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The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
Читать онлайн.Название The Education Invasion
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781594038822
Автор произведения Joy Pullmann
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство Ingram
A key reason given for stressing this approach to reading is that children in poorer homes typically read far fewer books, hear far less complex spoken language, and have far less exposure to varied experiences such as travel, or visiting a farm or a museum, a local music festival or a zoo. These deficiencies limit their knowledge of the world, which in turn limits their reading ability, because the ability to read fluently on any particular subject depends heavily on prior knowledge of that subject. A baseball fanatic will read various team statistics with ease, but people with little knowledge of baseball will have a hard time getting through articles littered with unfamiliar terms such as “RBI” and “closer,” as I learned after taking on the baseball beat for my college newspaper. This is true of any subject, as the linguist E. D. Hirsch has demonstrated.34
Hirsch advocates that all children therefore be taught an explicitly defined core of knowledge in school, and he established his Core Knowledge Foundation for that purpose. Schools affiliated with this organization boast significantly higher student achievement than others.35 Common Core seemingly nods to Hirsch’s findings by saying in the introduction that the mandates need to be accompanied by a curriculum that is “intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades.” Hirsch officially endorsed Common Core for that reason in 2013, writing that the authors “break the fearful silence about the critical importance of specific content.” In the very same endorsement, however, he noted that the mandates contain no “specific historical, scientific, and other knowledge that is required for mature literacy.”36 After giving a little nod to Hirsch, Common Core runs contrary to the substance of his work.
Common Core requires little content whatsoever for English language arts. The mandates are mostly a set of procedures that can be applied to just about anything. That’s why organizations completely unrelated to teaching English, such as the Girl Scouts or the Future of Sex Education Project, can claim their materials are “aligned to Common Core.” Instead of giving specifics on what children must know about the English language and literature in order to be educated adults, Common Core mostly tells teachers what to do with content-bearing material, whether it’s “text” or conversation. It does recommend some books in an appendix (including Bud, Not Buddy, though not Pop’s Bridge or Grandfather’s Journey).37 One likely reason for not specifying content is to avoid curriculum wars. So while Common Core’s introduction says a few positive things about “content knowledge,” the mandates remain mostly silent on what such knowledge ought to be. It’s a little like requiring schools to provide vitamins every day, but not specifying which ones or at what dosage.
But Common Core doesn’t merely remain open-ended on content. It actually undermines the teaching of specific core knowledge by promoting classroom methods that emphasize academic skills or practices instead, supposedly to help eliminate the environmental advantage that better-off children bring with them. That’s why “close reading” calls for answers drawn strictly from the text at hand, not from the wider store of knowledge that children may have amassed. It’s an attempt to level the playing field.
Trying to separate skills from knowledge in this way is a fool’s errand, according to Robert Pondiscio, a former teacher turned pundit.38 To illustrate the point: you can’t learn how to build a house without knowing about materials or the use of tools; and conversely, using the tools and materials deepens your knowledge of them. Reading about baseball or the phases of the moon or the Oregon Trail increases your knowledge of those subjects, and the acquired knowledge then improves your ability to read about related topics, in a kind of feedback. When you read the daily news, you will comprehend it more thoroughly if you start from a solid base of civic and cultural literacy — something that too many citizens do not have.
A survey in 2011 found that only half of Americans could name the three branches of government, and just one in five could identify the origin of the phrase “a wall of separation” between church and state from among four options.39 The remedy for this problem does not lie in the content-light standards of Common Core, with all its emphasis on “informational text” but no coherent principles for selecting and organizing it. If children read only a haphazard list of materials their teachers happen to like, compiled with no thought to building a focused and delineated core of cultural literacy, their knowledge level will be laughable and their reading fluency will be underdeveloped, too.
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