunatics.

A very good point that was unfortunately overlooked in the discussion. I believe most of the local and state credentialling in this area are, like the teachers unions themselves, are simply efforts to eliminate real competition for employment in a role that is particularly important to our society. The teaching establishment has built these walls around public education to protect itself from competition or accountability for the generally poor results it achieves.