This article, submitted by a curriculum advisor to the TASIS International Schools, explains why some have adopted the Core Knowledge curriculum and describes an opportunity for Core Knowledge teachers who might like to consider teaching in Switzerland. Click here to see the specific job listing.
Core Knowledge in the TASIS Schools:
England, Puerto Rico, Switzerland
TASIS, The American School in Switzerland, is the oldest American boarding-and-day school in Europe, this year celebrating the 50th year of its foundation above Lugano in the Ital ian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. The nonprofit TASIS Foundation also operates TASIS, The American School in England, in Thorpe, Surrey, this year celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. The school in Switzerland has 330 students in grades 7–13 and the school in England has 685 in grades K–12. In 2004 TASIS also opened an elementary day school in Puerto Rico, TASIS Dorado, which already has 240 students.
TASIS, The American School in England, and TASIS Dorado are successfully implementing the Core Knowledge curriculum in the lower grades, and now the parent school in Switzerland has decided to open an elementary day division for grades K–6 using the Core Knowledge curriculum. We have been impressed with the content, coherence, and rigor of the scope and sequence of the Core Knowledge curriculum and also its thoughtful sense of America as part of a world civilization, providing a valuable introduction for our American students to world history and cultures and an equally valuable introduction for our non-American students to important features of American history and government. Core Knowledge has judiciously avoided the extremes of American chauvinism, on the one hand, and superficial, relativistic multiculturalism, on the other hand, as well as the vague curricular arrangements bequeathed to Americans by eighty years of “Progressivism.”
A revealing compliment to the transnational applicability of the Core Knowledge approach has been paid by the prominent British educator Christopher Woodhead, former Chief Inspector of British Schools under both Conservative and Labor Governments. In his best-selling 2002 book Class War: The State of British Education, Woodhead uses as one of his epigraphs the following quotation from E.D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them: “Wherever there is an absence of explicit focus and definite goals — that is, wherever there is an absence of traditional ‘schooling’ — there is also an absence of secure and universal learning.”
Located in beautiful Montagnola, above the Lake of Lugano in the Ital ian lakes region of Switzerland, The American School in Switzerland solicits applications from experienced Core Knowledge teachers who would like to help inaugurate its new elementary school.
M.D. Aeschliman is Professor of Education at Boston University, Professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and Curriculum Advisor on the TASIS Foundation. He has been associated with TASIS since 1971.