Her useful blast
at faddism got ensnared in a familiar trap: her stance allows the compromises and accidents from a century ago that shaped today's public schools and districts to define the mission and scope of future public schooling.
, this wave of what some regard
as faddism, may have had its positive side.
With gluten increasingly demonised over the last decade in alternative health and
food faddism circles, many Australians who are not coeliac or allergic to wheat buy gluten - free versions of foods at least sometimes, and up to nine percent of Australians claim to be gluten intolerant.
My big concern is that today's frenzied enthusiasm for computer - assisted «personalized learning» will lead us to heedlessly charge into some all - too - predictable pitfalls, fueling one more cycle of ed
tech faddism and disappointment.
But the habit of conflating «knows something» with «expertise» has left policymakers and media credulous and too often swept along by
feckless faddism masquerading as reputable expertise.
They didn't go after funding inequity, poverty,
reform faddism, consultant profiteering, massive teacher turnover, politicized bureaucratic management, or the overuse and misuse of testing.
Without systematic incentives rewarding officials for wise decisions and penalizing them for bad ones, public schooling became a ferris wheel of
faddism rather than a propagator of excellence.
Crichton is largely wrong about how science makes progress (but Lakatos, while improving on Popper's description of how science progresses, hardly proved him wrong about what * is * scientific), but he surely isn't wrong to suggest that
scientific faddism is as prevalent as pseudoscience.
Browning levels a great deal of criticism at
the faddism of recent Protestant history, marked by grabbing onto one modality of therapy after another — from Rogers to Berne to Jung — and losing sight of its own moral rootage in the process.
Let us take care that hubris,
faddism, or untamed enthusiasm do not render these gifts more hindrance than help.
It hardly seems misguided to question whether the champions of rigor are likely to beat back the forces of
faddism.
That made «wedges» vulnerable to
faddism and footloose about the real economics.