By W.C. JAMESON
Cabin Columnist

The manner in which we teach teachers in this country has been taking a serious bashing for the past three or four decades.

Lately, renewed attacks on college and university teacher-training programs are generating some serious examinations of processes that increasingly place unfit and unqualified teachers into public school classrooms. The discussion has gone clear to the U.S. Congress and Senate.

Some colleges, however, are not waiting around for official reform -- they are jumping in and changing on their own. I'm tickled to report that one of them is located in Arkansas.

Based on recent articles and reports in the Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times, the principal criticisms against basic teacher training in U.S. colleges include the following:

* Graduates of teacher-training programs possess little in the way of content relative to the courses they will teach.

Specific examples cited in one of the studies were public school teachers conducting classes in geography, biology and music when none of them had taken even a single course in any of those subjects!

* Education graduates complete what some experts claimed was an "overbalance" of courses in pedagogy. These so-called "technique" courses have come under severe criticism as being "repetitive," "useless," "out of date" and baroque." A hasty examination by me of selected education programs around the country revealed so-called technique requirements ranging from 43 hours to 80 hours, in some case over one-half of all courses taken in college!

* Standards in the majority of the country's education programs, according to the writers, are low.

* Requirements for passing education classes are ridiculously low, according to studies. Exit interviews at some colleges showed that a large percentage of graduates never once visited the library relative to their education courses. Critics are referring to education colleges these days as "teacher factories."

* Education programs generally attract, statistically speaking, the worst students. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Paul Greenberg recently wrote, "Schools of education have long been considered hideouts for the least gifted students."

Reacting to what are clearly serious problems in teacher training, Arkansas' own Lyon College in Batesville has redesigned its education program. At first glance, it looks pretty good.

For one thing, they cut back on the number of pedagogical courses the student is required to take. Only 28 hours of education courses are required, and some claim that is still too many.

For another thing, potential teachers attending Lyon College are required to major not in education, but in an actual academic field. For example, if people want to teach high school biology, they will major in biology. They will actually be somewhat qualified as biologists. Speaking from experience, this will make an incredible difference to their students.

For yet another thing, Lyon College refuses to allow its education program to become a haven for the incompetent -- it requires students to have a B average in order to be admitted. As far as I can tell, most colleges around the country require only a C average.

In many of the nation's education colleges, teacher-trainees are required to invest approximately 12 weeks in what is called "practice teaching." At Lyon College, the student is required to serve a one-year internship.

I'm proud such innovation is taking place in Arkansas, a state which continually receives, and is largely deserving of, intense criticism of its public school education.

The Lyon program appears to be rigorous, demanding and quite professional in scope, orientation and objectives. It leaves the impression Lyon wants to graduate truly educated and competent teachers. It is graduating teachers who will actually know something about the subject they will be required to teach.

I have been told the Lyon program is already upsetting a number of education professionals around the state. One education professor recently told me, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Apparently he wasn't aware the system has been "broke" for a long time. Now, thankfully, some people are determined to fix it.

Kudos to Arkansas' Lyon College. We wish them success in this all-important undertaking, and hope their efforts serve as a model, if not a warning, to any inferior education programs that may exist in this state and elsewhere.

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(EDITOR'S NOTE: W.C. Jameson is associate professor of geography at the University of Central Arkansas.)

Copyright 1997 The Log Cabin Democrat