Cultural literacy
Sol Sternberg has a great education article at City Journal about E.D. HIrsch's Cultural Literacy movement - the concept that early in schooling, children need to understand certain Core Knowledge subjects (that the education establishment positively hates):
"For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson,Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome,and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects."
I chuckle at the crap that passes for literature in the schools: Anything that undermines a solid grounding the greats. Sure to the Scarlett Letter, but Stevenson or Kipling? Environmentalist "novels? Sure. But Shakespeare? C'mon. Nonsense!
As Sternberg points out, the Hirsch experiment has proven effective in - of all places - Massachusetts:
"Like A Nation at Risk, Cultural Literacy came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names,events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist. The progressives often lumped him in with the three 'killer Bs'—Bennett, (Allan) Bloom, and(Saul) Bellow—whom they loved to hate at the height of the 1980sculture wars. Because Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind appeared just above Cultural Literacy on the bestseller lists for most of 1987, many liberal commentators paired the two writers, calling them conservatives agitating for a return to a more traditional, elitist education."
Great reading here.
"For example, the Core Knowledge curriculum specifies that in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson,Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome,and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects."
I chuckle at the crap that passes for literature in the schools: Anything that undermines a solid grounding the greats. Sure to the Scarlett Letter, but Stevenson or Kipling? Environmentalist "novels? Sure. But Shakespeare? C'mon. Nonsense!
As Sternberg points out, the Hirsch experiment has proven effective in - of all places - Massachusetts:
"Like A Nation at Risk, Cultural Literacy came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names,events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist. The progressives often lumped him in with the three 'killer Bs'—Bennett, (Allan) Bloom, and(Saul) Bellow—whom they loved to hate at the height of the 1980sculture wars. Because Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind appeared just above Cultural Literacy on the bestseller lists for most of 1987, many liberal commentators paired the two writers, calling them conservatives agitating for a return to a more traditional, elitist education."
Great reading here.
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