Tag Archive for 'cultural literacy'

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.

PBS Bill Moyers JournalIn 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

The Washington PostHoward 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

New York TimesA 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.”

The 10 Most Famous Americans in History

Published by J. Martin Rochester on February 5, 2008 in Curriculum. 1 Comment

The February 3 USA Today reports on a study done by Sam Wineburg of Stanford University that will be appearing in the March issue of the Journal of American History. The study validates what I had to say in my article on “The Training of Idiots” in Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong? published by the Fordham Foundation. The top ten list of “the most famous Americans in US history,” compiled based on a survey of thousands of American high school students (who were told only to exclude presidents) is a sad commentary on the grotesque triumph of the PC (and celeb) culture in our schools and the larger society.

Rosa Parks #2? Harriet Tubman #3? Amelia Earhart? Oprah? Marilyn Monroe? I suppose we should be thankful that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears did not make the list! I am surprised that the Grimke Sisters did not come in at #3 and #4. I can think of no better evidence of how our k-12 social studies educators, thanks to the NCSS and other such organizations, have failed to give kids a sound, accurate, serious KNOWLEDGE of American history as opposed to racial and gender cheerleading.

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

USA Today 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

Education SectorE.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