A
Utilitarian Extension of Hirsch’s Plea for National Core Standards
Evan Long (SED '07) is majoring in History
Education. He plans on teaching history education in the future
and aspires to become a professional educational researcher.
This paper was written for Professor Aeschliman's ED410/412:
Social and Civic Context of Education.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t
Have Them attributes the deterioration of American education
over the past half-century to the intellectual monopoly of progressivism
in schools of education that has indoctrinated millions of teachers
with a strong adherence to deleterious Romantic principles.
These principles, according to Hirsch, changed the way educators
in the early twentieth century viewed the concept of human nature.
No longer were children viewed as benighted versions of adults
with destructive impulses; they were now viewed as innately
good yet fragile objects whose natural innocence was corrupted
by a predatory and artificial society. This new abhorrence of
anything deemed non-natural soon took form in educational practice,
as ‘scientific’ methods of non-competitive, child-centered,
individualized, and holistic learning replaced traditional methods
that emphasized subject-centered education, rote learning, and
rigorous memorization.
Using international and national studies, Hirsch demonstrates
that the effects of these progressive policies have worked paradoxically
against their goals. Consequently, inequality has grown between
the haves and have-nots in America, as children from less privileged
backgrounds have increasingly fallen further behind those who
come to school with more intellectual capital. Rather than finding
real solutions, progressive educators simply attack the validity
of standardized tests that have unmasked the failures of their
ideology. Hirsch shows that the best remedy for these escalating
problems is to develop coherent, grade by grade, cumulative
core standards that emphasize early literacy and ensure equality
of educational opportunity for all.
Hirsch claims that the intellectual capital or broad knowledge
banks that a child brings into school is the main determinant
of his or her future social class, achievement in school, and
psychological and physical health (Hirsch 19). Individual differences
in parental literacy and involvement with their children lead
to unequal levels of prior knowledge and vocabulary that children
bring into kindergarten. Moreover, if schools do not correct
these problems early, gaps in amounts of intellectual capital
are multiplied and made permanent by the time the students advance
into the fourth grade (Hirsch 45). This intellectual capital
determinism is supported by psychological research that shows
“the ability to learn something new depends on an ability to
accommodate the new thing to the already known” (Hirsch 23).
Hirsch, along with a coalition of parents, scientists, teachers,
and experts on America’s multicultural traditions, devised a
curriculum based on this knowledge-first approach. Their long
lists of common cultural facts and core knowledge make up about
half of the recommended curriculum and state specifically what
each student needs to know at each grade level, in order to
reduce these escalating intellectual capital gaps and social
inequalities.
Progressive education, however, maintains the unequal levels
of knowledge acquired at home, because they wrongfully assume
that emphasis on higher-order skills rather than broad content
knowledge first will facilitate more effective learning (Hirsch
21). Hirsch shows that prioritizing such critical thinking strategies
over subject content first can actually reduce a child’s ability
to think critically (Hirsch 66). Progressives often use the
misleading notion that “it is better to teach a child how to
fish than simply give him or her a fish” to support their claims;
however, in Hirsch’s more practical viewpoint a child can be
taught how to fish, but will not catch anything without proper
fishing tools (Hirsch 26). According to Hirsch, young children
cannot be taught how to think. They learn by placing new information
within the context of other previously stored knowledge. Only
after making connections between their storehouses of general
knowledge can children begin to discover higher truths and think
critically.
Progressive education is especially detrimental to disadvantaged
students. Believing that the acquisition of literacy is a natural
process and should be done at each child’s own pace, progressives
make no effort to correct literacy problems in their early stages.
Sadly, social mobility for underprivileged children is made
nearly impossible under this “natural” pedagogical system even
in the best performing school systems. A recent report shows
that Massachusetts, which leads the country in National Assessment
of Educational Progress scores, “is good at helping students
who are already doing well, but less successful at helping every
student do their best” (Leblanc sec B). The 1988 International
Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement shows
that countries with core curriculum programs can effectively
reduce intellectual-capital learning gaps between social classes
and races within a few years of schooling. Not only do countries
that use core curricula prove themselves to be more equitable
than ones that do not, they also prove themselves to have better
overall quality education (Hirsch 41). Another reason that progressive
education hurts underprivileged children is because it fails
to recognize and provide a remedy for the migratory habits of
impoverished families. Many urban schools face a turnover rate
of more than half of their student population within a single
school year (Hirsch 34). Vague standards and unspecific content
in urban schools’ curriculum have led to unevenness in learning,
repetition from year to year, and overall curricular anarchy
from community to community (Hirsch 32). Core schools, on the
other hand, are able to accommodate the high number of students
who move to new schools each year, because of their emphasis
on curricular cohesion and accountability (Hirsch 36).
The educational progressive movement, which began in the United
States in the 1920s and became mainstream in the 1960s, traces
its roots to the nineteenth century European literary and philosophical
movement known as Romanticism. In Europe, Friedrich Froebel,
Johann Herbart, and Johann Pestalozzi established child-centered
education that was supposedly in harmony with the natural development
of children (Hirsch 72). These new anti-Enlightenment and anti-Jeffersonian
ideas dispelled the old Platonist and Augustinian notions that
education should restrict dangerous, lazy human impulses. American
Romantics such as Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson adopted these
naturalistic ideas and inspired a new generation of American
educational theorists in the 1920s and ‘30s, most notably John
Dewey and William H. Kilpatrick, to implement their suspicions
of hard work, mechanical memorization, and discipline into educational
practice (Hirsch 76). American educators have since been more
interested in developing self-esteem, creativity, and other
non-intellectual skills than in more proven traditional practices.
The influence of these early proponents of flawed ideas is astounding.
Kilpatrick, at Teachers College in New York City, taught over
thirty-five thousand teachers that testing, grades, and curricula
were harmful to children’s natural development (Hirsch 118).
Hirsch highlights many studies that demonstrate extrinsic motivations
for learning, such as tests and grades, work much more effectively
than a reliance on intrinsic yearnings for knowledge (Hirsch
181).
The progressive tradition selectively uses scientific research
to justify its ideas. Despite the neurobiological findings of
Pasko Rakic that “children’s brains can make far more synaptic
connections than can adults” (Hirsch 81, progressives stubbornly
rally behind developmental theories that argue the teaching
of literacy at young ages is inappropriate and harmful to natural
development. In doing so, progressives greatly underestimate
the capability of children. Their findings often lead to deflated
academic expectations, as best seen in Howard Gardner’s theory
of multiple intelligences, which categorizes skills like musical,
natural, and intrapersonal knowledge as equally important as
mathematical and linguistic intelligences. His reasoning leads
to a relativist outlook of knowledge, as his theory makes every
student seem able to obtain mastery in something. There is also
no empirical way to measure his so-called intelligences. Moreover,
education policymakers should not adopt his progressive ideas
because he fails to separate the academic skills needed for
success in the workforce, mainly literacy and numeracy, from
nonacademic talents that few people will ever depend on for
success during their lives (Hirsch 105). Developmentalists also
claim that their techniques promote constructivism, a term used
to imply active engagement in learning. This concept ignores
the active role that students take when they turn precepts into
concepts during the simple act of listening and comprehending
(Hirsch 133).
Hirsch is not entirely against developmentalism; he states that
pushing speech and fine motor skills at too young of an age
can be hazardous, because some children may need more time to
develop physically. He deduces that the acquisition of spoken
language is a natural process and points to the universality
of oral language in all cultures as his supporting evidence.
Using this common-sense reasoning, he alludes to the non-universality
of written language as proof of the inherent artificiality and
unnaturalness of written language. Therefore, as he states,
“there is no age when a child is developmentally ready by nature
for learning reading, writing, and arithmetic” (Hirsch 88).
The term “developmentally appropriate” has limited validity,
but is often misused to ignore extremely unchallenging content
and consequently promotes false senses of accomplishment through
lowered standards and inflated grades (Hirsch 249).
Despite its faulty reasoning, the progressive tradition maintains
its influence because of its intellectual monopoly in schools
of education and close association with localism, American exceptionalism,
and individualism. Progressives claim themselves to be fundamentally
right in promoting social equality and denounce educational
conservatism as heretical (Hirsch 69). Ironically, educational
progressivism, as Hirsch demonstrates, decreases social progress.
One possible reason is that it rejects national standards in
favor of local control over curriculum and teacher autonomy
(Hirsch 97). However, these local curricula remain extremely
vague, unaccountable, and ineffective. In order to discard international
research that contradicts their policies, progressives hide
behind the idea of American exceptionalism, believing that America’s
problems are too unique to be compared with other countries.
This allows them to blame society for the educational decline
among minorities, when in fact other countries with similar
minority problems, such as Jamaica or France, effectively reduce
literacy gaps between native and non-native speakers (Hirsch
92). Such countries are able to do so only because they do not
pity the victims of poverty and racial discrimination by reducing
standards and expectations as the progressive tradition in the
United States promotes.
Progressives also maintain their destructive influence by using
feel-good rhetoric that emphasizes individualism and self worth
above subject matter, contrasting the research of psychologist
Robin Dawes that finds no correlation between self-esteem and
academic accomplishment (Hirsch 100). Paradoxically, progressive
emphasis on self-esteem serves to ultimately deflate a child’s
self-esteem (Hirsch 66). Furthermore, they justify their failed
policies by denying that progressivism is the status quo, and
arguing that it has never been implemented properly (Hirsch
50). Progressives promote the problematic Romantic egalitarian
ideal of achieving equality of outcomes and discard the more
just ideal of meritocratic equality of opportunity that Hirsch
promotes (Hirsch 210).
Progressive educators deny that anything is wrong with the state
of American education today in order to make excuses for their
failed policies. Rather than find viable solutions to the racial
biases in education that national standardized tests help reveal,
progressives wrongfully attack the tests as causing problem
(Hirsch 179). They often claim that these tests are unable to
determine practical, real-world thinking skills. Hirsch states
that although there are some problems and abuses of standardized
testing, it is a mistake to eliminate them. National and state
standardized tests work to provide incentives and encourage
effort, while simultaneously identifying and correcting deficiencies
in learning (Hirsch 177). Moreover, they can unveil and correct
racial biases in education by reducing intellectual capital
gaps and inequalities of opportunity between the privileged
and underprivileged (Hirsch 41). The racial gaps in achievement
scores on the NAEP grew substantially in the decades before
the No Child Left Behind Act required states to implement their
own standardized tests (Lee 4). Even before NCLB has been completely
implemented, the racial gaps in achievement have already begun
to shrink (Toppo 1). While standardized tests are certainly
fallible, they remain the most reliable large-scale indicator
of trends in student achievement.
The state of American education is dismal. In 1995 the College
Board, faced with decades of declining SAT scores, succumbed
to progressive pressures to “renorm” its grading criteria and
thus automatically raised test scores (Hirsch 101). Rather than
find solutions to effectively deal with declining scores, the
College Board simply ignored the underlying educational failures
and contributed more to the dumbing down of society. America’s
fifteen-year-olds now rank twenty-seventh out of the thirty-nine
participating countries in the Program for International Student
Assessment mathematics tests (Hanushek 1). American science
students did not perform any better, actually falling from seventh
out of seventeen countries to fifteenth during the 1980s on
the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational
Achievement. However, during this time, “the rank order of science
achievement in core-curriculum nations rose or stayed stable,
while the rank order in noncore countries declined” (Hirsch
41). Progressives cannot easily label the findings of the IEA
as irrelevant, since American education experienced both a relative
decline compared to other countries and an absolute decline
within itself from 1966 to 1980 (Hirsch 39).
Hirsch is not entirely against non-standardized or performance-based
tests. He, in fact, promotes them within individual classrooms
(Hirsch 177). They are not effective, fair assessments at the
national level, since there are fluctuations in testing committee
standards from year to year and, moreover, within individual
graders from day to day (Hirsch 185). Portfolio assessments
are inefficient as well, since the grading process is also very
financially costly (Hirsch 263). Hirsch concludes that the best
and most reliable national assessment is a standardized multiple-choice
test combined with one essay question (Hirsch 187). This ensures
equity to all students because it eliminates the many variables
in grading procedures.
The problems of multiple-choice standardized tests include teachers
who teach narrowly to the test and not to content, districts
that use the same test from year to year and allow teachers
to know questions beforehand, and assessments that lack academic
goals and quality. Hirsch suggests following the Chicago model
in which districts choose a wide variety of assessments from
various testing agencies, and wait until the last minute before
issuing the tests to teachers. This would consequently eliminate
cheating and focusing narrowly on specific test content (Hirsch
195). Despite progressives’ criticism that multiple-choice tests
are boring and fail to tap into higher order skills, Hirsch
shows that they can provoke active and creative cognitive thought
(Hirsch 200). While the content may be inappropriate, as it
can be in essay form as well, the format of multiple-choice
tests is not (Hirsch 198).
Extending Hirsch’s Plea for Core Standards
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. makes a powerful case for the importance of
implementing common core curriculum in K-8 schools in the United
States. In doing so, he successfully shows that the quality
of our schools has diminished as a direct result of the implementation
of Romantic-based naturalism and formalism into educational
policy in the 1960s and continuing today. Perhaps the most enthralling
and motivating aspect of Hirsch’s work is his insistence on
providing equality of opportunity for underprivileged students
through the promotion of early literacy. However, Hirsch’s argument
is far from infallible. If his egalitarian aims are to be fully
achieved, the accountability created from his national core
curriculum cannot reside at the elementary level; it must be
extended into the early years of high school in order to prevent
another generation of graduates from proceeding into the work
force without the basic skills necessary for success. Furthermore,
his vague call to reform the ideology of progressivism in schools
of education must be clarified to most effectively make use
of both traditional and progressive practices, to more effectively
target mid-level students, and to recognize the influence that
progressive parents bring into the classroom.
The importance of acquiring early literacy and numeracy cannot
be overstated. Recently a high school friend of mine, an active
member in our student council, expressed resentment and embarrassment
that he graduated from high school and passed the Massachusetts
Comprehensive Assessment System without ever knowing how to
do simple long division. The life-long consequences of not having
an early grade by grade core program that ensured basic accountability
will remain with him the rest of his life. During my freshman
college teaching practicum in a fourth-grade classroom in Concord,
MA, I saw even more deleterious effects of lapses in early learning.
While the students’ abilities obviously differed, the greatest
variation amongst them was seen in the two children who had
spent their earlier school years in other, less prestigious
school systems. The quality of their work was far below the
quality of the other children, and the frustrations of both
the struggling students and teacher grew over the course of
the year.
Despite Hirsch’s convincing evidence, progressives still criticize
repetitive drill methods that stress memorization and early
literacy. They opt instead to stress the interrelationship of
disciplines and view knowledge as relevant only if it pertains
directly to students’ lives. Historian Wilfred McClay’s assertion
that “we have to resist the essentially narcissistic idea that
history is valueless unless it reflects our own image back to
us”(McClay 35) contradicts these progressive ideas on learning.
Progressivism is especially dangerous, because it leads to a
relativist and reductionist viewpoint of all knowledge and allows
students to dismiss anything they deem uninteresting at first
glance. Progressive educator George Wood argues that “an area
of study begins not with what a book says is the starting point,
but with what the students want to find out” (Wood 178). He
is naive enough to believe that students will dependably take
the incentive to learn on their own. Psychologist Sandra Scarr
shows that having prior knowledge not only makes it easier to
accumulate more knowledge, but also makes students more curious
and eager to learn. Students who lack this prior knowledge require
much more extrinsic stimulation to learn (Hirsch 26).
Hirsch’s ideas on the neurobiological processes involved in
learning are a substantial contribution to K-8 education. However,
his neglect of secondary education is discouraging to any person
who cares about the well being of our current generation of
high school students. His logic holds that if a core curriculum
was effectively implemented in K-8 schools, then future high
school students would have the necessary skills to advance into
higher-order critical thinking (Hirsch 236). As Hirsch might
have it, the next generation of incoming high school students,
who were lucky enough to have learned under effective traditional
practices, would replace a generation of outgoing high school
students who were severely inhibited by their elementary school
progressive experience. The outgoing generation of inept graduates
is not at all held accountable under Hirsch’s plan and expected
to succeed in the workforce without basic skills. There is simply
no justice in this reasoning.
I have personally experienced the consequences of being inhibited
by severe deficits in basic knowledge. During my sophomore year
in high school, I spent four months without a permanent English
teacher. Standards were so low that I succumbed to reading online
summaries of texts rather than entire novels. The results of
not having internal or external accountability in literacy during
high school are becoming more and more evident in my college
career; throughout my reading of Hirsch’s book I recorded 138
words that were initially beyond my conceptual realm of understanding.
Lacking an adequate vocabulary continues to hinder my ability
to write effectively without the constant utilization of a thesaurus
and computer spell checker. The only way to prevent more cases
of high school graduates such as myself from going into the
work force or college without basic skills and vocabulary is
to solve the problem now, not in ten years.
It is true that Hirsch may have avoided a transitional high
school core-curriculum proposal in his book in order to avoid
distracting from his main objective in promoting early literacy.
He certainly offers a plausible solution to help society in
a few years. However, the costs of not doing anything to help
the current generation of high school students are too high.
From an economic standpoint, the United States stands to lose
billions of dollars in productivity over the next ten years
if it cannot raise its achievement level up to that of even
a middle-performing European school system (Hanushek 1). At
the very least, a temporary solution must be created to help
ease the transition to Hirsch’s plan. Such a temporary proposal
would establish core curriculum in all grades until the earliest
recipients of core practices passed into high school. Then,
core standards may be gradually phased out at the upper levels.
However, Hirsch’s own evidence shows a need for permanent traditional
practices in the early years of high school. His justification
for rejecting core high school standards comes from Cornell
University researcher, John Bishop, who “shows that in the last
two years of high school, and later on, the balance of utility
shifts in favor of deeper and more narrowly specialized training
as the best education for the modern world” (Hirsch 158). Following
this evidence, it seems that freshmen and sophomores are not
receptive to progressive strategies that emphasize higher-end
learning strategies. Bishop’s evidence clearly suggests that
Hirsch’s core programs and subject-based teaching strategies
should be extended at least into the tenth grade.
Bishop’s research does not support Hirsch’s extremely vague
aim to “reform the reformers.” Instead it suggests the need
to reorganize the “half-truths” of progressive education into
a separate sphere within schools of education that deals only
with grades eleven and twelve. This would prevent schools like
Boston University from wrongly grouping prospective fifth and
twelfth grade teachers in the same educational theories and
methods courses. K-10 education would henceforth be placed within
the domain of traditional policies and would stress rote learning,
drill and practice, and whole-class instruction. Since the overall
goal of high school education is to promote lifelong learners
and critical thinkers, prospective eleventh and twelfth grade
teachers would learn how to best utilize the progressive-promoted
interdisciplinary studies, thematic units, multiple intelligences,
and metacognitive strategies that prove effective for their
students’ age group.
Knowledge-first learning strategies work best as an anterior
step to higher-learning strategies within individual courses
in later grades of high school. During my freshman writing class
in college, my professor assigned a three-step paper to analyze
a scientific ethical problem. The first written assignment simply
gathered and laid out the information relative to the issue,
while providing no personal input or criticism. The next assignment
compared the pros and cons of the issue and detailed opposing
arguments on both sides. Not until after the first two papers
were finished when opinions and analysis were forged with the
previous researched knowledge into a final synthesis. Consequently,
the final result of this cumulative assignment has been my biggest
academic accomplishment to date. These cumulative assignments
that build on prior knowledge can serve high school students
as well. The progressive alternative approach, which asks students
to provide opinions on complex issues without providing them
with sufficient background knowledge, results in superficial
conjecture at best, or extreme anxiety and frustration at worst.
Opponents of core standards in early high school grades may
charge that high schools vary too greatly from region to region
and in civic and social goals to be regulated by core standards.
They may also charge that such standards would only serve as
a dangerous step towards indoctrination. Hirsch also faced this
criticism, despite calling for fifty to sixty percent common
curriculum in elementary schools and leaving the rest up to
the local community (Hirsch 235). Hirsch’s curriculum, which
encompasses input from parents, teachers, multicultural experts,
and education theorists, proves to be far more democratic than
curriculum created by a few local policymakers. Hirsch shows
that many local communities, in the absence of national accountability,
actually often fail to develop adequate standards. In many cases,
there is a complete absence of any curriculum (Hirsch 26). The
diversity in the missions and geographies of schools shows that
America needs more, not less, curricular cohesion in its high
schools.
States also have failed to develop adequate standards. While
NCLB is a plausible first step towards national equitability
of curricula, it still leaves discrepancies between standards
in different states that may lead to unequal educational opportunities.
Professor Diane Ravitch of New York University supports elimination
of the “50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests approach” because
“many states model their testing on the national program, but
still cling to lower standards for fear of alienating the public
and embarrassing public officials responsible for education”
(Ravitch sec A). According to the NAEP, Massachusetts is leading
the country in fourth and eighth grade reading and mathematical
skills. If Massachusetts is supposedly outperforming every other
state in maintaining high quality minimum standards (Lehigh
sec A), yet cannot even hold a high school graduate accountable
for long division, the condition of our nation’s education is
worse than previously thought. Many students who had passed
their state tests with ease failed the NAEP test, thus demonstrating
that some state tests are extremely dumbed down and demand far
less from their students than other state tests do. Such discrepancies
prevent students in low standard states from competing with
students in more demanding states in college admissions and
high-skill jobs. Under NCLB’s present system, geography unfairly
determines future success. If state curricula and tests are
working as poorly as this evidence suggests, the need for national
curricular frameworks in K-10 education must be met as soon
as possible.
By concentrating narrowly on lower achieving students, Hirsch
ignores the need to push mid-level students to higher achievement.
While the intellectual capital gap should be closed through
equalizing educational opportunities, it should not be done
at the expense of other children. His promotion of minimal standards
is wrongfully seen as a utilitarian ideal. His policy helps
disadvantaged students situated at the lowest base of school
systems. However, the majority of our students is in the mid-level
range. Therefore, a utilitarian policy would target this majority
group. Otherwise, average students, intent on doing bare minimum
effort, may succumb to attaining the same levels of knowledge
as the less-able students who Hirsch targets.
The Advanced Placement Program helps motivate advanced high
school students and their teachers to work to their fullest
potential, but most students will never take such rigorous classes.
Using this AP model of year-end standardized tests for each
class, a voluntary national curriculum designed specifically
for mid-level classes, a Junior Varsity Advanced Placement Program
if you will, would be created to ensure a common consensus on
what a average American student should learn at every grade
level. This voluntary JVAP curriculum, unlike the AP Program,
could be implemented in elementary schools because it does not
promote unfair social tracking at early ages. Since Hirsch’s
core curriculum allots nearly half of the curricular decisions
to local communities, the JVAP Program could easily complement
it.
The JVAP Program would provide more accurate information on
student achievement as well. Some one-time-only tests, like
the SAT, only measure individual achievement in comparison to
how their peers perform. Others, such as the MCAS, measure school
progress or decline, by comparing how this year’s class compared
with last year’s class. This gives no true indication of yearly
progress every individual student and teacher made within a
school year; it only gives a broad indication of how a school
performs overall. The JVAP Program could solve these testing
problems because it would monitor the value each teacher added
to his or her mid-level students’ education throughout every
year. The JVAP Program would also help identify and eliminate
inefficient teachers and provide a more accurate indication
of educational progress than any existing methods. It, unlike
NCLB, prevents geography from determining student success by
nationalizing standards for mean student achievement and eliminating
discrepancies in expectations between states.
Hirsch blames schools of education for indoctrinating teachers
with the progressive fallacies of developmentalism and natural
pedagogy (Hirsch 117). He shows quite convincingly the dominance
of the progressive ideology in America’s most distinguished
teacher training colleges. However, he fails to account for
the progressive influence that parents can bring into the classroom.
In his essay, “Why Johnny Can’t Fail”, Jerry Jesness, a long
time teacher in Texas and South Dakota, highlights the destructive
impact of progressive parents in classrooms. Jesness describes
disheartening encounters with parents, who complained about
the fairness of failing their children even after they were
caught cheating. In one such case, the school’s principal supported
a failing student and even began harassing Jesness for having
an inflexible grading policy (Jesness 21). Jesness showed that
after he finally succumbed to pressure and consequently lowered
his standards, his job became easier. Fewer parents complained
as students began getting great grades. Student self-esteem
grew since they passed all of their assignments with ease. Their
behavior also improved because he no longer forced them to learn
more than they cared about (Jesness 22). This certainly exemplifies
how attractive progressive education is to teachers since it
justifies laziness. Jesness perhaps best sums up America’s attitude
with education in his statement that “Americans hate public
education because standards are low but love their local schools
because their children perform so well there” (Jesness 23).
Americans know that their children have become intellectually
lazy, but do not want anyone reminding them. Jesness also shows
that inflating grades may seem to benefit everyone in the short
run, but hurts student success and self-esteem once they enter
into college or the workforce completely unprepared.
The belief in naturalism caused an increase in the number of
less authoritarian parents in the United States, who see their
role as guiding friends rather than strict disciplinarians.
Such parents, showing clear signs of Romantic influence, are
more willing to ignore immoral behavior and support their children
when they do wrong. The belief in the fundamental goodness of
their children allows parents to shift blame away from the child
onto such things as too much stress, immaturity from youth,
and even the teacher. By demanding that teachers reduce their
standards, raise a child’s grade, or reduce the child’s punishment,
the parent is, in effect, trying to prevent the teacher from
infringing on the natural development of the child. Additionally,
many parents often use the progressive fallacy of overemphasizing
developmentally inappropriate material to inflate grades. To
them it is better to feel smart than to really be smart.
Since most progressive parents never enrolled in schools of
education, something other than “reform[ing] the reformers”
needs to be done in order to reverse the damage of progressive
education. However, education policymakers do not have the authority
to regulate how parents should raise their children at home.
They do, however, have the ability to weaken harmful progressive
influences in classrooms. This can be done by increasing the
authority of teachers through the development of fixed standards
and classroom accountability constitutions. Parents and students
would thus voluntarily adhere to these established grading procedures
and student responsibilities in the beginning of the school
year. This would certainly prevent arguments over fairness in
grading procedures from ensuing later on in the school year
and establish clear, fixed standards.
The United States depends on its educational system to pass
on its republican and democratic principles from generation
to generation, and to develop effective and innovative human
capital in order to continue its strong role in the global economy.
Despite it present pathetic state, the quality of American education
was not always so poor. During the nineteenth century, it led
the world in revolutionizing education. It effectively absorbed
a mass wave of immigrants into its schools by using subject-based,
traditional drill-and-practice methods, and consequently initiated
an ensuing century full of unprecedented economic growth and
a strong sense of American unity. When progressive policies
became mainstream in the 1960s, educational progress screeched
to a halt. Since then, due to our inability to produce native
talent, outsourcing of American jobs has increasingly threatened
our economic future. Furthermore, American universities remain
increasingly dependent on Asian and European graduate students
to fill the lack of qualified American-born teaching assistants
in undergraduate courses. No longer do we lead the world in
economic growth and technological innovation. That honor, along
with the privilege of being the next global cultural hegemony,
belongs to countries that rely on proven, empirically-based
educational theory rather than misguided, feel-good assertions.
A greater threat exists, however. If we continue on the path
of progressive educational mediocrity, the doors that have led
numerous generations of Americans to a world of higher conceptual
understanding and shared cultural values will close forever.
References
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