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What Do They Know?
Reclaiming the K-12 canon from John Dewey.
by M.D. Aeschliman
1/20/2007 12:03:00 AM, Volume 012, Issue 19
The Knowledge Deficit
Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children
by E.D. Hirsch Jr.
Houghton Mifflin, 192 pp., $22
"The effect of John Dewey's philosophy on the design of curricular systems was devastating," Richard Hofstadter wrote nearly 50 years ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. The disastrous effects of the progressive educational ideology on our K-12 public school system have become even
more pervasive and entrenched since Hofstadter wrote those words. Yet government reports such as A Nation at Risk (1983) and comparative international surveys of American educational incompetence have elicited healthy responses and a growing, bipartisan movement of educational reform at the local, state, and federal levels.
Despite difficulties, defects, and even dangers, the No Child Left Behind Act is the most important national, top-down, federal educational initiative since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s that destroyed de jure segregation. Its indispensable testing provisions give us descriptive and diagnostic pictures of state and district educational performance without which real accountability, remediation, and repair are simply impossible.
Along with the top-down national effort, and earlier and continuing state initiatives, there have been complementary, bottom-up, grassroots educational reform initiatives of great promise. In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch highlights the most important and valuable of these efforts when he commends "the heroes of the systematic phonics movement, who through their efforts have now brought effective teaching" of literacy into many schools. Charter schools, new or revived religious schools, and voucher programs are other local, state, or private initiatives that have begun to bring beneficial ...
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