Revisiting Core Knowledge

A few weeks ago I complained about an essay by E.D. Hirsch on the "American speech community," extolling the virtues of his "core knowledge" approach to education. Since then I have corresponded with a friend whose children attend a "core knowledge" elementary school with a very good reputation, and I have read some other things that tout the successes of Hirsch's approach, especially in Massachusetts. And I accept that an approach like Hirsch's focused on having children learn a certain set of facts, can get results. After all, I used to teach Western Civ.

But this article by Sol Stern perfectly illustrates what I was complaining about, the danger that any "core knowledge" curriculum will degenerate into an ideological operation that indoctrinates children rather than expanding their minds:

After Hirsch has memorialized early American education, you can almost hear his remorse as he surveys what passes for higher thinking today in the education schools and teachers’ organizations. In The Making of Americans, Hirsch again shows how consensus science proves that “a higher-order academic skill such as reading comprehension requires prior knowledge of domain-specific content.” But the ed schools’ closed “thoughtworld” (Hirsch’s term) has insulated itself from science. For that matter, future classroom teachers must search far in ed-school syllabi to find a single reference to any of Hirsch’s work—yet required readings by radical education thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers are common. From these texts, prospective teachers will learn that the purpose of schooling in America isn’t to create knowledgeable, civic-minded citizens, loyal to the nation’s democratic institutions, as Jefferson dreamed, but rather to undermine those institutions and turn children into champions of “social justice” as defined by today’s America-hating far Left.

The interweaving of sense and outrageous nonsense in this paragraph takes some unraveling, but I think it is worth doing. The central assertion of the "core knowledge" approach is that children can't just learn, they have to learn something. I believe that this is true, and I regularly use this argument with my children when they ask, "why do I have to learn this?" "You don't," I say, "but to train your mind you have to learn something, and this works as well as anything else." The second part of Hirsch's argument is that it is very hard to understand things about which one knows nothing, no matter how well trained one's brain is. We should, therefore, strive to teach children important facts and expose them to important arguments, so that when they encounter them in civic life they will have some basis for understanding them. I believe this is also true. But the example Sol Stern gives is a test involving a paragraph from a book about the Civil War; not surprisingly, students who had some knowledge of the Civil War scored higher on a "reading comprehension" test based on this paragraph than those who did not. Ok, fine, but why is it important for Americans to understand books about the Civil War? Who decides that Civil War history is important knowledge, but not history of the labor movement or of paranormal belief?

Many of the most hotly debated topics in our civic life concern changing patterns of marriage, child-bearing, and sexuality, but I very much doubt that Sol Stern would endorse of curriculum giving high school students a decent knowledge of how much these things have varied across human history. We debate war and peace all the time, but it seems to me that to judge correctly when war might be necessary we should expose students not just to the glories of D-Day and Bunker Hill, but to My Lai and Wounded Knee.

And what about this business of creating citizens loyal to our institutions? I am myself a great fan of our constitution, but I have a suspicion that what Sol Stern has in mind is history as a grand whitewash. Does it make me an America-hating leftist to think that think that it makes no sense to teach about the Civil Rights movement without pointing out how many people opposed it? To teach the Civil War without mentioning that the secessionists were motivated by their desire to preserve slavery? To discuss the Cold War without sparing a few words for the growth of secret government?

I consider myself a patriotic American, but to me that means recognizing my nation's crimes and working to redress them; it means not just believing that my nation is good, but trying to make it better; it means not believing that our way is the best way, but wanting to make our way the best.