50 Years After Brown v. Board of Education
When I turned fifty my friends sent greeting cards suggestive of mourning, an admonishment that I had seen better days, perhaps my best days, and that all I had left was the shadowy memory of it all. So it has been for a recent celebrant of fifty years, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Throughout this year both print and broadcast reporters, columnists, pundits, and political opportunists have questioned whether the promise was fulfilled or the dream deferred, whether we have diluted education beyond recognition or blazed trails to the post-Brown frontier. The answer to them all is yes. Brown has had its successes and its failures, but the landmark case that brought out the worst in people, along with vicious police dogs and fire hoses, never aimed at righting all racially motivated social ills. The intent of Brown v. Board of Education was to provide the opportunity for all students to achieve parity in the educational realm so that they could later succeed in the economic realm. The justices who wrote the decision sought to ensure that all students would have choices in life — the kind of choices that a solid education provides..
At its inception in 1986, the Core Knowledge Foundation focused on these identical issues of educational success and choice. Recognizing that students who lack education are unlikely to have much choice in their lives, our Founder, E.D. Hirsch, led the development of a structured curriculum that would reinvigorate education and become the prototype for what some educators have since labeled the ideal of a content-rich education. The Core Knowledge idea is, at root, a Jeffersonian idea. In 1813, Jefferson described to Adams his rejected Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. "It established in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic . . . worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts." Although this linkage between educational success, eventual economic equity, and a clear political voice existed long before the country did, it was a connection not embraced by courts prior to 1954. Even today some who concede the importance of education regard high educational standards as “non-progressive,” and a content-rich education as either useless or beyond the intellectual capabilities of average Americans. Given that most developed nations view a rich national curriculum as vital to their survival, it is hard to imagine how anyone acquainted with the creation of this country could hold such opinions — but hold them they do. To under-fund public schools and neglect issues of quality and equity is to undo the critical link between an educated citizenry and a viable democracy. This is a lamentable disservice to the nation. Without educated citizens, who will do the work required of a civilized state, especially of a state based on democracy? Education is, in fact, the main line of defense for civilization itself.
The relationship between freedom and education applies equally to the life of the nation and to the life of the individual. The Core Knowledge Sequence outlines the true elements of fully educating each individual child and reinforces the proper meaning of the phrase "the art of becoming free." It intends to free the individual from constraints imposed unseen by his own culture and circumstances. Also the subjects in the Sequence are rooted in freedom, not privilege, and they are broad, not narrow in educational scope. In 1835, Thomas Macaulay championed this sort of practical simplicity while criticizing the impracticality of British education:
Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world. We ought to procure such books as are likely to give the children a taste for the literature of the West; not books filled with idle distinctions and definitions, which every man who has learned them makes haste to forget. Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme?
Giving girls and boys Robinson Crusoe is precisely what Core Knowledge does, along with equal parts of Conan Doyle, Cervantes, and Swift. But, more importantly, the Foundation also gives students the background knowledge necessary for true comprehension and sound reasoning. This is no trivial thing. These educational rights were denied students at all levels prior to 1954 if they were of a certain hue or economic strata.
An orientation game that is used on college campuses is sometimes called “the privilege walk.” The game is intended to open the eyes of college students to inequalities associated with race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Students line up on a basketball court and respond to a series of statements read by a facilitator. Depending on how the students respond to the statements, they either step forward or backward. For example, the facilitator might say "if you were raised in an area where there was prostitution or drug activity, take one step back," or "If you had to rely on public transportation growing up, take one step back," or “If you have ever had a private tutor, take one step forward.” As students step forward or back, the gaps between them widen. Although one can question the utility of this game as an orientation strategy, it certainly provides a clear illustration of the way differences in cultural and social settings can accentuate inequalities and widen achievement gaps in our society.
What Core Knowledge seeks to do is to narrow those gaps and mitigate those inequalities by providing all students with the kind of enabling knowledge privileged students acquire at home. Every topic studied in a Core Knowledge School represents a step back towards equality. Using the metaphor of the game just described, it is as if the facilitator said, “If you know who Robinson Crusoe was, take one step back towards the center.” “If you know about the Civil War, take one step back towards the center.” “If you know the parts of an atom, take one step back towards the center.”
In this way the Core Knowledge Foundation and all of the teachers who follow the Sequence are furthering the intention of the Brown decision of fifty years ago. Whereas Brown brought students of various skin colors together physically, in the same building, Core Knowledge seeks to bring students of diverse backgrounds together intellectually, into the same world of enabling knowledge.