A content-rich pedagogy makes better citizens and smarter kids.
Influenced by the Romantics, progressive-education doctrine held that children learn best “naturally” and that we should not drill “lifeless” facts into their developing minds. Such views, which became prevalent in American teacher training by the 1920s, Hirsch shows, represented a sharp break with the Founding Fathers, who believed that children needed to learn a coherent, shared body of knowledge for the new democracy to work. Thomas Jefferson even proposed a common curriculum, so that children’s “memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history.”
By the time Hirsch turned his attention to education reform in the mid-1980s, Romanticism’s triumph was complete. Most public schools, for instance, taught reading through the “whole language” method, which encourages children to guess the meaning of words through context clues rather than to master the English phonetic code. In many schools, a teacher could no longer line up children’s desks in rows facing him; indeed, he found himself banished entirely from the front of the classroom, becoming a “guide on the side” instead of a “sage on the stage.” In my children’s elementary school, students in the early grades had no desks at all but instead sat in circles on a rug, hoping to re-create the “natural” environment that education progressives believed would facilitate learning. In the 1970s and 1980s, progressive education also absorbed the trendy new doctrines of multiculturalism, postmodernism (with its dogma that objective facts don’t exist), and social-justice teaching.
Does the supposed triumph of the progressive educators serve to support or undermine JT Gatto's thesis about the American public education s ystem?
Core Knowledge Foundation
Core Knowledge Essays by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
Educational Theory of E. D. Hirsch
Hoover Institution - Fellows - E. Donald Hirsch Jr.
ED Hirsch, Jr - PBS
wiki: E. D. Hirsch
2 comments:
I am not up, certainly, on all the buzzwords of education (though my kids lived through a particularly unfortunate spelling curriculum, the name of which is blessedly gone from my memory). I only know that education is not a one-size-fits-all proposition, and what worked well for my older kids isn't working so well for the youngest. And as shown in "Lives of Passion, School of Hope, students at quote unquote progressive schools with a student-centered curriculum turn into successful adults who can live, cope and thrive in the real world, once they're out. It doesn't have to be school standardization and "teaching for the test" (a particular bugaboo of mine). The book shows change in action. It shows a school to work for -- and as far as that goes, other institutitions as well. What we're doing now isn't working. At least, it's not working for vast numbers of kids.
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