If you want your children to sit in rows, you have to pay extra

Reading David Cutler's "The Private-School Stigma," I came across this:

In a Washington Post opinion piece last year about their book, the coauthors also wrote that private schools too often use their autonomy from state regulations to teach in such a way that may please parents but isn’t effective for learning. In the piece, the Lubienskis wrote:

For example, private school students are more likely than their public school counterparts to sit in rows, complete math worksheets and believe that mathematics is 'mostly memorizing facts'—a narrow view that captures neither the breadth of the discipline nor the reasoning that is central to it. In contrast, public schools have moved beyond traditional, repetitive exercises, and more often ask students to solve complex, real-world problems and to learn geometry, data analysis, and early algebra ideas, in addition to basic arithmetic.

So it's official.

If you want your children learning inside a teacher-centered classroom, you have to a) make enough money to pay for private or parochial school; b) live in an area that has a decent private or parochial school or two; c) hope your kids get in.


Can you spell 'hegemony,' part 2

The private/parochial school option may not be long for this world.

For one thing, the National Association of Independent Schools seems to come down on the side of progressive education, no surprise given that many private schools were founded as progressive alternatives to public school in the first place, at least here in New York:

The 70-odd private schools in or near Manhattan are a varied lot, but with few exceptions they share one notable quality: age. They have the mystique of wood-paneled privilege that is hard to manufacture anew and that continues to radiate the glamour that makes even pop divas like Madonna aspire to Scottish castles and English nannies. Many of these schools are housed in fine, old Upper East Side buildings or ivy-covered campuses; students often wear uniforms, including blazers or kilts; they honor traditions like teas and Founder's Days; they may even call teachers "Sir." History has given each of these institutions a unique character. Towne and Allen-Stevenson are small, traditional schools with a neighborhood tone; Little Red Schoolhouse and Trevor Day have a staunchly 1920s left-wing feel; Grace Church, Marymount, and Sacred Heart have proud religious affiliations.

But it is what Victoria Goldman, co-author of The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools, calls the Baby Ivies that are the million-dollar prize of this Survivor game. These are the crème de la crème, the Harvard, Yale, and Princeton of the K-12 set. Decades ago, these schools could easily be divided into two broad categories. The coed, progressive schools—Dalton, Fieldston, Friends Seminary, Horace Mann, Riverdale, and St. Ann's—appealed to New York's artistic and intellectual elite. The unisex traditional schools—Buckley, Collegiate, St. Bernard's, and Trinity (now coed) for boys or Brearley, Chapin, Nightingale-Bamford, and Spence for girls—educated the children of the Protestant establishment, at least until adolescence, when many of the boys went on to board at Groton and Choate. (St. Bernard's and Buckley still only go up to ninth grade.) These days, all the schools pride themselves on a progressive, multicultural curriculum that counts as today's conventional wisdom; you would be just as likely to find a first-grade "interdisciplinary project" on Eskimos at Collegiate as at Dalton and a tenth-grade African-American literature course at Spence as at Fieldston. All of them "respect different learning styles." Yet despite the trendy veneer, the curricula remain fairly rigorous, and the schools still turn out graduates who know the difference between a Van Gogh and a Vermeer, speak French, and play decent tennis.

Survivor: The Manhattan Kindergarten by Kay Hymowitz

And then there are the forces of hegemony, which are pervasive and powerful, and which explain why every reform is the same non-reform all over again, for the most part. The hegemon never quite wins, so the battle never (quite) ends.

That's one theory.

Hirsch has a different take on the one hundred years' war:

The history of American education since the 1930s has been the stubborn persistence of illusion in the face of reality. Illusion has not been defeated. But since reality cannot be defeated, either, and since it determines what actually happens in the world, the result has been educational decline.

And this:

In a conflict between ideology and reality, reality always trumps.

I think that's true.

"Reality always trumps" explains why our schools grind on and on, innovating and disrupting, disrupting and innovating, adopting open classrooms, flipped classrooms, station classrooms--any permutation they can dream up--but nothing ever sticks, and the conflict never ends.

Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

Training versus education, or Why don't constructivists like phonics?

Why don't constructivists like phonics?

I had always assumed E.D. Hirsch's account explained it: constructivists are the philosophical descendants of Romantics, and Romantics believed that nature is a whole and should not be dissected, analyzed, broken down into component parts, etc. Wholeism, in other words. Romantics extended this belief to teaching and learning.

Constructivists are Romantics, and Romantics are Whole-ists, so: whole child, whole language, whole math, histogeomegraph....

Here's Hirsch:

The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect”; the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the romantic preference for “integrated learning” and “developmental appropriateness.” Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real-world applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty mastery of formal relationships.

Reading Matthew Hunter's article on constructivism in British schools, though, I saw the constructivist antipathy to phonics in a new light:

The much publicised debate over "phonics" versus "whole word" methods sounds arcane, but it is really quite simple. "Phonics" involves teaching pupils to match individual letters to sounds, so that they can combine these sounds to make words. The teaching of phonics requires an orderly, teacher-led classroom, and in its technical approach is often characterised as boring and off-putting for young children.

For that reason, "whole-word" methods have been promoted for the last half-century as a more child-centred alternative. Instead of didactically instilling an understanding of which letters make which sounds, whole-word teaching encourages pupils to "discover" how to read by first matching words with meanings, then slowly building an understanding of letter-sounds. This method promises that pupils, to a large degree, will teach themselves. As one whole-word apostle claimed, it will lead to the "withering away of the teacher".

The most important distinction between the two methods is that one works, and one does not. This has not stopped generations of "progressive educators" from eschewing the teaching of phonics, not because of any perceived ineffectiveness but because its didactic methods are repugnant to their ideology. As a result of these teachers indulging their romantic ideals, 11-year olds arrive at secondary school unable to read and write.
Child-Centered Learning Has Let My Pupils Down
MATTHEW HUNTER| June 2012

I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I had never thought of this.

During the Summer School Institute at Morningside Academy, Kent Johnson talked about the difference between training and education. Most of what he was teaching us was how to train students, not how to educate them. Training comes before education.

from my notes:

[The] test for training [is]: “I’m teaching them something I know & they don't know. I want them to be as smart as I am.”

That's training, and for Kent training is (generally) not about discovery, while education may be.

For some time now, I've been frustrated that schools aren't giving students the practice they need.

But now, reading Hunter in the wake of attending the Institute, I think it's probably more accurate to say students aren't getting the training they need.

The reason they aren't getting the training they need is likely to be the fact that the concept of training seems almost intrinsically to require, or at a minimum suggest, an "orderly, teacher-led classroom" and a "technical approach."

and see:
balanced literacy - the video
histogeomegraph: preventing the tragedy of content isolation

E.D. Hirsch explains cause of decline in SAT scores is content-light instruction

Average SAT scores fell this year, with critical reading results declining to the lowest on record.  E.D. Hirsch writes that the main cause is a move away from content-rich instruction in the elementary grades.

The decline has led some commentators to embrace demographic determinism — the idea that the verbal scores of disadvantaged students will not significantly rise until we overcome poverty. But that explanation does not account for the huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s.

The most credible analyses have shown that the chief causes were not demographics or TV watching, but vast curricular changes, especially in the critical early grades. In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach.

Daniel Willingham on this subject:

More: How Knowledge Helps - It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning—and Thinking (Cross-posted at Cost of College)

E.D. Hirsch on the philosophical roots of progressive education

Hirsch writes:

In my mind, progressive educational ideas have proved so seductive because their appeal lies not in their practical effects but in their links to romanticism, the 19th-century philosophical movement, so influential in American culture, that elevated all that is natural and disparaged all that is artificial. The progressives applied this romantic principle to education by positing that education should be a natural process of growth that flows from the child’s natural instincts and interests. The word “nature” in the romantic tradition connotes the sense of a direct connection with the holy, lending the tenets of progressivism all the weight of religious conviction. We know in advance, in our bones, that what is natural must be better than what is artificial. This revelation is the absolute truth against which experience itself must be measured, and any failure of educational practice must be due to faulty implementation of progressive principles or faulty interpretation of educational results. Thus the results of mere reading tests must not be taken at face value, because such blunt instruments cannot hope to measure the true effects of education. The fundamental beliefs of progressivism are impervious to unfavorable data because its philosophical parent, romanticism, is a kind of secular theology that, like all religions, is inherently resistant to data. A religious believer scorns mere “evidences.”

The Chasm Between

There are many disputes within the education field, but none so vituperative as the reading and math wars—the battles over how best to teach children to read and to solve arithmetic problems. These aren’t just disputes over instructional techniques; they are expressions of two distinct and opposing understandings of children’s nature and how children learn. The two sides are best viewed as expressions of romantic versus classical orientations to education. For instance, the “whole language,” progressive approach to teaching children how to read is romantic in impulse. It equates the natural process of learning an oral first language with the very unnatural process of learning alphabetic writing. The emotive weight in progressivist ideas is on naturalness. The natural is spiritually nourishing; the artificial, deadening. In the 1920s, William Kilpatrick and other romantic progressivists were already advocating the “whole language” method for many of the same reasons advanced today.

The classical approach, by contrast, declines to assume that the natural method is always the best method. In teaching reading, the classicist is quite willing to accept linguistic scholarship that discloses that the alphabet is an artificial device for encoding the sounds of language. Learn the 40-odd sounds of the English language and their corresponding letter combinations, and you can sound out almost any word. Yet adherents of “whole language” regard phonics as an unnatural approach that, by divorcing sounds and letters from meaning and context, fails to give children a real appreciation for reading.

The progressivist believes that it is better to study math and science through real-world, hands-on, natural methods than through the deadening modes of conceptual and verbal learning, or the repetitive practicing of math algorithms, even if those “old fashioned” methods are successful. The classicist is willing to accept the verdict of scholars that the artificial symbols and algorithms of mathematics are the very sources of its power. Math is a powerful instrument precisely because it is unnatural. It enables the mind to manipulate symbols in ways that transcend the direct natural reckoning abilities of the mind. Natural, real-world intuitions are helpful in math, but there should be no facile opposition between terms like “understanding,” “hands-on,” and “real-world applications” and terms like “rote learning” and “drill and kill.” What is being killed in memorizing the multiplication table? The progressivist says: children’s joy in learning, their intrinsic interest, and their deep understanding.

The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect”; the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the romantic preference for “integrated learning” and “developmental appropriateness.” Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real-world applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty mastery of formal relationships.

Romancing the Child
E.D. Hirsch
Education Next

Spring 2001 / Vol. 1, No. 1

This is where whole math comes from.

Also, this is why it's illegal to teach sentence diagramming (pdf file - Martha Kolln's 10 core sentences) in public schools.

[pause]

I see I've posted this passage before: E.D. Hirsch on "spilt religion."

more fun with public schools

Peter Meyer weighs in

E.D. Hirsch: a brief history

Hirsch writes:

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville wrote admiringly: “In the United States the general thrust of education is directed toward political life; in Europe its main aim is to fit men for private life.”

[snip]

The reasons for this communitarian emphasis were obvious to American leaders in the nineteenth century. Loyalty to the Republic had to be developed, as well as adherence to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toleration. For without universal indoctrination by the schools in such civic virtues, the United States might dissolve, as had all prior large republics of history, through internal dissension.

The aim of schooling was not just to Americanize the immigrants, but also to Americanize the Americans. This was the inspiring ideal of the common school in the nineteenth century, built upon a combination of thrilling ideals and existential worry. By the end of the century we were educating, relative to other countries, a large percentage of the population, and this forward movement continued well into the twentieth century. In the post–World War II period, the US ranked high internationally according to a number of educational measures. But by 1980, there had occurred a significant decline both in our international position and in comparison with our own past achievements. Two decades ago I was appalled by an international comparison showing that between 1978 and 1988 the science knowledge of American students had dropped from seventh to fourteenth place. In the postwar period we have declined internationally in reading from third place to fifteenth place among the nations participating in the survey.

The root cause of this decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth—a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience. A 1939 critic of the new movement, Isaac Kandel, described it this way:

Children should be allowed to grow in accordance with their needs and interests…. Knowledge is valuable only as it is acquired in a real situation; the teacher must be present to provide the proper environment for experiencing but must not intervene except to guide and advise. There must, in fact, be “nothing-fixed-in-advance” and subjects must not be “set-out-to-be-learned.”

By 1950, with new, watered-down schoolbooks and a new generation of teachers trained in specialized colleges for education, the anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint had taken over the schools. The consequence was a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.

With the current emphasis on testing and accountability it might be assumed that the days of child-centeredness are now over. But that assumption would miss an essential point. The schools still lack a definite, pre-set, year-by-year curriculum (though this is changing in math) and yet at the same time schools are being required to make measurable progress on year-by-year tests.

How to Save the Schools
New York Review of Books
May 13, 2010
by E. D. Hirsch Jr.

fast feedback

I'm reading Stuart Yeh's book on rapid assessment of student learning via daily computer quizzes: Raising Student Achievement Through Rapid Assessment And Test Reform.

It's terrific, though it's also a case study in education school thought world-ery.

Example:

[F]unding for rapid assessment programs may enable schools to begin to address the challenge of the No Child Left Behind Act to improve student achievement without compromising educational quality.

Statements like this appear throughout the book, along with companion statements assuring readers that rapid assessment reduces skill and drill to the bare minimum, leaving maximum time for "critical thinking activities." The author has written an entire book about direct instruction, practice, and feedback: teacher teaches a lesson, then students do a bunch of problems and the computer scores their work pronto.

But 'drill' is bad.

Yeh is the person who showed that class size reduction was 124x less cost effective than rapid formative assessment.

Curriculum for Democracy

I'm an unabashed fan of E.D Hirsch. Sol Stern does a tremendous job of summarizing Hirsh's contributions to the field of education in his article in the Autumn 2009 City Journal entitled E.D. Hirsh's Curriculum for Democracy. Stern follows Hirsh's academic path from chemistry student to Yale graduate school to English professor at the University of Virginia and finally his current status as a true education reformer. The article is worth reading in full. Here is what initially grabbed Hirsch's attention:

Though UVA’s admissions standards were as competitive as the Ivies’, the reading and writing skills of many incoming students were poor, sure to handicap them in their future academic work. In trying to figure out how to close this “literacy gap,” Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”

The education establish has criticized him as elitist for years, but that's baloney.

Far from being elitist, [Hirsch] insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”

spilt religion

Here is Hirsch on the religious roots of romanticism and progressive education:

In my mind, progressive educational ideas have proved so seductive because their appeal lies not in their practical effects but in their links to romanticism, the 19th-century philosophical movement, so influential in American culture, that elevated all that is natural and disparaged all that is artificial. The progressives applied this romantic principle to education by positing that education should be a natural process of growth that flows from the child’s natural instincts and interests. The word “nature” in the romantic tradition connotes the sense of a direct connection with the holy, lending the tenets of progressivism all the weight of religious conviction. We know in advance, in our bones, that what is natural must be better than what is artificial. This revelation is the absolute truth against which experience itself must be measured, and any failure of educational practice must be due to faulty implementation of progressive principles or faulty interpretation of educational results....The fundamental beliefs of progressivism are impervious to unfavorable data because its philosophical parent, romanticism, is a kind of secular theology that, like all religions, is inherently resistant to data. A religious believer scorns mere “evidences.”

The Chasm Between

....The two sides [in the education wars] are best viewed as expressions of romantic versus classical orientations to education.^* For instance, the “whole language,” progressive approach to teaching children how to read is romantic in impulse. It equates the natural process of learning an oral first language with the very unnatural process of learning alphabetic writing....The emotive weight in progressivist ideas is on naturalness. The natural is spiritually nourishing; the artificial, deadening. In the 1920s, William Kilpatrick and other romantic progressivists were already advocating the “whole language” method for many of the same reasons advanced today.

[snip]

[T]he classicist is quite willing to accept linguistic scholarship that discloses that the alphabet is an artificial device for encoding the sounds of language....

The progressivist believes that it is better to study math and science through real-world, hands-on, natural methods than through the deadening modes of conceptual and verbal learning, or the repetitive practicing of math algorithms, even if those “old fashioned” methods are successful. The classicist is willing to accept the verdict of scholars that the artificial symbols and algorithms of mathematics are the very sources of its power. Math is a powerful instrument precisely because it is unnatural. It enables the mind to manipulate symbols in ways that transcend the direct natural reckoning abilities of the mind.

[snip]

The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, “We murder to dissect”; the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the romantic preference for “integrated learning” and “developmental appropriateness.” Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real-world applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty mastery of formal relationships.

Natural Supernaturalism

The religious character of progressivism is rarely noted because it is not an overtly religious system of belief. Romanticism is a secularized expression of religious faith. In a justly famous essay, T. E. Hulme defined romanticism as “spilt religion.” Romanticism, he said, redirects religious emotions from a transcendent God to the natural divinity of this world. Transcendent feelings are transferred to everyday experience—like treacle spilt all over the table, as Hulme put it. M. H. Abrams offered a more sympathetic definition of this tendency to fuse the secular and religious by entitling his fine book on romanticism Natural Supernaturalism. The natural is supernatural. Logically speaking, it’s a contradiction, but it captures the romantic’s faith that a divine breath infuses natural human beings and the natural world.

In emotional terms, romanticism is an affirmation of this world—a refusal to deprecate this life in favor of pie in the sky. In theological terms, this sentiment is called “pantheism”—the faith that God inhabits all reality. Transcendent religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism see this world as defective, and consider the romantic divinizing of nature to be a heresy. But for the romantic, the words “nature” and “natural” take the place of the word “God” and give nature the emotional ultimacy that attaches to divinity. As Wordsworth said,

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can
—The Tables Turned (1798)

The romantic conceives of education as a process of natural growth. Botanical metaphors are so pervasive in American educational literature that we take them for granted. The teacher, like a gardener, should be a watchful guide on the side, not a sage on the stage. (The word “kindergarten”—literally “children-garden”—was invented by the romantics.) It was the romantics who began mistranslating the Latin word educare (ee-duh-kar’e), the Latin root word for education, as “to lead out” or “to unfold,” confusing it with educere (eh-diu’ke-re), which does mean “to lead out.” It was a convenient mistake that fit in nicely with the theme of natural development, since the word “development” itself means “unfolding.” But educare actually means “to bring up” and “instruct.” It implies deliberate training according to social and cultural norms, in contrast to words like “growth” and “development,” which imply that education is the unfolding of human nature, analogous to a seed growing into a plant.

The same religious sentiment that animates the romantics’ fondness for nature underlies their celebration of individuality and diversity. According to the romantics, the individual soul partakes of God’s nature. Praise for diversity as being superior to uniformity originates in the pantheist’s sense of the plenitude of God’s creation. “Nature’s holy plan,” as Wordsworth put it, unfolds itself with the greatest possible variety. To impose uniform standards on the individuality of children is to thwart their fulfillment and to pervert the design of Providence.

[snip]

Whether these educational tenets can withstand empirical examination is irrelevant. Their validation comes from knowing in advance, with certainty, that the natural is superior to the artificial.

A More Complicated Nature

Plato and Aristotle based their ideas about education, ethics, and politics on the concept of nature, just as the romantics did. A classicist knows that any attempt to thwart human nature is bound to fail. But the classicist does not assume that a providential design guarantees that relying on our individual natural impulses will always yield positive outcomes. On the contrary, Aristotle argued that human nature is a battleground of contradictory impulses and appetites. Selfishness is in conflict with altruism; the fulfillment of one appetite is in conflict with the fulfillment of others. Follow nature, yes, but which nature and to what degree?

Aristotle’s famous solution to this problem was to optimize human fulfillment by balancing the satisfactions of all the human appetites—from food and sex to the disinterested contemplation of truth—keeping society’s need for civility and security in mind as well. This optimizing of conflicting impulses required the principle of moderation, the golden mean, not because moderation was a good in itself, but because, in a secular view of conflicted human nature, this was the most likely route to social peace and individual happiness. The romantic poet William Blake countered, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." But again, that would be true only if a providential nature guaranteed a happy outcome. Absent such faith in the hidden design of natural providence, the mode of human life most in accord with nature must be, according to Aristotle, a via media that is artificially constructed. By this classical logic, the optimally natural must be self-consciously artificial.

Renewed interest in evolutionary psychology has given the classic-romantic debate new currency....[E]volutionary psychology reintroduces in its own way the classical idea that there are inherent conflicts in human nature—both selfishness and altruism, both a desire to possess one’s neighbor’s spouse and a desire to get along with one’s neighbor. The adjudication of these contradictory impulses requires an anti-natural construct like the Ten Commandments. Similarly, from the standpoint of evolution, most of the learning required by modern schooling is not natural at all. Industrial and postindustrial life, very recent phenomena in evolutionary terms, require kinds of learning that are constructed artificially and sometimes arduously on the natural of the mind—a point that has been made very effectively and in detail by David Geary, a research psychologist specializing in children’s learning of mathematics at the University of Missouri. Geary makes a useful distinction between primary and secondary learnings, with most school learnings, such as the base-ten system and the alphabetic principle, being the “unnatural,” secondary type.

The very idea that skills as artificial and difficult as reading, writing, and arithmetic can be made natural for everyone is an illusion that has flourished in the peaceful, prosperous United States. The old codger Max Rafferty, an outspoken state superintendent of education in California, once denounced the progressive school Summerhill, saying:

Rousseau spawned a frenetic theory of education which after two centuries of spasmodic laboring brought forth... Summerhill.... The child is a Noble Savage, needing only to be let alone in order to insure his intellectual salvation... Twaddle. Schooling is not a natural process at all. It’s highly artificial. No boy in his right mind ever wanted to study multiplication tables and historical dates when he could be out hunting rabbits or climbing trees. In the days when hunting and climbing contributed to the survival of Homo sapiens, there was some sense in letting the kids do what comes naturally, but when man’s future began to hang upon the systematic mastery of orderly subject matter, the primordial, happy-go-lucky, laissez faire kind of learning had to go.

The romantic versus classic debate extends beyond the reading and math wars to the domain of moral education. The romantic tradition holds that morality (like everything else) comes naturally.... Wordsworth’s account of his own education, which he called “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” contained a section entitled, “Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind.”

The romantic wishes to encourage the basic goodness of the natural soul, unspoiled by habit, custom, and convention. The principal means for such encouragement is to develop the child’s creativity and imagination—two words that gained currency in the romantic movement. Before the romantics, using the term “creativity” for human productions was considered impious. But that ended when the human soul was conceived as inherently godly. Moral education and the development of creativity and imagination went hand in hand. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, textbooks like the McGuffey Readers strongly emphasized moral instruction and factual knowledge. With the rise of progressive ideas, however, the subject matter of language arts in the early grades began to focus on fairy tales and poetry. The imparting of explicit moral instruction gave way to the development of creativity and imagination. Imagination, the romantic poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “brings the whole soul of man into activity.” When we exercise our imaginations, we connect with our divine nature, develop our moral sensibilities.

Romance or Justice?

One cannot hope to argue against a religious faith that is impervious to refutation. But there can be hope for change when that religious faith is secular and pertains to the world itself. When the early romantics lived long enough to experience the disappointments of life, they abandoned their romanticism. This happened to Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. One of Wordsworth’s most moving works was the late poem, “Elegiac Stanzas,” which bade farewell to his faith in nature.

Romancing the Child
By E. Donald Hirsch Jr.
Education Next
Spring 2001
Vol 1, no. 1

in a nutshell:

• Romantics (progressive ed) versus classicists (instructivism)
  
• Romanticism is a secularized expression of religious faith; it is "spilt religion."
• Pantheism (“the faith that God inhabits all reality") versus transcendent religions (Christianity, Judaism, etc.)
  
• the natural is supernatural (!) God is in nature
  
• the abstract is unnatural; the concrete is natural; the natural is good
• the natural = growth; the unnatural = instruction
  
• nature = wholeism ("We murder to dissect")
  
• nature = developmentalism (teach no subject before the child is "ready")
• Romanticism: children are naturally good & are to be developed via creativity & imagination
• diversity expresses the "plenitude of God's creation"

pop quiz

Which classroom best expresses the plenitude of God's creation:

• 19 or 20 heterogeneously grouped middle school students working collaboratively in groups on tiered projects
  
• 19 or 20 homogeneously grouped elementary school children reciting correct answers in unison on the teacher's signal

spilt religion - Hirsch on progressive education & Romanticism
David Labaree on the 2 factions
Labaree on constructivism
Hirsch on Labaree

Hirsch, E.D., "Romancing the Child," Education Next, 1 (Spring 2001).
Labaree, David F., "Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance," Paedagogica Historica (Gent), 41 (Feb. 2005), 275–89. (pdf file)

Hirsch on Labaree (& Mathews)

Hirsch, E. D. (Eric Donald) 1928- "Comments"
Brookings Papers on Education Policy - 2004, pp. 112-125
Brookings Institution Press

Excerpt

Comment by E. D. Hirsch Jr.

David F. Labaree's historical analysis of progressivism belongs in the tradition of Larry Cuban, Arthur Zilversmit, and, most recently, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. That tradition readily concedes that romantic progressivism has permeated education schools to the point of intellectual monopoly, but, according to these historians of education, romantic progressivism has never taken over the public schools as a method of teaching. As proof of this they [End Page 112] show that a considerable amount of whole class instruction is still going on, that students' seats are still arranged in rows, and that students are still asked to complete exercises in workbooks. I am inclined to concede this point, as I think all education historians probably should, given the believable observational reports, most recently from Jay Matthews. I have always assumed that this claim of progressive apologetics was probably right in a narrow sense.

At the same time, I have long thought that this narrow point is almost completely irrelevant to the most important historical influence of progressivism, which is less its influence on pedagogy than its influence in diluting and fragmenting the elementary curriculum to a truly harmful and indefensible degree.

I agree to some extent with Hirsch's first observation (there's not much in the way of "real" constructivism happening inside U.S. classrooms), disagree with his second (constructivism's real damage was done to curriculum, not pedagogy).

Really existing constructivism means spiraling, not teaching to mastery, and a steadily widening gap between kids who can survive this system thanks to fast learning curves, good reading habits and tutors, and kids who can't.

It's bad for curriculum, and it's bad for pedagogy, too.

I would like it to go away.

fyi: "really existing socialism," also here

really existing constructivism

That's what we've got.


spilt religion - Hirsch on progressive education & Romanticism
David Labaree on the 2 factions
Labaree on constructivism
Hirsch on Labaree

Hirsch, E.D., "Romancing the Child," Education Next, 1 (Spring 2001).
Labaree, David F., "Progressivism, Schools, and Schools of Education: An American Romance," Paedagogica Historica (Gent), 41 (Feb. 2005), 275–89. (pdf file)

interview with Willingham

(Cross-posted at D-Ed Reckoning)

EdNews has a good interview with Daniel Willingham posted today on "reading comprehension:

6) What are your three main factors that you see as important in reading comprehension?

Decoding, fluency, and background knowledge. Obviously, if you can't decode, it's pretty much "game over." And if you don't have some degree of fluency, you're so occupied with decoding, that you can't pay attention to the meaning of the text. Finally, if you don't have some background knowledge to which you can relate the text, you may comprehend it, but your understanding will be pretty shallow—it will be closely tied to the text itself, and you won't be able to generalize the message of the text

There you go: decoding, fluency, and background knowledge. Three things that don't get systematicallt taught in your typical balanced literacy classroom.

Here's a question: "To what extent have educators and policy-makes recognized the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension?" My answer would be "not enough!" I'm specifically concerned about the role of the National Reading Panel report. That Report is becoming crystallized in state and federal legislation as the final word on reading, and the report is great. . . but it's incomplete because it doesn't say anything about the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. If we're concerned about having students who are good readers we have to recognize that reading is an interaction between the words on the page and the knowledge in the reader's head. Without background knowledge, you can't comprehend a text to a level we would call "understanding." We need to pay attention to developing background knowledge in students from the first day that they are in school, and encouraging parents to do so even before then. It's not a trivial matter to decide what that content should be and how to deliver it. But if we want all children to be excellent readers it has to be done.

Background knowledge: the untaught subject. Read the whole thing.