Jeremiah Reedy is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Macalester College. One of the founders of the New Spirit School in Frogtown, he is currently working with a group to start a new charter school to be known as the Seven Hills Classical Academy.

Core Knowledge and the Coming Paradigm Shift

by Jeremiah Reedy

Progressive education (also called by some "romantic modernism") is the dominant philosophy of the education establishment that has controlled U.S. public schools for nearly 100 years. Progressive education is associated with the names of John Dewey (1859–1952) and William H. Kilpatrick (1871–1965), but recent research has shown that many of their ideas came from Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

In The Promise and Failure of Progressive Education, Norman Norris, who identifies himself as a progressivist, lists six "common components" of progressive education: 1) It rejects "traditional or classical" content, methodology and goals (e.g. progressivists deny the centrality of the trivium — grammar, logic, and rhetoric); 2) Progressive education claims to be "child-centered"; 3) It focuses on "the development of generic problem-solving 'life skills'" and denies the need for a common body of content ([F]actual information" is "superfluous and redundant"); 4) Progressivists favor what they consider the natural and oppose the artificial, the theoretical, and the academic (for example, presenting subjects such as history and civics separately is unnatural — hence "social studies" and, presumably, "integrated math"); 5) Progressive educationists reject the transmission of culture (or to look at it in another way, the initiation of the young into the cultural tradition) as a goal of education. They see instead schools as the "primary tool for social change;" 6) According to progressivists, education should be as democratic in "design and delivery" as possible.

Not mentioned by Norris are a number of other well-known characteristics of progressive education: There is an antipathy to hard work, drilling, and memorization (of, e.g., the multiplication tables, rules of grammar, and poetry). There is also opposition to testing, ranking, and competition. Professor Hirsch has accused educationists of having too much faith in their own "empirical" studies and of ignoring the results of research done by mainstream psychologists, linguists, historians, philosophers, and others.

The history of public education in the U.S., since it was taken over by progressivists, is a history of fads and alleged panaceas. Recent fads that come to mind include: the new math, whole language, project learning, discovery learning, multiple intelligences, cooperative learning, the self esteem movement, and brain periodization. In fact, some of these, such as whole language and project learning, are decades old but have been recently refurbished and recycled.

As this list suggests, nothing seems to work, and I argue that nothing will work until progressive education is replaced by a philosophy based on a more realistic understanding of human nature. The fact is that progressivists have failed and are failing America. Their approach to education is especially ineffective for children from disadvantaged backgrounds — hence the "achievement gap." Such students need what is called "direct instruction." Marva Collins, who had inner city students in Chicago reading Homer, the Bible, Shakespeare, DuBois and other classics, "traced the failure of the modern school to the theory of education that supported it," and she called for a new philosophy of education. Everyone who is concerned about public education should be praying for a paradigm shift.

Fortunately a "new" paradigm has appeared on the horizon. It is called "classical education." (See Classical Education, the Movement that is Sweeping America, by Gene Veith and Andrew Kern. See also The Well Trained Mind, A Guide to Classical Education at Home, by Jessie Wise and Susan Bauer.) Mortimer Adler's Paideia Program, the Core Knowledge curriculum, Marva Collins' approach, and that of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools and numerous parochial schools are all examples of classical education. Of these, the Core Knowledge curriculum is the best thought out and will in the long run produce the greatest improvements in student achievement in my humble opinion.

Let me emphasize in closing that classical education is not just the latest theory du jour. It is a return to what worked for millennia before the advent of progressive education with its naïve and romantic notions about children.