14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A New Year's Wish for our Country, December 6, 2009
This review is from: The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (Hardcover)
If you're thinking about New Year's wishes, consider the wish that Hirsch's arguments with regard to core curricula would be widely accepted in American grammar school education. He has been making the arguments for decades. They were true when he first made them and they are no less true now. His new book, The Making of Americans, contextualizes them in an interesting way. Basically, the founding fathers recognized the existence of two spheres: the public and private. In the public sphere we communicate with one another as citizens, build our society's polity and economy and subscribe to a set of common, American values. In the private sphere we express our cultural, ethnic and linguistic individuality. The public sphere is the melting pot; the private sphere is the salad bowl. Now, however, we have eschewed the idea of the melting pot and celebrated the salad bowl. We need both.
Education theory, i.e., the education theory of schools of education, has, for over six decades, been `child-centered' rather than `teacher-centered' and it has resisted the notion of a core curriculum, particularly for the grammar school grades. It has demonized core curricula by associating them with `rote memorization' and `drill and grill' pedagogy. There is only one problem: the touchy-feely practices advocated by schools of education are disastrous failures. American test scores are an embarrassment and the results are particularly harsh for the poor.
The schools of education claim that the test scores are low because American education is diverse and many students come from backgrounds of poverty. This is rubbish, Hirsch argues. Other countries have diverse populations and students from poor families; their test scores are higher because they have core curricula. Test scores have also fallen in less diverse (white, largely middle class) states such as Iowa because of the absence of core curricula there. The methods (or lack of methods) are to blame, not the students. Moreover, when core curricula are installed, the performance gaps between rich and poor students narrow. The bottom line is that `traditional' educational methods yield the results favored by `progressive' and `liberal' educators, while their methods drive everyone down, particularly the poor. Hirsch, himself a traditional liberal, cites distinguished left-leaning thinkers like Rawls and far-left-leaning thinkers like Gramsci to underline his point.
None of this comes as a surprise, of course. The root notion (the same root notion that undergirded his best-selling book from the late 80's, Cultural Literacy) is clear and, I believe, indisputable: reading is fundamental and students are better able to read and comprehend when they have knowledge of the subject. Every piece of writing assumes prior knowledge. (Hence, we cannot have a society in which we all participate as citizens without sharing core, prior knowledge.) He gives several clever examples. For example--a description of a cricket match. All of the words in the paragraph are common, but one, words that each American could put in a sentence. Nevertheless, the paragraph is unintelligible to Americans ignorant of the rules of cricket. He gives a quote from the Nixon tapes--a very straightforward and intelligible quote, but only if you know what a president is, what a budget director is, who George Meany and Hubert Humphrey are, how unions relate to democrat politics, what Watergate was, what audiotape is, and so on. He has the most fun, perhaps, in bloodying the noses of the schools of education types who think that technique is more important than knowledge, individuals who try to train students to tease out key ideas rather than instill in them a knowledge of the material which forms the basis for the ideas. He gives a quote from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and then asks which notion (a, b, c or d) is the key idea. This is impossible unless one has some sense of what Kant means by words such as `manifold' and `category'.
The strength of The Making of Americans is in its anchoring of traditional notions of education in American history and pivotal notions of our values and our society (Lincoln is frequently quoted, e.g.). Its strength is in its hard facts and common sense and its reference to concrete studies and concrete statistical analysis which demonstrate the success of core curricula and the failure of `student-centered' pap. The book is written for a general audience and it is exceptional in its use of commonsensical anecdotes. It confirms what the majority of teachers and parents already believe: core knowledge leads to strong results for all.
If you are a parent, an educator or someone interested in education policy you should read this book. Several decades ago a black colleague of mine, an administrator from another university, said to me, `We all know what works and we all know what doesn't work. The problem is being able to do what works.' That is the point of Hirsch's efforts. Schools that have adopted his advice (e.g. those in Massachusetts) have flourished. The `advice' is, in essence, to follow the practices of the countries which realize that the importance of core curricula and cultural literacy is obvious and that students who share a knowledge of important things are more likely to be successful than students who do not.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous Book, Awful Format by Publisher in Kindle!, January 3, 2010
This is a very important book on a vitally important subject. As usual for this author, the book has complex ideas and rich content readable and accessible to a general reader. I have read other books by E.D. Hirsch and recommend them all but found this one especially significant.
As a high school and college teacher, I regularly see the terrible effects that our current educational ideas have had on the most vulnerable and powerless students. This book gives sound ideas on how to reverse this trend.
My complaint is with the formatting by the publisher for the Kindle edition. As I have found so often with Kindle books, the footnote function does not work and, as usual, graphs and charts are often unreadable. I finally called Kindle to complain and they told me that publishers often choose not to activate the links to the footnotes. Shame on Yale University Press and all the other publishers who do this! I have definitely given up buying Kindle editions of books with footnotes. If the publishers think that means I'll be buying print editions, they are mistaken: I'll take them out of a library. These are exactly the kind of books that are perfect for a Kindle if they would just make them work. I would love to be able to carry around a library of this type of bulky book and go easily from one to the other for reference, to check footnotes quickly (and perhaps immediately download a Kindle edition of a book in the footnote) and to be able to go quickly to charts and graphs and be able to actually read them!
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What America Needs, October 2, 2009
This review is from: The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (Hardcover)
Hirsch has had it right for 25 years, but this time he also wrote it better than ever before. Crossing political and social boundaries, Hirsch has the answer for the inequities around race and class promoted by our current system. He has the answer for how we can stay competetive for the 21st century. Read this book, then go out and create te groundswell needed to take back the romantic, anti-curriculum system that has monopolized our children for over 60 years!
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