THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610200237
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS
LENGTH: 85 lines
THE SCHOOLS WE NEED AND WHY WE DON'T HAVE THEM
E.D. HIRSCH JR.
Doubleday. 317 pp. $24.95.
Public schools in the United States do a lousy job of imparting necessary knowledge, with sad, sometimes tragic results, says University of Virginia education professor E.D. Hirsch Jr. in his new book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them.
Children are eager to learn, he says. They welcome challenges. But well-meaning teachers and administrators, influenced by failed, early-century reform principles, emphasize process - critical-thinking skills and the like - over facts. They fear asking too much of children and damaging their self-esteem.
Hirsch stirred up the education world in 1987 with his best seller Cultural Literacy, which called for a return to teaching specific knowledge. Since then, he has edited the ``Core Knowledge Series'' teaching plan that's observed by dozens of schools nationwide, laying out what he believes students in kindergarten through sixth grade should learn in drill-and-test classrooms.
In his book, which is based in part on feedback from these schools, Hirsch argues that children would learn more - and enjoy learning more - if schools would turn to rigorous teaching and testing of basic facts, covering everything from the pharoahs to photosynthesis.
Doing so would create necessary ``intellectual capital'' that gives children something to build on year to year, he says. As with money, the more knowledge they have, the more they can gain. And it goes beyond pure intellectual exercise.
``With jobs having become highly changeable, no one knows how to teach for specific occupations,'' Hirsch writes. ``In the present, ever-shifting economic scene, the student needs the ability to learn new occupations. Hence, a general ability to learn, based on broad general knowledge and vocabulary, is a more practical tool than direct vocational training.''
Hirsch also argues that the nation should establish a standard core curriculum and details the basic facts and skills that children in any city or state should know and have by the time they reach certain grades. This way, as children move around in our mobile society, they won't miss out on the knowledge needed to succeed in their grade.
More rigorous, common expectations would also mean that disadvantaged children who often enter school with less intellectual capital than their peers would be brought up to the same level as their classmates. Hirsch argues that the current education system, more concerned about preserving self-esteem than with vigorously challenging and pushing those behind in relative knowledge, only winds up leaving them further behind. The disparity between them and their more-advantaged classmates widens, all the way through adulthood.
``In short, an early inequity in the distribution of intellectual capital may be the single most important source of avoidable injustice in a free society,'' he writes.
Hirsch notes that Japan and many European countries use core national curricula with good results. He counters arguments from those who say that the United States is too diverse, with too wide a mix of students and background, for his suggestions to work, by citing France's success. That nation has nearly as diverse a population around its major cities as the United States, but starts early with educational day-care programs.
While some of Hirsch's criticism seems overly harsh - he calls U.S. public education ``anti-knowledge'' - our test scores still lag behind those of other countries, and anecdotal experiences with high school graduates still reveal embarrassing education lapses.
Still, it's hard to imagine a state like Virginia accepting Hirsch's national-curriculum standard when this year it wouldn't even accept federal money for education because reporting back on how it was used constitutes unacceptable ``strings attached.''
And the facts-versus-critical thinking debate is something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Yes, knowledge of facts is needed to be a successful critical thinker, as Hirsch writes. But children still need instruction and practice in how to use facts to figure out the world around them.
Many of Hirsch's reforms depend on good teachers who can make learning - hard, have-to-work-at-it learning - exciting and enjoyable, and do it in classrooms crowded with students of widely varying abilities and interests.
Still, it's hard to come up with a more important issue in this country than the future of our children. The more views in the debate on how to best protect and enhance those futures, the better. MEMO: Matthew Bowers is a staff education writer. by CNB