Pencils out, clear your desks. Pop quiz!
What ”inalienable rights” are referred to in the Declaration of Independence? What are the three branches of government? Name a right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Which branch of government has the power to declare war? And finally, what percentage of Americans failed a test of these and other basic civics, history and economic questions?
Seventy-one percent. Yep. More than seven out of ten earned an F.The average score was 49%. USA Today reports that of 164 respondents who say they have held elected office, 44% was average.
Without knowledge of your country’s history, key texts and institutions, you don’t have a frame of reference to judge the politics and policies of today,” Richard Brake, head of the institute’s American Civic Literacy Program, tells the paper.
Take the quiz yourself, or give it to your students right here. And after they’re done and you’re thoroughly depressed, here’s a link on how to become a Core Knowledge school.
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“The common idea that we can teach thinking without a solid foundation of knowledge must be abandoned, notes Lauren Resnick, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, in a new report from Education Sector, Measuring Skills for the 21st Century. “So must the idea that we can teach knowledge without engaging students in thinking. Knowledge and thinking must be intimately joined.” The report is by Ed Sector’s senior policy analyst, Elena Silva, who notes:
The belief that there should be a solid, specific, and shared core curriculum, an idea advanced most notably by the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, founded and led by former professor and literary scholar, E.D. Hirsch Jr., is not at odds with this approach. The Core Knowledge curriculum supports the point that learning factual knowledge and the ability to apply, analyze, and solve problems go hand-in-hand. Teachers using the Core Knowledge approach do not stress rote memorization of facts; they use an array of strategies including workshops, research projects, dramatizations, and collaborative learning groups because they know that students will learn best if they are exposed to both subject knowledge and ways to apply this knowledge at the same time.
The full report is here. Silva is hosting a weeklong online discussion on it with Eva Baker, director of UCLA’s Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation, on Ed Sector’s website here.
There’s a good, in-depth interview on ednews.org with Dr. Matt Davis, the head of the Core Knowledge Reading Program, which will be piloted in New York City this year. He talks about the two major strands of the program: a unique phonics-based “Skills” strand, and a “Listening and Learning” strand that enables very young children to build up vocabulary and background knowledge, through read-alouds of classic literary selections, fairy tales and poems, as well as a non-fiction selelctions in history, science, art, and music.
“We think the two strands together will be a great one-two punch. The Skills Strand should teach the students to decode fluently, while the Listening and Learning strand should help ensure that they have the breadth of background knowledge they will need to understand what the words they decode.”
Davis also makes a good, if little appreciated point about Core Knowledge in general. “Although people have been slow to see this, it is a curriculum designed for social justice,” he notes. ”The well-off kids, the ones whose parents read to them, teach them about numbers and letters, take them to New York and Washington, DC in the summer, visit museums, listen to public radio, and so on – those kids are going to tend to soak up a lot of cultural literacy in the home environment, and they will be able to make sense of a lot of what they read. But other kids are not as fortunate. These children need to get their cultural literacy in the schools. These are the children the Core Knowledge Foundation is looking to help, and they are also the children we are hoping to help with the reading program.”
E.D.Hirsch opposed to a core curriculum? Yes, but in college. In an essay on Forbes.com Hirsch argues against expecting colleges to do work that ought to be done by K-12 schools. ”The underlying problem is not that our professors are feckless or that our undergraduates are brain-dead addicts of iPods and cellphones who lack curiosity and passion for knowledge, he writes. “The real problem is that these young men and women, through no fault of their own, are showing up on campuses undereducated and unprepared for college-level work. They should have received a good general education before they arrived on campus.”
They need remedial courses–including “core curriculum” courses in science, history, the arts and civics–at the time in their lives when they want to launch out on their own, exploring, discovering and pursuing interests at a high level. A required core curriculum in college is not something to be devoutly wished for, but rather a concession to the consequences of a third-rate preparation for first-rate colleges and universities….But though we may currently need to do so, the last thing we should want to do is impose a table d’hôte of required classes on undergraduates who are enjoying their first taste of academic freedom and a chance to chart their own educational destinies.
“There is a real danger that in making colleges the academic safety net of last resort, we’ll absolve the public schools of their obligation to provide students with a sound, well-rounded education,” Hirsch cautions. ”It’s damaging to our students, to our country and to our higher education system, which is the lone bright star in our educational firmament. Everyone loses.”
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