I’ve read all major
tomes on public education and over the years have acquired deep knowledge of
the history and philosophy of education.
I can make a debater’s argument in favor of misguided approaches to education
better than can the perpetrators of such approaches; accordingly, I can forcefully pretend to
favor the errant approaches of Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, William Heard
Kilpatrick, Harold Rudd, Jonathon Kozol, Deborah Meyers, Ted Sizer, and Alfie
Kohn.
But for those of you who know that an
excellent education is a matter of broadly and deeply educated teachers
imparting a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education is logical sequence
throughout the K-12 years, undergird your understanding by reading the
following, in order of importance:
1) E.
D. Hirsch, The Schools We Need and Why We
Don’t Have Them
(New York: Anchor/ Doubleday, 1996)
Hirsch summarizes the origins of the anti-knowledge
ideology of education professors in the teachers colleges that were
incorporated into universities in the early 20th century. He describes how a creed with roots to philosophical
and literary romanticism became a devotion to inefficient project and portfolio
methods that fail to deliver logically sequenced knowledge bases to students, thereby
hurting most those young people from ill-educated families often stuck in cyclical poverty. With calls for ‘’critical thinking” and “lifelong
learning” that proceed on the basis of very slim knowledge and skill sets, the “Thoughtworld” of education professors has damaged generation
of students, as detailed in this heavily researched and cogently argued work.
2) Diane
Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform
(New York: Touchstone/ Simon and
Schuster, 2000)
With masterful comprehensiveness, Ravitch
delivers a classic history of education in the United States, with emphasis on
the shifting manifestations of the so-called “progressive” approach to
education that begins with Dewey, Kilpatrick, and Rugg; imbeds itself in the teachers colleges, most especially
Teachers College of Columbia University;
and shoves past the resistance of local opponents until triumphing in
the 1960s. Ravitch details how, despite
quite different emphases the common facet of child-centered education,
vocational education, and social utility education was an anti-knowledge stance
by education professors who found themselves surrounded by field specialists
with whom they could not compete intellectually and therefore asserted the
preeminence of a form of pedagogy that ironically involved very little
teaching.
3) Amanda
Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World
(and How They Got That Way (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2013)
Ripley innovatively follows three foreign
exchange students from the United States to three nations wherein students have
vastly outperformed American students on the Program of International Student
Assessment (PISA). The students hail
from a district in Oklahoma, another in Pennsylvania, and a third from our very
own Minnetonka, Minnesota, who land respectively in Finland, Poland, and South
Korea. These three systems are very
different in detail and range from the emotionally brutal South Korean system; to the spare but substantively successful
Polish system; to the gentle,
emotionally nourishing Finnish system productive of students who have achieved at the
highest international level. What these
systems have in common, though, are features that are missing from the system of
K-12 education in the United States: a
conviction that knowledge matters, that educators should be taken seriously and
paid as professionals, and that objective assessments are vital measures of
academic achievement, typically administered as exit exams at the end of the
elementary, middle/ junior high school, and high school years.
After reading these books, read two others:
Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve (New York:
Doubleday, 1999)
This is the “progressive” response to
Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We
Don’t Have Them, serviceably making the case for projects, demonstrations, portfolios,
child-identified topics for study, teachers as guides to (rather than
transmitters of) knowledge, and the elimination of standardized testing.
Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the
Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (New York: Vintage/ Random House, 2013)
Ravitch in this work denounces the
standards movement that she embraced at the time she wrote Left Back: A Century of Battles
over School Reform, detailing the involvement of private corporations in the
reform movement, the profit motivation behind the design and distribution of standardized
tests, and the corruption of many charter school administrations. Ravitch does a one hundred eighty degree turn
from her earlier work, critical as it was of the anti-knowledge views of the education establishment, in stoutly praising teachers and their unions for
defending public education from these outside attackers.
When you have finished reading these books,
reflect especially on the Hirsch versus Kohn arguments.
Take a stand.
Have a philosophy, a working definition of
an “excellent education.”
Is an excellent education a matter of
excellent teachers imparting a knowledge-intensive curriculum?
Or is excellent education a matter of
students researching topics according to their own driving interests, guided by
classroom facilitators, while developing critical thinking skills as they
prepare for lifelong learning?
Don’t finesse this one. Any thoughtful person knows that critical analysis
of material is important, and true lovers of knowledge will read for
information and pleasure throughout their lives.
But take a clear position: Should knowledge be at the center; or can critical thinking and lifelong learning
proceed in the absence of the acquisition of a systematically acquired broad
and deep knowledge base?
This is the question of vital importance in
designing an educational program of excellence for students of all demographic
descriptors.
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