What Do They Know?
Aeschliman, M.D.
What Do They Know? Reclaiming the K-12 canon from John Dewey. by M.D. Aeschliman U> ¦ <he effect of John Dewey's philosophy on the design of cur-ricular systems was devastating," Richard...
...Kandel, Arthur Bestor, and Russell Kirk, and contemporaries such as William Kirk Kilpatrick, Diane Rav-itch, Charles Glenn, and John Silber, Hirsch is ultimately antagonistic to the seductions of what he calls the ideology of Romanticism, with its flattering and "complacent faith in the benefits of nature" and its hostility to "artificial," traditional literacy, history, rationality, and culture itself...
...In Hofstadter's patient, but very damning, indictment of the experimental anti-intellectualism of Dewey and his disciples, he asserted against them the obvious, Aristotelian truth that some "part of the adult community must have convictions about the curriculum and be willing to organize it accordingly...
...Like Renaissance Latin, its potency is largely rhetorical: Who could be educated without Latin...
...Lewis and the Case Against Scientism...
...Who could be a teacher without being progressive...
...Bagley, I.L...
...Like earlier critics of the theory and practice of educational progressivism, such as Irving Babbitt, W.C...
...Eighty years of progressive experimentation, "policy churn," euphemistic and pretentious rhetorical pyrotechnics, individualized teacher units, and an isolating teacher "autonomy" have left our elementary system with a curricular chaos that ultimately demoralizes teachers and students alike...
...For the fantasy that most Americans believe, and that must be dispelled to make real progress, is that there exists a coherent K-8 curriculum in the United States...
...It is an initiative that is beneficially affecting the lives of thousands of American children...
...Aeschliman U> ¦ <he effect of John Dewey's philosophy on the design of cur-ricular systems was devastating," Richard Hofstadter wrote nearly 50 years ago in Anti-Intellectual-ism in American Life...
...Houghton Mifflin, 192 pp., $22 Knowledge curriculum over the last 15 years...
...Its indispensable testing provisions give us descriptive and diagM.D...
...The disastrous effects of the progressive educational ideology on our K-12 public school system have become even more pervasive and entrenched since Hofs-tadter wrote those words...
...In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D...
...Hirsch Jr...
...Rather, "it is the consequence of the training they have received and of the vague, incoherent curricula they are given to teach," and these factors are themselves the legacy of the progressive tradition of Dewey that has been institutionalized in most teachers' colleges and education schools...
...Aeschliman, professor of education at Boston University, is the author, most recently, of The Restitution of Man: C.S...
...Often labeled a neoconservative by his left-wing critics, Hirsch is, rather, an outstanding example of what the educational policy specialist Charles L. Glenn calls "the radical middle...
...This elementary curriculum is now in use in over 800 elementary schools in the United States and abroad, with increasingly favorable evidence of its capacity to deliver a good basic education to all sorts and conditions of children, to elicit their engagement, and to help teachers coordinate their own efforts within grade levels and in a coherent scope and sequence of courses—a real, specific curriculum—over the elementary grades...
...Hirsch highlights the most important and valuable of these efforts when he commends "the heroes of the systematic phonics movement, who through their efforts have now brought effective teaching" of literacy into many schools...
...His opposition has taken the form not only of a detailed, sustained critique of Romantic-progressive ideas, but of engagement and democratic collaboration in an effective civic initiative that will outlive him...
...Beginning in 1990, three years after the publication of his Cultural Literacy, this is precisely what Hirsch, some University of Virginia colleagues, and "145 people from every region, scholarly discipline, and racial and ethnic group" in the United States did...
...Among these beneficial educational initiatives, arguably the most important has been pioneered by Hirsch himself, both in a series of books over the last 20 years and in his intellectual and inspirational leadership and collaboration in the formation of the Core The Knowledge Deficit Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children by E.D...
...Charter schools, new or revived religious schools, and voucher programs are other local, state, or private initiatives that have begun to bring beneficial change to a public school system that Hirsch describes, without exaggeration, as "the most chaotic and unfair in the world"—and also one of the least effective...
...Despite difficulties, defects, and even dangers, the No Child Left Behind Act is the most important national, top-down, federal educational initiative since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s that destroyed de jure segregation...
...Yet government reports such as A Nation at Risk (1983) and comparative international surveys of American educational incompetence have elicited healthy responses and a growing, bipartisan movement of educational reform at the local, state, and federal levels...
...nostic pictures of state and district educational performance without which real accountability, remediation, and repair are simply impossible...
...He is keen and dogged in resisting what he calls the "premature polarization" of public educational issues along political lines...
...Here he praises Ruth Watten-berg, "the brave editor of the American Educator, published by the American Federation of Teachers," for openly advocating "that the states should agree on specific core content in all subjects in the early grades...
...And Hirsch's emphasis on "specific, cumulative content" in the curriculum is based not on a narrow political agenda but on research into what works in elementary teaching and learning, on what students need to know, and on an unostentatious, steady, sturdy devotion to the promise of American life and institutions, a devotion that can best be described as civic courage...
...Along with the top-down national effort, and earlier and continuing state initiatives, there have been complementary, bottom-up, grassroots educational reform initiatives of great promise...
...So-called low teacher quality," Hirsch judiciously writes, "is not an innate characteristic of American teachers...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 19
