Category Archive for ‘Review’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Archive for the 'Review' Category

Dr. Seuss: Stop Making Movies About My Books

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 8, 2008 in Humor and Review. 0 Comments

Courtesy of the wags at The Onion, a plea in verse from the late Theodor Geisel, beloved by millions (but not by Hollywood) as Dr. Seuss:

Did you learn all but squat from The Cat In The Hat?
Please tell me you fired the p—- who made that.
I would have stopped writing, maybe sold Goodyear tires.
If I knew one dark day I’d costar with Mike Myers.

And Oh!
Oh, dear! Oh!
My poor Grinch, what they’ve done!
They crammed in live-action and snuffed out all the fun!

It’s icky, it’s tacky, it’s awkward, it’s wrong.
The Whos look like ferrets, it’s an hour too long.
What a rotten idea to spend millions destroying
This masterful tale kids spent decades enjoying!

There’s more, but this is a family blog.

The High Cost of Not Knowing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 20, 2008 in Curriculum and Review. 0 Comments

It’s 1987 all over again! Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason has come out of nowhere to become a top ten bestseller on Amazon. Her message, that there are deadly and destructive consequences to ignorance, has clearly struck a chord.

In an interview with PBS lion Bill Moyers, Jacoby is unsparing in her criticism of America’s schools. “When one out of every five Americans still believes that the sun revolves around the earth [there's a problem]….You shouldn’t have to be an intellectual or a college graduate to know that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth,” she tells Moyers.

Perhaps Jacoby hasn’t heard that content knowledge is mere data, and that critical thinking and problem solving are How We Learn Now. Jacoby points out what ought to be obvious—you can’t divorce content knowledge from understanding and critical thinking. “People getting out of high school should know how many Supreme Court justices there are. Most Americans don’t. Well, now this feeds back into our current political process,” says Jacoby. “If you don’t know that there are nine judges then you don’t know that George W. Bush’s last two judicial appointments, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, have put us one vote away from having a Supreme Court which really believes that religion should have a much more active role in public life, that’s likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you have to know there are nine justices before you know that we’re up to a five out of nine sure votes.”

She also sounds a theme that will ring familiar to Core Knowledge adherents. “I think that schools over the last 40 years instead of just adding things, for example—African-American history, women’s history, these are all great additions, and necessary—they really have placed less emphasis on the overall culture– cultural things that everybody should know,” says Jacoby.

Say It Loud! I’m Dumb and I’m Proud

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 14, 2008 in Core Knowledge and Review. 0 Comments

A headline in the the New York Times today asks “Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?”

The piece that follows jumps off of Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason, which notes a “generalized hostility to knowledge.” Complaining about how uneducated we are is a hardy perennial, but according to Jacoby “something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that ‘too much learning can be a dangerous thing’) and anti-rationalism (’the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion’) have fused in a particularly insidious way.”

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she tells the Times, but they also don’t think it matters.

The Times illustrates this phenomenon with a reference to this cringe-inducing YouTube video that shows Kellie Pickler of American Idol fame on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” struggling with the question “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” She gets the correct answer from her 5th grade partner (the Republic is saved!), but not before saying on national TV before millions, “I thought Europe was a country.”

Giving Kozol His Due

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 8, 2008 in Educational Policy, Opinion and Review. 0 Comments

Unusually good, nuanced and ultimately fair dissection of Jonathan Kozol’s work by The Quick and the Ed’s Kevin Carey today. A stark contrast to what Carey rightly describes as the “standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself.”

Carey’s main point is a good one. “In in his righteous anger and dark pessimism, [Kozol] has become blind to all evidence of progress and possibility with our public schools.” Having read a lot of Kozol and worked for years in precisely the neighborhood he chronicles, I’m inclined to agree with Carey. That said, there is an undeniable tendency on the part of both teachers and reformers to congratulate themselves for their effort and incremental progress. The needle is moving, but barely. Anger is still the right reaction. There’s a hell of a lot more to be unhappy about than not.

E.D. Hirsch Comments on Tough Liberal

Published by CKF on September 20, 2007 in Review. 0 Comments

Education Sector Author Talk, September 20, 2007

Rick Kahlenberg has written a masterful biography of Al Shanker — deeply researched, thoughtful, eloquent — and crystal clear without in any way oversimplifying the complex period that Al and the rest of us have lived through. After reading Rick’s book, I understand better many aspects of the things that I’ve witnessed in education reform.

… I like Rick Kahlenberg’s title, Tough Liberal. It’s exactly right. William James once drew a contrast between tough-minded and tender-minded people. Tender-minded liberals are fond of pious slogans while tough liberals are pragmatists who are indifferent to slogans, and insist on getting the job done for the sake of social justice and the good of the community as a whole, no matter what bad names one might be called in doing so.

Read the complete article

The Knowledge Deficit, reviewed by Andrew Rotherham

Published by CKF on April 3, 2007 in Education Theory and Review. 0 Comments

Hirsch’s basic premise, laid out most clearly in his most recent book The Knowledge Deficit, is so straightforward that observers outside of education are often surprised at the uproar he sparks. Most school curricula are, according to Hirsch, vacuous and disjointed. Hirsch believes that knowledge acquisition is a deliberate process, requiring curriculum that emphasizes content rather than process and it must be organized around systemic rather than random acquisition of knowledge. Obvious? Well, this is a fundamental dispute in education circles because, as Hirsch discusses in Knowledge Deficit, much of American educational theory is predicated on 19th-century romantic ideas that celebrate learning and the acquisition of knowledge as a natural process. Where reading is concerned, Hirsch is especially vehement that lack of attention to curriculum is hamstringing efforts to improve literacy.