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

(Page 4 of 5)

First of all, I recognize that I can’t, as George Counts said in his 1932 essay, "Dare the School Build a New Social Order?" bring the entire universe into my classroom. So I try hard not to do what I think Hirsch would have me do, what a lot of teachers in other places have always done: Presented with an ever larger body of information and the same number of minutes per year in which to teach it, they go faster. Both my daughters, after having been educated in progressive settings at PS 234 and at Bank Street, encountered the much more traditional textbook approach in high school. They played along, learned to deal with volume, maybe became a little more culturally literate, and had good averages. But when my younger daughter, who is a high school senior, tells me that she has difficulty remembering much about the history she learned even last year, I know why.

I take my time. But I also embrace the idea of knowing a little bit about a lot of things: I try to structure homework assignments and less formal class discussions so as to establish a class culture in which children expect of each other and themselves that they are paying attention to the world. Current events, student led, is an important part of our week. The fact that I’m not at the helm allows time and opportunities for children to talk about a variety of topics and to figure out what they know and don’t know about them. The ability to know the difference, to be able to articulate the right questions is often better than to know the right answers. I’ve noticed that students make frequent and natural references to social studies concepts and events in those discussions, but more important, as time goes by, they pick up the mantle of responsibility to know things.

Next, I try consciously to make bridges between what we’re studying and everything else. When I used to study China, for example, if we were studying art, I would have students compare a scroll painting to a Winslow Homer painting, a Tu Fu poem with a Shelley. Now, in the midst of a study of the 19th century in America that focuses mostly on slavery and the Civil War, students are doing independent research on topics, the scope of which goes from the more obvious ones like railroad building and the Gold Rush, to less predictable ones like the history of the treatment of the mentally ill and the invention of the flush toilet and its implications for the growth of cities. I also have held my students responsible for a common body of factual information, general knowledge that I don’t think kids should be without. For example, I compel my students to learn to label a blank map of the US with the names of the fifty states, and spelling counts.

The last piece of it, which really relates to the very first- the scarcity of time- is that I expect a good chunk of the cultural education of my students to come from their other-than-social studies and out-of-school observations and experiences. Of course, social and economic class issues pervade this part: Families in which parents are well educated and have disposable income and extra time (for trips and cultural events, for example), or those who are already lifelong learners and explorers, are, in general, more likely to pick up the ball and be teachers of their children outside of school. The issue of the role of class in education is complex in itself and I wouldn’t presume to deal with it here, except to mention its enormous importance and our ongoing commitment to learn about it and address it directly.

Continued

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