At over eighty years of age, reading the interesting and varied commentaries on Diane Ravitch’s recent spectacularly successful book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, I took to wondering what had come before the onset of so-called progressivism began to dominate the teaching practices of the nation’s public schools. Roughly speaking, taking hold in the 1950s and ‘60s, how had these since compared to those of the ‘30s and then the wartime ‘40s when I was in school?
I went to a Long Island K-8 private school with every possible advantage. The curriculum was specific, systematic, and substantive, taught by agreeable, college-educated, effective teachers. I remember learning how to read, starting in the earliest grade, sounding out the syllables, and how to write, on paper lined as a guide to the proper size of letters. As for substance, I remember best, in perhaps 3rd grade, spending what seemed like the whole year, but certainly a semester, on learning the history and geography of New York State, including the construction of the Erie Canal and its significance to the state’s development and history, lodged in my memory to this day. Math was divided into two distinct parts – ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, abstract being the times tables and addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and concrete being ‘word problems,’ using the mechanics of ‘abstract’ to find ‘concrete’ answers. English was also divided into two segments, grammar and literature, taught separately, but similarly related.
As for tests, there certainly wasn’t any anxious test-preparation; in fact we never knew when they were coming. From time to time we would come to school as usual, but instead of the usual routine, tests from some source outside the school were distributed, without time for anxiety we took them, and the results were reported to our parents. As for in-house grades, at intervals those with averages at the top of the class were rewarded by getting to carry the national and school flags at weekly whole school assemblies.
My subsequent high school years were passed at a top-of-the-line girls’ private high school in Boston, with a faculty and curriculum so effective that the first year at Radcliffe, then the pre-co-ed incarnation of Harvard for women, seemed a let-down. Meanwhile the parents of my later-to-become lifelong best friend, immigrants from eastern Europe, landed penniless at Ellis Island and were still struggling during her early childhood in the Bronx. There she went to the nearest public school, receiving basically the same substantive K-8 education that I did, followed by four years at a very high-quality all-girls public high school. After that came NYU and Harvard Law School, where she and I met in the second class to admit women. Her two brothers both became doctors and she a much honored supervising Legal Aid attorney.
During roughly the same span of years I spent summers in New Hampshire where I came to know the local 4-H Club agent who, though I didn’t know it at the time, was also a public school teacher. A few years ago I had the good fortune to meet her again, by then aged and long past retirement but with clear memories, and I asked her about her training to be a teacher. She told me that she had attended the so-called “normal school” in the nearby small city of Keene, since evolved into what is now Keene State College, which includes an education school, successor of the normal school. Her training, she said, included practical matters such as classroom management, but most of it was like high school all over again, courses in English, both grammar and literature, history, geography, science, etc. etc., only much more rigorous and detailed than in high school, to be taught to the children at a level suitable to each grade.
She retired just as our public schools were entering the new era in which such prescribed subject matter was denigrated as “mere facts,” teachers were trained to focus on what children seemed to want to learn, and to act accordingly. The results we see before us.
Is such reminiscing just backward-looking? I think not. Surely the technology of the present offers unprecedented opportunities to convey essential substantive knowledge in irresistibly effective new ways. Gertrude Stein, hardly a stodgy traditionalist, delighted in being taught English grammar by diagramming sentences, resulting in thorough understanding of the structure of the language, essential, as she saw it, to maximum creativity in using it. Yet such practices were banished by progressivism, as discouraging to children’s imaginations, written and spoken English usage suffering consequent mortal damage. Only now is it dawning on a few pioneers that interactive computer programs, diagramming correct and expressive speech, illustrating the roles of nouns, verbs, etc., and perhaps featuring notable and admired public figures as exemplars, may offer a way to re-introduce the potency of correctly spoken and written English language to the young.
What puzzles me most, perhaps, is that Arne Duncan and the new education establishment in Washington appear not to understand, not just the implications of examples from the past as possible guides to current school reform, but that of existing schools, like those that have thus far educated the Obama children. Not to widely replicate such schools, which would be impossible, but at least to absorb the thinking behind them.
The famously progressive University of Chicago Lab school where the Obama girls started out describes itself as ‘unregimented but demanding,’ focused ‘on teaching students to analyze and critically solve problems, rather than simply absorb facts,’ where they ‘learn to be independent and responsible in their studies’ … but where students also ‘pursue a rigorous curriculum in reading, writing, mathematics, and science’ and ‘begin in the early grades to study foreign languages, music and the arts … .’ Similarly, Sidwell Friends in D.C. where they now go offers an equally specific curriculum: “English instruction includes grammar, vocabulary, composition, reading, and literature. …Mathematics: In fifth and sixth grade, students work with fractions, decimals, percents, and integers …Social studies: Fifth graders study the Middle Ages around the world … Science: The science program is organized around themes drawn from the scientific disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physical science; Modern and Classical Language: Fifth and Sixth graders take Spanish. Seventh and eighth graders take French, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese or Latin … .”
Shouldn’t our public school leadership nationwide at least aspire to such a feast?
Louisa C. Spencer is a retired environmental attorney, a longtime supporter of curriculum reform, and a retired Trustee of the Core Knowledge Foundation. She also served for several years as a volunteer teachers’ aide in low-income New York City elementary schools.
Great essay; thank you.
I would like to point out that in terms of Sidwell Friends, not all is as it seems. The math instruction at that school in the lower grades is questionable.
See http://www.ednews.org/articles/obama-sidwell-friends-and-the-achievement-gap.html for more info on this.
Comment by Barry Garelick — August 2, 2010 @ 10:06 am
This wonderful essay makes me feel very sentimental — the same feeling I get re-reading Horace Mann’s “On the Art of Teaching” each year. Nonetheless, there is a little voice in the back of my head telling me to be careful.
The problem with any set curriculum, beyond the basics in early elementary school, is that today’s students need to know how to “re-invent” themselves to adapt to many changing jobs. Many appear to have a very different world view that blurs the line between personal and professional lives compared to those of us over 40.
Yes, students need core skills. They are communication, collaboration and creativity. They do not need to know the Middle Ages around the world, just why the era was important. They can get details in seconds any time, any where and in many formats.
I am currently struggling with the notion of a set curriculum after years of seeing CK as a wonderfully deep model that is more balanced than what most schools in my area are using. To engage students we need to meet them halfway, using their interests with our educational goals. Automated curriculum software is in development, so the conversation about what EVERYONE should know is once again becoming important.
Comment by Don Brown, D.Ed. — August 2, 2010 @ 11:51 am
As I approach retirement after several decades in the pubic school system (and “teaching teachers” as an adjunct at a local college), I am increasingly aware of a broad difference in background and expectation among newer teachers who have very little knowledge of true “curriculum” as differentiated from “programs.” They are evaluated based on their delivery of the latest program, rather than on their ability to lead their students along the path of learning. Most of my peers – and I -entered the profession because we were inspired by the teachers who introduced us to the exhilaration of knowledge. I regret that many newer colleagues do not come to the profession with similar knowledge or excitement.
Comment by LynDee — August 2, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
Thank you for a wonderful essay. This is my favorite part:
“Gertrude Stein, hardly a stodgy traditionalist, delighted in being taught English grammar by diagramming sentences, resulting in thorough understanding of the structure of the language, essential, as she saw it, to maximum creativity in using it. Yet such practices were banished by progressivism, as discouraging to children’s imaginations, written and spoken English usage suffering consequent mortal damage.”
I, too, went to a wonderful girls’ school in Boston, and we learned our grammar (English and other languages) to the bones, with the effect that we sensed the structures of language, the weight of different parts of a sentence, the subtle differences of emphasis when you rearranged the phrases. We also studied literature–works that we read closely and discussed and that I have reread many times since.
We were responsible for learning the material. The school did not try to control “outcomes.” The outcomes were quite good, but no one was hovering over us making sure we used the right strategies, making us complete graphic organizers, or dangling one of our “multiple intelligences” in our face. Certain strategies were indeed emphasized: we learned to underline in books and make notes in the margins; to write one-sentence thesis statements for things we wrote and read; to make good outlines, and more. But this was all in the context of challenging and interesting literature, language, history, math, science, and arts.
Today, with all the obsession over outcomes, there is a tendency to equate the curriculum with the thought process. A set curriculum, it is feared, will set the students’ minds. Why should that be? Why shouldn’t a student play with the “set” works and ideas learned in class? Why shouldn’t he or she go to the library to learn more, or search a topic of interest on the internet? Why does anyone assume that a specific body of knowledge will be the sum total of what students know?
We were expected to be inquisitive. We were expected to figure out how to learn things. The class time was devoted to the subject in all its glory. Some of that did consist of skills, but even those were taught in depth. We were expected to listen to the teacher (who was usually very interesting to listen to). And we had class discussions and time for questions.
One might argue that underprivileged children simply don’t know how to learn things on their own or pursue interests independently, or they don’t have the resources at home or in the neighborhood. True or not true, the solution is not to have students “reinvent” the subject in the classroom. How can you reinvent something you don’t know in the first place? The classroom should still be the place for challenging, lasting, thought-provoking material. Once students have things to think about and things to master, they will find ways to do just that.
Comment by Diana Senechal — August 2, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
Isn’t it cool how Don Brown’s core skills are so alliterative?
Comment by Student of History — August 2, 2010 @ 4:07 pm
I would like to add what a significant role that I believe educational psychology, as it’s currently practiced, plays in all this. It seems to me that the moment the goal of public schools became not academic achievement but “cognition,” the societal value we once placed in meaningful curricula went out the window. It also seems to me that this process began when Bloom’s Taxonomy became the Gold Standard of education in the late 50s.
As an English teacher holding both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in creative writing, and who neither majored nor minored in education, it has always puzzled (and occasionally disturbed) me how often I’m expected to defer to the authority of psychologists, both in my lesson plans and in my personal dealings with students. I wouldn’t presume to tell any pyschologist or psychiatrist how to do their job, yet I’m constantly reminded that I must defer to a discipline which I neither studied in college nor find of much current use in my profession.
I should add also that I’m aware Dr. Hirsch, the founder of CK, is himself an educational psychologist–but then his views (with which I’m in thorough agreement) are hardly those of the education establishment these days, are they? There’s the rub.
Comment by James — August 2, 2010 @ 4:10 pm
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