The Core Knowledge Blog

A coherent curriculum trumps school choice in promoting student achievement, says Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr. in an interview with Michael F. Shaughnessy of EdNews.org. The interview was conducted in response to the Sol Stern/school choice dust-up. Hirsch and Shaughnessy delve deeply into curriculum and Hirsch’s concept of “educational incoherence.”

“Children go to school for more than a decade because learning is gradual, and there is a great deal to be learned — especially in matters relating to general knowledge and the build up of vocabulary,” Hirsch observes. “If the specific content for each grade level does not build on what went before and prepare for what will come after, there will be big gaps, and boring repetitions. Those are the conditions that now prevail in charter schools and regular schools. A great deal of school time is being used unproductively, and the hardest hit by this incoherence are disadvantaged children.”

Hirsch also takes issue with those who claim content knowledge must take a back seat to problem solving and critical thinking. “Critical thinking skills cannot be learned in the abstract,” he retorts. “They always pertain to concrete knowledge of subject matter. I review the scientific literature on this in The Schools We Need. Writing skills are obverse of reading skills. They both depend more on knowledge of the unspoken within the language community than on knowledge of the spoken. The main, somewhat revolutionary point I have been making is that teaching content is teaching skills, where as teaching formal processes is, in the end, teaching neither content nor skills. This is not only clear in the scientific literature, it is also clear from comparative results. Students who have had been taught coherent knowledge are more highly skilled than those who have been taught “skills.” See the (unfortunately repressed) book by the late Jeanne Chall: The Academic Achievement Challenge.”