Williams College’s Susan Engel took to the op/ed page of the New York Times yesterday to argue that education reform must include overhauling the curriculum. Engel’s column focuses on reforming the notoriously content-free early grades, starting with a lot of reading:
In [our hypothetical] classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
One qualm we have is that Engel doesn’t appear to be concerned with the quality of what students are reading or listening to. She seems, like skill-based education advocates, to consider all content equal. She in fact identifies a list of “essential skills” that should be emphasized in elementary schools: “reading, writing, computation, pattern detection, conversation and collaboration.” We concur. But we also know that these skills cannot be effectively acquired unless children have a base of knowledge to use when they are trying to figure out how to “read, write, compute, detect patterns, converse, and collaborate.” We say to Engel what we say to P21: Where’s the content?
Lynne Munson and James Elias