Archive for the 'Core Knowledge' Category

Critical Thinking Not Possible Without Content Knowledge

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 11, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Review. 2 Comments

Here’s a plan for eliminating the national debt: Charge a tax of one dollar on anyone who says ”teaching critical thinking skills” should be the goal of schools.  One person less likely to idly toss around the phrase in the future is none other than The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews, arguably our most influential education writer.  He concedes today that critical thinking programs “don’t work very well, except as a measure of the gullibility of even smart educators.”  How did he come to see the light?

A remarkable article by Daniel T. Willingham, the University of Virginia cognitive scientist outlines the reasons. Critical thinking, he explains in a summer 2007 American Educator article, overlooked until now by me, is not a skill like riding a bike or diagramming a sentence that, once learned, can be applied in many situations. Instead, as your most-hated high school teacher often told you, you have to buckle down and learn the content of a subject–facts, concepts and trends–before the maxims of critical thinking taught in these feverishly-marketed courses will do you much good.

“The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge),” Willingham says. “Thus, if you remind a student to ‘look at an issue from multiple perspectives’ often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives.”

Willingham’s work builds the strongest case I know for why narrowing the curriculum to load up on reading and math at the expense of other subjects is ultimately self-defeating.  If we want kids to be critical thinkers, they need the broadest possible education.  Describing Willingham’s upcoming book, Why Don’t Students Like School? — A cognitive scientist answers questions about how your mind works and what it means for the classroom,  Mathews says “Willingham’s own work is, in my view, a triumph of critical thinking because he knows his content so well….We need to do our homework and remember that no matter how brilliant we think we are, we can be useful critics only after we master the facts.”

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The Innumeracy of Intellectuals

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 6, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Higher Education. 1 Comment

Inside Higher Ed“I know nothing about art or music,” writes Chad Orzel at Inside Higher Ed. “I don’t know Beethoven from Bach, Renaissance from Romantics. I’m not even sure those are both art terms.” Orzel, is not a high school student, or even a middle school student. He’s a professor of physics at Union College.

Given my line of work, this doesn’t rise to the level of a liability, but it’s awkward. I’m a professor at a liberal arts college, putting me solidly in the “Intellectual” class, and there’s a background assumption that anyone with as much education as I have will know something about history and philosophy and literature and art and classical music….On those occasions when I’m forced to admit my ignorance (or, worse yet, the fact that I don’t even like classical music), my colleagues tend to look a little sideways at me, and I can feel myself drop slightly in their estimation. Not knowing anything about those subjects makes me less of an Intellectual to most people in the academy.

Alas, it’s a one-way street. Intellectuals in the humanities don’t look askance at those who confess an ignorance of math or science. In fact, it’s something of a badge of honor. “Students seeking to avoid math or science classes can expect to get a sympathetic hearing from much of the academy,” Orzel writes, “where the grousing of physics majors is written off as whining by nerds who badly need to expand their narrow minds.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today’s society. And it starts in the academy — somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of math and science. If I admit an ignorance of art or music, I get sideways looks, but if I argue for taking a stronger line on math and science requirements, I’m being unreasonable. The arts are essential, but Math Is Hard, and I just need to accept that not everybody can handle it.

“It simply should not be acceptable for people who are ignorant of math and science to consider themselves Intellectuals,” Orzel concludes. “Somehow, we need to move away from where we are and toward a place where confusing Darwin with Dawkins or Feynman with Faraday carries the same intellectual stigma as confusing Bach with Beethoven or Rembrandt with Reubens.”

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A Progressive Educator Learns to Love Core Knowledge

Published by John Thompson on August 5, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Essay and Teaching. 0 Comments

Long before I began teaching, I carried on a silent debate with Al Shanker and his “Where We Stand” column. I seethed when he recounted the common question—”is it on the test?”—and then dignified the mindset that produced such a juvenile question. Like so many liberals, my educational philosophy was a hybrid between Dewey’s (and the 1960s’) progressivism and the heroic fantasy created by Hollywood of the charismatic teacher who transforms students by the power of personality and hope. Shanker, however, did convince me that standards were politically necessary and maybe they were educationally valid.

I read Hirsch with the wisdom of half of a decade in the classroom, and I rejected his approach completely… Hirsch sounded too much like a fact-driven traditionalist. He sounded too much like a testing advocate.

My rookie year in an alternative school for felons was a perfect proving ground for my ideals. Our two teachers and our two social workers functioned interchangeably like linebackers in the old “3-4-4″ defense. Class and counseling were recognizably different at times, but mostly we worked seamlessly as student-centered teams. Anytime I wanted adjust my lesson plans, I would dismiss our Social Studies class, and notify the kids that we are now in Science class. And the students were free to do the same. When an emotionally disturbed student barged into class one morning in a particularly agitated state, he directed me, “John, teach me something.” “OK, I replied, today we are studying Psychology,” and I provided a simplified version of autonomic functioning, habit, and choice. The student then scribbled a diary of the day’s thoughts, categorizing them as “auto” and “congo,” which were his spellings of automatic and conscious, and habit. It would have made a great scene on The Wire.

Even as I congratulated myself for my innovative lessons, I started to recognize the impossibility of making the “bricks” of great ideas without the “straw” of information. When I moved to a regular high school, I saw that most of my students had almost no recall from their previous classes. An A.P. student answered that Vietnam was the war we won after dropping the atomic bomb. And it got worse from there.

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A Second Act In American Life

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 4, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Higher Education. 0 Comments

“The Dumbest Generation” author Mark Bauerlein has an interesting piece about Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Bauerlein has a good grasp of his work on cultural literacy and curriculum, but his piece is about Hirsch’s career before Core Knowledge–work that set Hirsch “at the forefront of literary study.”

I don’t know of any publication in which Hirsch explains why he stopped doing critical theory; or, indeed, why he exited the whole high-powered/grad school/research humanities world. We may assume, though, that Hirsch simply drew a sweeping conclusion over the course of the 1970s: Literary theory and literary study were drifting ever farther from the pressing intellectual needs of 19-year-olds. Students were coming into college with cultural-literacy deficits, and humanities professors weren’t responding. All the incentives of professional success steered professors away from the freshman classroom, not to mention from the pre-college years, and glamour of a symposium in which theory stars hashed out Derrida’s latest turned a composition class into sheer drudgery.  That didn’t change the fact that the help students needed came properly in elementary and middle school, and Hirsch directed his attention accordingly. His example is worth remembering.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was clearly wrong.

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Whaddya Know?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 9, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 0 Comments

Can you name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? The Speaker of the House? How much of the oil consumed in the U.S. is imported from other countries? What’s the total U.S. national debt? Which country emits the most carbon dioxide? What’s the minimum amount of exercise a person needs each day?

These and other questions are part of a Newsweek poll as the magazine looks at “Global Literacy 2008.” It’s easy to deride some of the questions (What’s the tallest building in the U.S.) as mere trivia. On the other hand, content knowledge will remain stubbornly useful when engaging in critical thinking and problem solving in the realm of politics, the economy, health care, the environment, et al.

Newsweek’s quiz is here.

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Fourth of July Fieldwork

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 3, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 3 Comments

When you’re at your holiday barbecues, ballgames and fireworks this weekend, ask the children you meet the following questions:

  • What country did America win its Independence from?
  • How did America become independent?
  • Why did Americans want to be independent?

Probe for understanding, not just “mere facts.” Feel free to summarize or post the responses here. I’m curious to get a snapshot about what our kids know about this most rudimentary piece of our nation’s history.

Update: Joanne Jacobs highlights a survey from the Bradley Foundation that “questions whether Americans are learning about the ideas that hold us together as a nation.”

A rich and balanced history best prepares young people for informed democratic participation.  There are dangers to certain kinds of patriotism, but there are equal dangers to no patriotism at all. There is a middle ground, “a patriotism of principles,” to use the language of the American Federation of Teachers, based on a “common core of history [that] binds us together.” Americans should embrace an informed patriotism that expresses our devotion to our country and our bond with our fellow citizens.

Enjoy the holiday.

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The View From 1869

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 30, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 2 Comments

While at the Grand Canyon last week, I spent time reading the journals of the members of the 1869 Powell expedition down the Colorado River. It’s impossible not to be struck by the everyday erudition of Americans of even modest educational attainment of earlier times.

George Bradley described how he “would be willing to explore the River Styx” if it meant getting out of the Army. Later he described a particularly rough night on the river. “We need only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton’s most vivid conceptions of Hell,” he wrote.

It’s hard to imagine such allusions finding their way into the diaries of even the best educated contemporary Americans, let alone a sixth-grade dropout like Bradley. Spend some time reading the letters of ordinary Americans of the 19th century and you immediately grasp how much poorer our discourse is for a lack of a common set of references. It’s lack makes the lowest common denominator not merely lamentable, but necessary for us simply to understand each other.

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The Sharpton-Klein Education Reform Agenda

Published by Diane Ravitch on June 23, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

I have been a supporter of Core Knowledge from its beginning. Indeed, as Don Hirsch will testify, I urged him to write the book that eventually became Cultural Literacy, after I heard him speak iat a conference in 1983. Like Don, I believe that children need a firm command of not just vocabulary and skills, but background knowledge that will help them understand new words and new ideas.

Over the years, I have come to understand that children need a strong, rich, coherent curriculum, filled with the amazing ideas, experiences, discoveries and people that awaken children’s passion to learn and keep on learning.

Will America’s achievement gap really be eliminated by testing kids more?

But I have discovered something else. It is very difficult for children to become deeply engaged in learning when they come to school hungry; when their eyesight is so poor that they can’t read; when their hearing is impaired but no one knows it; when their family moves from place to place because they don’t have a decent home; and when their family income is so uncertain that their home is filled with anxiety about meeting basic needs.

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Required Reading

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 26, 2008 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Educational Policy, Homeschooling and Teaching. 0 Comments

Our weekly roundup of the week’s most important news, information and blog posts about curriculum, teaching, education policy and other items of interest to the Core Knowledge community.

Core Knowledge

Learning Essentials
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week 
Core Knowledge prizes content across the disciplines, bucking a trend toward a narrower, skills-based approach to learning.

Best of the Blogs

 Revisiting AERA, Bill Ayers, the Weather Underground and Public Education at Matthew K. Tabor
Just what the title says. The definitive post.

 Redefining intelligence at Joanne Jacobs
Yale psychologists are trying to develop new tests of intelligence that measure “practical, creative, and analytical skills.” One goal is to identify more black and Hispanic children as “gifted.”

Could a Parrot Pass the New York State ELA Exam? at Eduwonkette
What’s worse, the question students are asked to write about? Or the anchor paper?

Beating My Drum: Education, Economics, and Entitlement at The Gonzo Diner
America is not only experiencing an economic crisis, it is experiencing an education crisis, and there are more connections between the two than many think.

Compromised Competitiveness at The BoBo Files
The replacements for America’s retiring work force are less knowledgeable and less educated, less skilled and demotivated, disinclined to learn and prone to shortcuts, weak in science and math, and possess poor reading proficiency.

Teacher Voice From Washington…And, Is The AFT Going All Sherman Over Michelle Rhee at Eduwonk
What’s happening inside the teacher’s union?

Teaching and Curriculum

No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says
By Valerie Strauss, Washington Post
A new study on gender equity in education concludes that a “boys crisis” in U.S. schools is a myth and that both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade.

Great education debate: Reforming the grade system
By Steve Friess, USA TODAY
A handful of schools nationwide have set off an emotional academic debate by giving minimum scores of 50 to students who fail.

Bill to protect PE, arts classes vetoed
By Matthew Benson, The Arizona Republic
Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoes a measure intended to protect gym classes and the teaching of music and the arts from K-12 budget cuts.

Georgia Throws Out State Test Results
By Laura Diamond, Alan Judd and Heather Vogell, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The state throws out the results of two social studies tests and education advocates question the validity of eighth-graders’ abysmal math scores. 

Sent home: The suspension gap
By James Walsh, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Black students are far more likely to be suspended from school than are their white classmates — and Minnesota’s disparity in suspensions is twice the national average. Why? What are the consequences? 

Education Policy

States Starting Slowly on NCLB Proficiency Goals to Face Crunch, Report Says
By Christina A. Samuels, Education Week
States that established modest goals for themselves in the early days of the No Child Left Behind Act may need to make nearly impossible improvements in student performance to reach the law’s target of 100 percent proficiency by the 2013-14 school year.

Fixing the Flaw in the ‘Growth Model’ And Helping Schools, States, and NCLB in the Process
By David P. Sokola, Howard M. Weinberg, Robert J. Andrzejewski, & Nancy A. Doorey, Education Week
Why not craft the reauthorized NCLB to foster innovation and improvement in the field of assessment, rather than to prevent it?

Homeschooling and Parenting

Home-schoolers, unite and take over
By Melanie Wilson Daniel, Athens Banner-Herald
Home-schoolers solidarity comes from awareness that they’re rebels, outlaws - and that there are those out there who’d like to make them criminals.

Brown, Schwarzenegger rally behind homeschoolers
by Chris Rizo, Legal Newsline
California Attorney General Jerry Brown is urging a state appeals court to reconsider a ruling that parents must hold teaching credentials to homeschool their children.

Et Alia

Education drives democracy
By Diane Cameron, The Albany Times Union
Jefferson and the other founders valued education not so that the United States would someday lead the world’s economy, but to ensure longevity for the form of government they were birthing.

Study probes RFID use in schools
By Dennis Carter, eSchool News
Radio-frequency tracking technology would be ideal for equipment but could violate privacy laws if applied to people, researchers say.

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Way Smarter Than a 5th Grader

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 23, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 0 Comments

Pop Quiz (answers below):

  1. What is the westernmost Asian national capital?
  2. In which country is Makossa is a popular type of music?
  3. Where is Tillya Tepe?

If you don’t know, then you too would have lost the National Geographic Bee. The winner, 11-year-old Akshay Rajagopal from Lincoln, Nebraska won the contest by knowing that Cochabamba is the third-largest conurbation in Bolivia.

A conurbation, needless to say, is an extensive urban area resulting from the expansion of several cities or towns so that they coalesce but usually retain their separate identities. But you knew that.

There’s a terrific, if humbling, ten-question daily Geo Bee online. Start boning up for next year.

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