Content Curriculum

Today, Andrew Rotherham over at Eduwonk.com had a little blurb about E.D. Hirsch. In it he linked to three pieces about Hirsch.

Hirsch is an interesting fellow. He is the author of the series of books that many parents know of: What Your _ Grader Needs to Know. Many others, however, know of Hirsch because of his book Cultural Literacy. This book published in 1988 called for the education system to be turned on its head. Instead of teaching processes, Hirsch preaches a need to teach content. This content is the shared content of our society. There are things, he posits, that Americans know because we are Americans.

From an American Educator piece:

Consider the following sentence, which is one that most literate Americans can understand, but most literate British people cannot, even when they have a wide vocabulary and know the conventions of the standard language:

Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run.

Typically, a literate British person would know all the words in the sentence yet wouldn’t comprehend it. (In fairness, most Americans would be equally baffled by a sentence about the sport of cricket.) To understand this sentence about Jones and his sacrifice, you need a wealth of relevant background knowledge that goes beyond vocabulary and syntax—relevant knowledge that is far broader than the words of the sentence.

Teachers know this well. Just the other day, I read Casey at the Bat to four of my reading groups. I prefaced the reading with asking the students not to dwell on an individual word/term they may not know (haughty grandeur, for example), but to connect to the emotion of the poem. This was reached with mixed success.

I learned about 10 years ago that American children, at least those I teach, are generally unfamiliar with the game of baseball, our national pastime. This game that everyone played when I was a boy, is not the “in” thing. Furthermore, it is not understood. I began teaching the game to my class and then soon other teachers asked me to teach their classes. This was back when there was a little time for recess in the schedule. The lack of knowledge seemed complete: the little things were unknown, but so were the big things like the objective of the game.

I wrestled with this and then developed a unit that was tied to the fourth grade mathematics. Learning to score baseball games would provide data for us to practice our statistical analysis. Yet, it would also help teach these nine-year olds the national pastime.

When I left the classroom, recess also went out the window. Now students do not understand expressions like “the Mudville nine” and “the umpire said, Strike Two.” This is the cultural gap that so many speak of. It is not specifically racial nor tied to socio-economic class. There has been a paradigm shift. This is more than the adults not understanding the kids of today. Society has changed.

It is okay that children favor basketball to baseball, video games to watching a pitching duel, X Games to the World Series. Does the preference have to come with ignorance? Usually we herald choices made based on knowledge. Nowadays, we just exclude without consideration.

Hirsch offers content as the solution to that. A society that has a shared culture (and he freely admits that is the wrong term)

It would be much better if I said communication within a speech community requires unspoken shared knowledge, knowledge of conventions, knowledge of shared things

is a society that understands itself. So while baseball may not be the sport du jour, it is still understood as the national pastime.

Of course, this is not the approach public education takes. Public education is all about process and nothing/little about content. The “home rule” crowd shouts whenever someone “decides” what their children should learn or how education will look in their community. Just look at the outcry when it was suggested that some of New Jersey’s 600+ school districts (some without schools) consolidate to save money.

Content
Individual teachers teach content. Look at the standards.

  • STANDARD 3.3 All students will speak in clear, concise, organized language that varies in content and form for different audiences and purposes.
  • STANDARD 6.2 All students will know, understand and appreciate the values and principles of american democracy and the rights, responsibilities, and roles of a citizen in the nation and the world.
  • STANDARD 8.2 All students will develop an understanding of the nature and impact of technology, engineering, technological design, and the designed world as they relate to the individual, society, and the environment.
  • STANDARD 1.1 All students will use aesthetic knowledge in the creation of and in response to dance, music, theater, and visual art.
  • etc.

How are those standards interpreted? Individual teachers interpret them. That produces uneven curricula as Hirsch sees it. A content approach to education removes that unevenness. This is where teacher unions usually squawk. Such content is prescriptive and therefore renders the teacher as nothing more than an automaton. Nothing could be further from the truth. The manner in which content is taught is of little consequence to Hirsch. He agrees that some methods may be better than others, but content can be effectively taught in numerous ways and his program is not prescriptive. Facts do not often get in the way of hysteria.

Critics of Hirsch call him conservative. They state this traditional approach stifles creativity. Hirsch counters the claim.

I’ve never voted Republican. I’ve always voted Democrat. And actually I’ve always thought of myself—though I’ve changed somewhat in this—as a quasi-socialist, and a sense of social justice is my chief animating emotion.

He further states:

Conservative and traditional are terms that are death in the educationist world. And it’s been that way since the early teens of the last century; the dominant view has been against traditionalism and against content. We mustn’t forget that the dominant view in American education is an anti-content view in the sense that it’s against having content that is set out in advance to be delivered to the student. This has become the dominant line in education, so the real reason I’m labeled conservative and traditional in economic spheres is that I’m going against that line in the education sphere. And if that line of view had been correct—if it had been technically right, if it had worked and been consistent with social justice—that would have been fine with me. The problem is it’s technically incorrect as an account of reading and of what we need to do to get students to read proficiently. So the accusation that I’m traditionalist or conservative is irrelevant. The reality of communication is that the unsaid is just as active in communication as the said. So, we have to give these kids the unsaid, that’s the long and short of it, and if you don’t, they won’t be able to communicate and they won’t be able to learn.

Democrats basically didn’t talk to me because they assumed I was a Republican, which is not true. But that, to me, was the most disappointing aspect of the whole adventure—the knee-jerk politicizing of what are, in my view, intellectual and technical questions. Is phonics the right way to teach reading? That’s not a Republican versus Democrat question; it’s a question of how do you learn how to sound out best, and, in this case, how do you overcome the achievement gap between demographic groups?

This culture shift is eroding our society. The common thread no longer exists. And while diversity can be a good thing, it is not the only thing. Diversity alone produces chaos. Without those common threads to unite us, what we end up with is a society that cannot understand itself. Reading the news daily seems to support that claim.

One of the categories on aNobii I created was Classics. Over the years I keep reaching back to read the classics that I missed. I was graduated from a few fine institutions without ever having been required to read Moby Dick. Isn’t this part of our shared culture? When someone states, Call me Ishmael, do we not understand the unstated meaning (here, here, here)? Likewise, if one states, there is no joy in Mudville do we understand the sorrow? Without these common threads, communication is prevented.

Over time, the body of work shared will change. There was a time when most were familiar with 1984, but few read it now. Similarly, Waiting for Godot is something I am pretty certain my parents never read, but it is part of the classical liberal arts education of today.

Not everyone is going to know every minute literary reference no matter how we teach. I welcome building toward that than to continue the revolving “whatever the textbook companies do” approach that seems to drive taxpayer expenditures every five years during “curriculum review”.

At least, Isn’t it pretty to think so?

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