By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
One need not be a teacher or a school administrator to be aware of “progressive” theories of education. The buzzwords used in schools of education have seeped into the vernacular. We all have heard friends and neighbors pronounce in confident tones that the purpose of an education is not to “stuff a child’s mind full of names and dates,” but to teach him or her “how to learn,” to excite in them a “love of learning.”
I can remember a former colleague in the New York high school where I taught saying, “A student is not a vessel to be filled, but a lamp to be lit.”
It is an approach to learning that differs in significant ways from traditional views of education as a process which should preserve, protect, defend, and extend our cultural heritage and moral values.
We are experiencing an intriguing moment in our history. After all these decades with the progressives in charge of our schools, we now have solid evidence that the conservative approach works better than theirs.
Ironically, it is in Massachusetts, the stronghold of America’s liberal Democrats, where the evidence surfaced. Liberal Democrats may be the champions of political correctness, but they still want their kids to do well on their SATs and get into the most competitive universities.
The Bay State’s students are doing that. According to an article by Sol Stern in the June 10 edition of The Beat, an online publication of the Manhattan Institute, “In the new millennium, Massachusetts students have surged upward on the biennial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — ‘the nation’s report card,’ as education scholars call it. On the 2005 NAEP tests, Massachusetts ranked first in the nation in fourth and eighth-grade reading and fourth and eighth-grade math. It then repeated the feat in 2007. No state had ever scored first in both grades and both subjects in a single year — let alone for two consecutive test cycles.
“On another reliable test, the Trends in International Math and Science Studies, the state’s fourth-graders last year ranked second globally in science and third in math, while the eighth-graders tied for first in science and placed sixth in math. The United States as a whole finished tenth.”
What explains Massachusetts’ success? Impartial observers point to the state’s decision to put in place in 1993 the Education Reform Act, which, says Stern, “established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards.”
Those knowledge-based standards are based on the theories of E.D. Hirsch. While teaching at the University of Virginia in the 1950s, Hirsch conducted, in Stern’s words, “an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could.”
In other words, Hirsch discovered that “what” a student knows is more important than whether he or she has been taught “how” to learn. Facts matter, content matters. Hirsch became convinced, Stern continues, that “the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students — indeed, this was even more important than teaching the ‘skills’ of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn ‘how to’ skills.”
Hirsch’s theories caught the attention of William Bennett, when he was the chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with education historian Diane Ravitch. They urged him to write a book on his theories.
In 1987, that book, Cultural Literacy, landed on The New York Times’ bestseller list, where it stayed for 26 weeks.
Hirsch went on to launch, writes Stern, “the Core Knowledge Foundation, which sought to create a knowledge-based curriculum for the nation’s elementary schools. A wide range of scholars assisted him in specifying the knowledge that children in grades K-8 needed to become proficient readers.
“For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E.B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.”
Hirsch was attacked, as you would expect, writes Stern, for his “elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist.”
But Hirsch was undaunted. He insisted that the educational standards he was recommending were the best “path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups, that cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”
Hirsch was challenging the consensus in our schools of education, where, writes Stern, “future classroom teachers must search far in ed-school syllabi to find a single reference to any of Hirsch’s work — yet required readings by radical education thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers are common.
“From these texts, prospective teachers will learn that the purpose of schooling in America isn’t to create knowledgeable, civic-minded citizens, loyal to the nation’s democratic institutions, as Jefferson dreamed, but rather to undermine those institutions and turn children into champions of ‘social justice’ as defined by today’s America-hating far Left.”
Stern does not tell us why Massachusetts chose Hirsch’s approach over those of the education establishment. It is an intriguing question. (Maybe there are readers of First Teachers who know something about that.) But the state did.
“One element of the 1993 Education Reform Act,” Stern continues, “was Hirschean knowledge-based curricula for each grade. The history and social-science curriculum, for instance, makes clear that students should be taught explicitly about their rich heritage, rather than taught how to learn about that heritage. The curriculum calls for schools to ‘impart to their students the learning necessary for an informed, reasoned allegiance to the ideals of a free society.’ This learning includes ‘the vision of a common life in liberty, justice, and equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution two centuries ago.’
“Why is this essential? ‘We are convinced that democracy’s survival depends upon our transmitting to each new generation the political vision of liberty and equality that unites us as Americans. It also depends on a deep loyalty to the political institutions our founders put together to fulfill that vision’.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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