Review of The Schools We Need

This country's founders believed in the value of a traditional education: one that imparts knowledge of history, geography, language, literature, mathematics and science to the entire populace. The founders understood that providing citizens with such a broad general education was vital if they were to properly govern the newly formed, representative democracy called the United States of America.

Set against this traditional view of education is a philosophy called Progressivism. Its chief belief is that the traditional methods of drill and memorization of sets of facts, which it calls "rote learning", must be replaced by a naturalistic, child-centered pedagogy. Progressivism's declared intent is to avoid stifling children's innate love of learning by imposing on them a rigid curriculum and inflexible schedules. Its great hope is that by (within broad limits) allowing them to learn what and when they wish — a scheme it labels with such slogans as "developmentally appropriate" — it will achieve a fuller and sounder education. Its effect, however, has been just the opposite.

Since early in the Twentieth Century1, Hirsch writes in this book, America's educational establishment has been under the sway of Progressivist reformers with a bias against subject matter. He traces their campaign against the strait-jacket of "rote learning"2 and shows us its results. Those results have been that American students consistently fall behind those of Europe and Japan in scholastic tests, and frequently need remedial training in order to cope with routine business tasks like doing inventory or typing a coherent letter. Hirsch documents this decline in American education by citing statistics from comparisons designed to factor out extraneous influences. (See pp 38-42 and 212-213.) The truth is there in the numbers: Students in other countries (e.g. Japan) consistently outperform their American counterparts. The crucial difference between American schools and those of other developed nations is that the other nations' schools have a common core curriculum, while America's do not.

The powerful hold of the Progressivists on American pedagogy is shown by the fact that they have not been held to account for the lack of improvement due to their "reforms". Equally egregious is that, even though most schools have long since put the reformers' precepts into practice, the call for Progressivist reform rings out anew in any discussion of how to fix America's schools. There is abundant evidence that Progressivist methods are not working, and Hirsch presents it here. Yet somehow they manage to persist.

I can criticize the author's writing style in this book (it's academic in tone and at times evinces a slightly archaic flavor) but not his analysis or his conclusions.3 The Schools We Need is very well researched, closely reasoned, and clearly written. If you wish to understand the problems besetting our system of K-12 education, and their historical origins, The Schools We Need is one of the books to turn to. Those problems4 are complex; but Hirsch dissects them into their component parts and explains each, refuting the Progressivists' arguments as he does so. And he proposes a remedy, which, quite simply, is to restore the core (my phrase) — to, without sacrificing local control, re-establish a common curriculum that specifies a coherent set of subject-matter objectives for each grade level in all schools across America. For those who are pressed for time, Chapter 7 provides a summary of Hirsch's main points, with some supporting material. The text is supplemented by chapter notes, an extensive bibliography, and a thorough index.

E. D. Hirsch is a professor at the University of Virginia. With regard to education, he defines himself as an outsider — and well he might, since the ideas he advocates run counter to those that currently dominate the educational establishment. He also calls himself a pragmatist. The best proof of that is his ongoing demonstration of the core curriculum he advocates.5

1 Specifically, at the beginning of Chapter 3, he dates it to Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, published in 1918 by the Bureau of Education of the U.S. Department of the Interior. As an official document, this represented the mainstream educational philosophy in America.

2 What arouses these reformers' ire might be described as the "We're all in our places with bright shiny faces" syndrome — that is, children sitting quietly in desks bolted to the floor in orderly rows, each child in his or her assigned seat, never speaking out of turn, physically and mentally in lockstep as they absorb the "mere facts" doled out by their teachers.

3 With one exception. See the Errata page.

4 One component of which I was unaware is the interaction of the high mobility of American families with the variations in curricula their children are likely to encounter when they change schools.

5 This is the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation. Its curriculum is currently followed by some 200 schools in 37 states, and independent testing validates its precepts. Hirsch is founder and president.

THE SCHOOLS WE NEED And Why We Don't Have Them E. D. Hirsch, Jr. New York: Doubleday, August 1996				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-0-385-48457-2
ISBN-10 0-385-48457-7	317pp.	HC/GSI	$24.95

THE SCHOOLS WE NEED

Reviewed 5/27/2006