Sep 26, 2018

Three Books That Every Thoughtful Educator Should Read--- and Two Others to Be Read for Their Counter-Positions


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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