by Case Quinlan, Think Progress
A common cultural trope of the incompetent teacher is one who plays videos for their students on a regular basis instead of lecturing and overseeing in-class activities and projects. Yet that’s exactly the kind of education one Republican senator would like to see college students receive. During a recent appearance on WisPolitics, a state political news service, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson (R) suggested that the country could save money on higher education costs by cutting back on instructors — and instead allowing students to learn from Ken Burns videos and the internet. “If you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns’s Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done?” Johnson said. “You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas.”
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