Tag Archive for ‘cultural literacy’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'cultural literacy'

Spot the Looney

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 6, 2008 in Curriculum and Education Theory. 2 Comments

School children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are “middle-class” creations, and “mere stepping stones to wealth,” says an adviser to the British government (Finder’s fee: Joanne Jacobs).

Lessons will cover a series of personal skills, if Professor John White gets his way, reports the Daily Mail. “Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.”

White, a member of a committee set up to advise Government curriculum authors on changes to secondary schooling for 11 to 14-year-olds, favors a shift away from single-subject teaching to theme or project-based learning. Aims should include fostering a student who “values personal relationships, is a responsible and caring citizen, is entrepreneurial, able to manage risk and committed to sustainable development.”

Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said Professor White’s view was “deeply corrosive”.

“This anti-knowledge, anti-subject ideology is deeply damaging to our education system. It is this sort of thinking that has led to the promotion of discredited reading methods, the erosion of three separate sciences and the decline of mathematics skills. I just find it astonishing that someone with his extreme views has been allowed to advise the Government on education policy.”

Words fail me.

It’s Greek to Me

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 18, 2008 in Core Knowledge. 4 Comments

A paragraph in this morning’s paper about Nelson Figueroa, a pitcher for my beloved New York Mets, perfectly illustrates the link between content knowledge and reading comprehension:

“The 33-year old right-hander has put the journey in journeyman. It’s just 20 miles from his Lincoln High School alma mater to Shea, but his trek from his Brooklyn upbringing to Queens would daunt Odysseus.”

You don’t have to know baseball to make sense of this delightful paragraph. But you need a solid vocabulary (journeyman, trek, daunt), some Greek mythology and even a phrase or two of Latin. Perhaps you think this writer is striving for erudition to impress his educated readers? The passage is in the sports pages of this morning’s New York Post, a NYC tabloid with a decidedly blue-collar readership.

Content With Not Knowing

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 28, 2008 in Curriculum, Podcast and Video and Teaching. 1 Comment

The Common Core survey by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, which shows a troubling lack of historical background knowledge among American 17-year-olds, is enjoying a nice run this week, with stories in USA Today, the New York Times, and lots of broadcast coverage. But alas, the coverage has been all cause and no effect. At best, it irritates people that students are ill-informed. At worst, it’s seen as irrelevant. There’s a lot of “tsk-tsk” reporting. How embarassing! It would be nice to see a few journalists take the next step and look at the impact of a content-free education on outcomes.

The CBS Evening News did a piece on the Common Core report which started out as a standard issue “tsk-tsk” piece. In the words of correspondent Ben Tracy, “A lot of educators say all this talk about the ‘dumbest generation’ is quite stupid…students don’t need to know a litany of dates because they can just Google them.” The problem here is twofold: the continued absurd association of content knowledge with rote memorization of dates (does any school do that?) and the idea that content and critical thinking are mutually exclusive. One high school teacher in the CBS piece says, “I know that this generation is the smartest that we’ve had.” Based on what empirical evidence, exactly?

“Students are expected to analyze concepts rather than memorize dates,” Tracy reports knowingly. I continue to await an example of a concept that can be analyzed in the absence of content knowledge. This kind of thinking by educators (and uncritical reporting by journalists) implies a content-free education that infantilizes the learner. Some years ago, I was marched off to a social studies professional development session. The theme of the session was “No More Trivial Pursuit.” “It doesn’t matter if your students don’t know when the War of 1812 happened,” the staff developer said. “It’s more important to grapple with ‘essential questions’ like ‘Is war ever justifiable?’” Clearly no meaningful response would be possible without a solid grasp of history to bolster one’s point of view.

Linda Bevilacqua, the President of the Core Knowledge Foundation, was a guest on G. Gordon Liddy’s Radio America show yesterday to weigh in on the Common Core study. A caller described how he was taught in school that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King were the same person. It’s not merely embarrassing to not know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. Even those—especially those—who believe that critical thinking is the purpose of school should be alarmed. How much critical thinking about the Reformation and the Civil Rights movement is a student capable of who doesn’t know that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King are two different people separated by 500 years, language, culture and the Atlantic Ocean?

Until and unless we start to make a connection between content knowledge, reading comprehension, and critical thinking, I fear we’re not going to move the level of concern above the level of “tsk-tsk…these kids today!”

Radio America interview, with Linda Bevilacqua [53:31m]: Download (24)

Are You Smarter Than a Boston Latin Student?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 22, 2008 in Curriculum. 1 Comment

On Sunday, the New York Times published a lovely, uplifting piece about how The Great Gatsby still resonates with striving immigrant students at the prestigious Boston Latin School. One recent immigrant featured in the story is “inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for.” Says the student: “My green light is Harvard.”

Seemingly in direct response to the Times own ed blogger Will Okun, who recently questioned the relevance of teaching classic literature to inner city youth, Sara Rimer writes: “Some educators say the best way to engage racially and ethnically diverse students in reading is with books that mirror their lives and culture. But others say that while a variety of literary voices is important, ‘Gatsby’ — still required reading at half the high schools in the country — resonates powerfully among urban adolescents, many of them first- and second-generation immigrants, who are striving to ascend in 21st-century America.”

Fordham’s Gadfly took note of the piece yesterday, hailing, “three cheers for dead, white men,” and remarking with approval how urban adolescents “still identify with the book’s main characters and its themes of aspiration and striving.”

Leave it to a pair of bright high schoolers to rain on the feel-good parade in letters to the Times. Robinson G. Meyer, a junior from Pennington, New Jersey wonders if those Boston Latin strivers, their teachers and the Times have missed the point of the novel. “The Great Gatsby is no Great American Fable of accomplished dreams, it is a cautionary tragedy. Its characters discard their morals to attain pleasure or to quench their ambitions, and, by the novel’s end, they all wind up hollow and disaffected.”

Nathaniel Eiseman, himself a Boston Latin student, pointedly writes, “If F. Scott Fitzgerald knew that today’s high school students would be comparing Jay Gatsby’s elusive green light to admission to Harvard he would be shaking his head in disdain.

“The Great Gatsby’ is not a novel that glorifies the rags-to-riches American dream. It is, in fact, the very opposite, and I find it most surprising that the students and faculty of the Boston Latin School featured in the article could be so misinformed,” says Eiseman. “The light does give Gatsby hope, but between West Egg, where Gatsby is, and East Egg, where his hope is, there lies an insuperable cultural divide. The green light represents all of what we want, but that we never can attain. Jay Gatsby would never reach that light, for the end of his American dream saw him face down in his swimming pool.”

Ouch! Well, thanks for clearing that up, gentlemen. Somewhere today, there are a couple a proud English teachers smiling quietly to themselves.

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.

Multiple Literacies

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 17, 2008 in Education Theory. 0 Comments

Howard Gardner, who has made a lucrative career labeling skills and talents like musical ability and athleticism “intelligences,” is now doing the same for literacy. In an essay in the Washington Post, the Harvard professor is untroubled by dire reports of declining literacy because — what else? — “an ensemble of literacies — will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision.”

Thankfully, Gardner observes that “even in the new digital media, it’s essential to be able to read and write fluently and, if you want to capture people’s attention, to write well.” He doesn’t foresee books disappearing, although the printed word bound up at length between covers may lose its most-favored format status.

“But whatever our digital future brings, we need to overcome the perils of dualistic thinking, the notion that what lies ahead is either a utopia or a dystopia,” Gardner concludes. “If we’re going to make sense of what’s happening with literacy in our culture, we need to be able to triangulate: to bear in mind our needs and desires, the media as they once were and currently are, and the media as they’re continually transforming. It’s not easy to do. But maybe there’s a technology, just waiting to be invented, that will help us acquire this invaluable cognitive power.”

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.”

History Is Bunk

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 5, 2008 in Curriculum, Research and Reports and Teaching. 1 Comment

“Maybe if we start listening, history will stop repeating itself.” — Lily Tomlin

A pair of researchers asked 2000 high school juniors and seniors from across the country to “write down the names of the most famous Americans in history.” The top three most-cited names were Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. “Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women,” reports USA Today. “It suggests that the ‘cultural curriculum’ that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school,” writes Greg Toppo, “increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.” According to USA Today, the researchers involved in the project believe the prominence of black Americans signals “a profound change” in how students view history. “Over the course of about 44 years, we’ve had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story,” says Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, one of the study’s two authors.

A less charitable explanation is that American students have been so deprived of even a rudimentary knowledge of their own history that it doesn’t strike them as odd to name Oprah Winfrey, #7 on the list, as one of the most important people in American history. Other names cited most often by students in the study are Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin and Amelia Earhart. Marilyn Monroe, not incidentally, beat out both Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein.
Continue reading ‘History Is Bunk’

Core Convictions: An interview with E.D. Hirsch

Published by CKF on September 26, 2006 in Curriculum, Education Theory, Educational Policy and Interview. 0 Comments

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., a slightly awkward man with a quick smile, seems an unlikely combatant in the culture wars. Once best known in academic circles as a literary critic, author, English professor, and scholar of hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation of texts, Hirsch was catapulted to the center of the culture debate with the publication of his 1987 book Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin).

Since then, Hirsch has become a lightning rod for criticism from multiculturalists in the academy. Said Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1997: “[Hirsch] has swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education. If this kind of angry, stereotypical thinking is what results from a ‘core knowledge’ orientation, then I want no part of it.” But Hirsch’s supporters, including national organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers, argue that his work espousing a coherent and content-rich curriculum for American students has been an indispensable part of school improvement.

Hirsch is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia and the founder and chairman of the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, an organization dedicated to excellence and fairness in early education. The organization conducts curriculum research, develops materials for parents and teachers and offers professional development to help elementary and middle schools deliver a solid, specific and shared core curriculum that enables children to develop strong foundations of knowledge.

… In May, 2006, Education Sector Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham sat down with Hirsch in Charlottesville, Virginia, to talk about his new book, the links between his work in education and literary scholarship, school choice, the standards movement, and the politics of education.

Read the complete interview