On the day before Christmas Eve author and educator Marion Brady contributed what can be characterized as a confused and joyless blog to the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet.” Among his assertions:
- Stop expecting—and paying for–students older than 10 to attend class each day.
- Gather students in groups of 25 and teach them in homes instead of schools.
- Eliminate not just grade and age levels but school buses and athletic fields, too.
Most of all, Brady argued that we should blame the weaknesses of our public schools on the decision in 1893 to adopt a core curriculum in history, math, science, English, etc. because it “pulled [the young] out of apprenticeships and other real-world learning experiences, [and] put [them] in rooms insulated from the real world.” For those who think that all children deserve to possess knowledge beyond the most practical and applied of experiences, and that there is a world beyond their neighborhood and family, Brady’s ideas are no less than maddening.
CC board co-chair Diane Ravitch had these additional insights:
Marion Brady’s article is really misleading. On the one hand, the author says the schools have gone wrong since 1893, when they adopted the idea of a core curriculum for all, but on the other hand Brady wants to save the universal public schools (that have had a core curriculum since 1893).
If Brady doesn’t like the idea of a core curriculum (history, science, literature, the arts, civics, geography, mathematics, foreign languages for all), perhaps Brady might be willing to tell us which children should be excluded from the study of these subjects. Would it be Brady’s grandchildren? Certainly not mine! Would it be the children of the poor? Children of color? Since our schools prepare students to participate in and lead our democracy, I don’t see why any of them should be denied access to the study of science or history or civics or literature or the arts.
This is a very confused article, which is right to criticize the so-called “Race to the Top,” but which advocates an alternative that has never existed.
Lynne Munson and Diane Ravitch
Being unfamiliar with this site, I don’t know whether or not my response to the above actually made it to the comment section.
I’m unwilling to repeat it, but with apologies if it did, I’ll say again that my problem isn’t with “the core,” but with the assumption that the core is adequate, that sense can be made of reality via a random assortment of specialized studies, without regard for either the fields of knowledge they ignore, or the systemic relationships of those they happen to treat.
Agreeing with me:
Alfred North Whitehead: “[We must] eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of the modern curriculum.” – Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, 1916.
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “That our universities have grave shortcomings for the intellectual life of this nation is by now a commonplace. The chief source of their inadequacy is probably the curse of departmentalization.” – Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead’s The Aims of Education, Mentor 1948.
Leon Botstein: “”We must fight the inappropriate fragmentation of the curriculum by disciplines . . .” – The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 1982, P. 28.
Neil Postman: “There is no longer any principle that unifies the school curriculum and furnishes it with meaning.” – Phi Delta Kappan, January 1983, p. 316.
John Goodlad: “The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” – A Place Called School, McGraw-Hill, 1984, p.266).
Ernest Boyer: “All of our experience should have made it clear by now that faculty and students will not derive from a list of disjointed courses a coherent curriculum revealing the necessary interdependence of knowledge.” – Paraphrase by Daniel Tanner in his review of Boyer’s book High School. Phi Delta Kappan, March 1984, p. 10.
Harlan Cleveland: “It is a well-known scandal that our whole educational system is geared more to categorizing and analyzing patches of knowledge than to threading them together.” – Change, July/August 1985, p. 20.
Robert Stevens: “We have lost sight of our responsibility for synthesizing knowledge.” – Liberal Education, Vol. 71, No. 2, 1985, p.163.
Buckminster Fuller: “American education has evolved in such a way it will be the undoing of the society.” – Quoted in Officer Review, March 1989, p.5.
Peter M. Senge: “From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden, enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.” – The Fifth Discipline, Currency Doubleday 1990, p.3.
Thomas Merton: “The world itself is no problem, but we are a problem to ourselves because we are alienated from ourselves, and this alienation is due precisely to an inveterate habit of division by which we break reality into pieces and then wonder why, after we have manipulated the pieces until they fall apart, we find ourselves out of touch with life, with reality, with the world, and most of all with ourselves.” – Contemplation In a World of Action, Paulist Press, 1992, p.153.
Association of American Colleges: “We do not believe that the road to a coherent education can be constructed from a set of required subjects or academic disciplines.” – Integrity In the College Curriculum, A Report to the Academic Community, Project On Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees, 1985.
Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching: “The disciplines have fragmented themselves into smaller and smaller pieces, and undergraduates find it difficult to see patterns in their courses and relate what they learn to life.” – Prologue to “College: The Undergraduate Experience In America,” November 1986
I’ve no wish to antagonize, although posting a criticism of the core curriculum on a site titled “Common Core” may make that unavoidable.
I simply believe, along with those well-known and respected indviduals I quoted in the previous post, that the core curriculum isn’t up to the challenge.
Here’s one way I’ve tried to make my point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7Yf2xNDTVs
And here’s a piece that appeared on Truthout.com that’s a more general take on the present situation as I see it.
http://www.marionbrady.com/articles/2009-EdReformTruthoutNov11.pdf
Marion