But What About the Donner Party?:
What’s Important to Know?

(Page 3 of 5)

Seeing children develop this kind of understanding of human history is very satisfying. So, as a teacher, after you get the hang of it, you begin to become a believer, and this methodology slides quietly from your intellect into your soul, into who you are morally, what you stand for as a teacher. Children get the sense that their learning matters to their teachers, and this, in itself, is a powerful part of what happens here. As a result, students take their studies seriously and they become people who can think and communicate remarkably well. Probably the two most frequent responses made by visitors to my class are, "They are so articulate!" and "How do you get so many of them to talk so willingly?" They are articulate because they have a lot of practice at expressing themselves, and they want to because by the time they are twelve, participating in discussions is part of who they are. We expect it of our students, but they already expect it of themselves.

There is an important consequence of these core values. It has to do with what E.D. Hirsch calls cultural literacy. Hirsch argues that in order to participate fully in the life of your culture, you have to know about thousands of things, and that in some ways, it’s more important to know a little bit about a lot of things than a lot about a few things. When we read, he maintains, underlying the topic, underlying even the vocabulary and the syntax, each piece is packed with dozens of more or less obvious cultural references. If you don’t know anything about these ideas your comprehension of a piece will be undermined. He demonstrated this by having two groups of educated English-speaking adults, one from the U.S. and the other from New Delhi, read articles from their local newspapers and each other’s. In a comprehension test, the Indians fared better on the articles from their local paper and the Americans on the ones from the New York Times, although in terms of vocabulary and syntax, the articles were comparable. Hirsch’s recommendation was that, to get all kids up to cultural speed, the content of school curriculum in this country must be presented briskly and in great volume. It is pretty much the opposite of what most of us around here call the Bank Street way.

Hirsch feels that children, especially those who are more isolated by circumstances from exposure to the larger world, have to be given the tools to understand what’s written in our culture today. Hirsch feels that not teaching these cultural references to children is to shortchange them, to close doors on them, keep them parochial, and to preclude theor possibility of participating fully in the life of our country and effecting change.
I agree with him that it’s necessary to be culturally literate, but I disagree with his prescriptive what-every-seventh-grader-should-know curriculum and his hand-over-fist curriculum delivery system.

So what do I do?

Continued

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