E. D. Hirsch Sees His Education Theories Taking Hold - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...tion-theories-taking-hold.html
education theories content Common Core Core Knowledge
shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 13
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E. D. Hirsch Jr. is being dragged back into the ring at the age of 85
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Invitations to speak have come from Spain, Britain and China. He has won a prestigious education award. Curriculums developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, which Mr. Hirsch created to disseminate his ideas, have recently been adopted by hundreds of schools in 25 states and recommended by the New York City Department of Education for teachers to use in their classrooms.
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“This is a redemptive moment for E. D. Hirsch, after a quarter-century of neglect by people both conservative and liberal,”
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Mr. Hirsch’s newfound popularity comes largely because of the Common Core, a set of learning goals for kindergarten through 12th grade that have been adopted by almost every state in the last few years.
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Mr. Hirsch did not write the Common Core, but his curriculums — lesson plans, teaching materials and exercises — are seen as matching its heightened expectations of student progress. And philosophically, the Common Core ideal of a rigorous nationwide standard has become a vindication of Mr. Hirsch’s long campaign against what he saw as the squishiness — a lack of specific curriculums for history, civics, science and literature — in modern education.
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Two things happened,” Mr. Hirsch said in a recent interview. “I had become less controversial, and people actually agreed with or appreciated the general argument I’d been making.”
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The Soviets’ launching of Sputnik led to a new rigor devoted to math and science in the late 1950s and ’60s, but Dewey’s theories still held sway, and his ideas inspired generations of teachers and education professors to move away from classical notions — stressing facts, figures and memorization — of what and how students should be taught.
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“Cultural Literacy.” He said that if poor students were ever to achieve equity in American society, they needed to be taught a core body of knowledge.
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it was eviscerated as promoting a Eurocentric view of the world, and elevating rote memorization over critical thought.
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Mr. Hirsch explained his work as an effort to help the underprivileged. “They had me pegged as a reactionary, but my impulses were more revolutionary,” he said. “You have to give the people who are without power the tools of power, and these tools of power don’t care who’s wielding them.”
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Meanwhile, a broader range of sources were incorporated into the Core Knowledge curriculums with input from teachers and a multicultural advisory board.
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Mr. Hirsh said he still worries that Common Core proponents might doom the standards by saddling them with test preparation and meaningless assessments, rather than ones that measure learning in history and civics, science and literature.
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“That is the real battle to overcome,” he said, “whether anybody will have the courage to specify the content a first grader needs to know.” <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>