OPINION:
THE MAKING OF AMERICANS: DEMOCRACY
AND OUR SCHOOLS
By E.D. Hirsch Jr.
Yale University Press, $25, 288 pages
Reviewed by Phil Brand
Two questions are at the heart of debates about American schooling: What is its purpose? What should students learn to achieve that purpose? In his new book, “The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools,” E.D. Hirsch Jr. sensibly addresses both issues. If only he stopped there.
Now emeritus professor of English at the University of Virginia, Mr. Hirsch is widely known for his best-selling 1987 book, “Cultural Literacy,” which extols the virtues of educating all American students in a core course of studies in civics, history and literature. Mr. Hirsch turned this argument to practical effect by developing the Core Knowledge curriculum (in geography, first-graders ought to know the seven continents, second-graders the 13 Colonies, etc.). Hundreds of schools and thousands of home-schooling families have adopted the Core Knowledge curriculum.
Readers of Mr. Hirsch’s new book will find more than a cogent restatement of the central theme of “Cultural Literacy,” though they will find that. In this work, Mr. Hirsch aims to place the value of his curriculum “within the broader context of the founding ideals of the American experiment.”
As Mr. Hirsch sees it, Americans need a common language and an understanding of a body of common cultural knowledge. Schools provide this common experience. Armed with the right curriculum, they can perpetuate a “strong sense of loyalty to the national community and its civic institutions.” They are in the business of citizen-making. Mr. Hirsch recognizes that schools also must effectively teach the basic elements of education, reversing falling test scores and closing the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children, and he thinks his curriculum is effective there as well.
Why don’t more schools recognize the benefits of Mr. Hirsch’s approach and adopt it? Mr. Hirsch, who calls himself an educational conservative (though he explicitly rejects the label political conservative) blames advocates of progressive education. This large and influential cadre, whose intellectual mentors were trained at a “few model schools in the beginning of the twentieth century,” favors teaching “skills” and derides “mere facts” as dull and oppressive. To clarify where he stands, Mr. Hirsch calls this the “anti-curriculum” movement.
To turn the tide against the anti-curriculum forces, Mr. Hirsch makes an emotive appeal to the early republic’s “common school,” where, as Horace Mann might have put it, “All children attend the same school, with rich and poor studying in the same classrooms.” Today’s schools, Mr. Hirsch continues, ought to have an “explicit, grade-by-grade, core curriculum in grades K-8 occupying at least 50 percent of school time.” Preferably the policy would be nationwide. If this isn’t feasible, changes at the district and state level will do.
Mr. Hirsch isn’t the first to advocate for common, even national, standards and content. President Eisenhower called for “national goals” in education, and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton both threw their weight behind some form of federal standards and testing. President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, putting pressure on states to measure student and school progress. President Obama supports the Common Core State Standards Initiative, a joint effort by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers to develop a common core of state standards in English and math.
Mr. Hirsch is right that students need a curriculum with both content and context. But he oversells both the influence and the reach of the progressive education establishment, the anti-curriculum crowd. Most schools already make efforts to teach a core body of knowledge similar to Mr. Hirsch’s curriculum. When schools don’t, it usually is because parents and community don’t want them to do so. Any shift in curriculum will need to be preceded by a substantial cultural shift.
The bigger problem, of course, is that people don’t agree about what should be taught, or how. Who gets to decide? In America, those decisions have been reached by families and local communities working out satisfactory arrangements. Within broad bounds, local autonomy, independent control and parental choice have created a genuinely diverse school “system” in the United States, with the flexibility and incentives to tailor programs to students’ needs and parents’ desires.
When people disagree, forced uniformity creates lots of losers. A uniform curriculum, taught at a uniform pace, won’t benefit everyone. In his impatience with the current condition of schooling, Mr. Hirsch doesn’t seem to take that into account.
Those who claim to have the answer for what works for all children and families and schools across the country are understandably frustrated by American schools. But frustration is just a word for saying that power is too dispersed in our country for one person to tell everyone else what to do. Mr. Hirsch makes a solid case that Core Knowledge works and will help sustain the nation. He should allow parents and schools to make up their own minds to choose it.
Phil Brand is director of Education Watch at the Capital Research Center.
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