The Importance of No Child Left Behind: Part IV (The Disingenuous Assertion of Narrowing the Curriculum)

One of the silliested catch-phrases that has caught on among critics of No Child Left Behind stems from the idea that focus on math and reading has resulted in a "narrowing of the curriculum." Those who repeat this phrase, yet another mantra uttered mostly by the education establishment, are making an either disingenuous or clueless assertion. We cannot be narrowing the curriculum when there is so little curriculum in the first place. And if we were to launch a strong liberal arts curriculum, reading would be the key vehicle.

As mentioned in previous articles for this blog, most elementary schools (from kindergarten through Grade 5 or Grade 6) have no curriculum for anything beyond math and reading. By all means investigate this situation yourself by going to inquire at your local elementary school; just brace yourself for the double talk that you are likely to get. At the K-6 levels, especially, schools are rife with the "progressive" notions of education professors that curriculum should be driven by student and teacher interest. This may have a certain facile appeal until one realizes that young children have little prior experience with history, geography, economics, natural science, classical literature, or the fine arts from which to draw as they forge their own curriculum. And teachers evolving focal points of study from their own set of interests will almost certainly leave out huge swaths of important subject area content. Furthermore, there is typically very little logical subject area progression as a child moves from grade to grade, so that hot topics like endangered rain forests may get a lot of attention, while important topics such as the constitutionally established structure of local, state, and federal governments may get no coverage at all.

Thus our students enter middle school (typically grades 6-8) with a very poor knowledge base. And the curricular potential of many middle schools is undermined by another misguided notion, espoused by education professors and other members of the education establishment, that middle school students need guidance in developing social skills and good human relationships more than they need rigorous academic development.

So it is that many of our students arrive in high school with very little subject area knowledge. For the first time they enter a school in which some attempt is made to impart a liberal arts curriculum. But their learning potential is often weakened by the lack of the intellectual leavening that would have occurred if the K-8 years had not been largely wasted. And the pedagogical skill and knowledge base of high school teachers is so variable that getting a real education in any particular subject is the luck of the draw. Despite the rhetoric of engaging student interest that flows from the "progressive" legions in the education establishment, there is still a lot of turning to the back of the chapter and answering questions based on line by line responses from the text.

So, go ahead, if you yourself have the knowledge base to do so, ask a graduating senior the historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the meaning and differentiation of the terms "deficit" and "debt" with reference to the federal government; the difference between nuclear "fission" and "fusion" and the historical uses of each; the greatness of Shakespeare relative to Moliere; and how it might be said that Duke Ellington combined elements of classical European and the truly authentic forms of American music. If you know and care about these things, you will be deeply disturbed by the lack of knowledge that graduating seniors have about such matters.

Challenging reading assignments used in the service of strong liberal arts content acquisition can only wide and deepen, not narrow, the curriculum. Strong mathematical skill underpins many topics in science. Math and reading are fundamental, powerful agents of learning for topics across the curriculum.

But it is the lamentably weak curriculum of K-12 education in the United States that is the real problem, a problem that is variously finessed by the disingenuous or spouted by the clueless in advancing the silly notion that No Child Left Behind in any sense has resulted in a "narrowing of the curriculum."