E.D. Hirsch over romantische
onderwijsopvattingen als een bedreiging van echt onderwijs & core
knowledge
Woord vooraf: bijdrage
in het kader van 7 jaar O-ZON
Prof. E.D. Hirsch
richtte 30 jaar geleden in de VS de Core Knowledge- beweging op. Net zoals
O-ZON (Onderwijs Zonder ONtscholing) en Onderwijskrant staan volgens Hirsch
rijke basiskennis en degelijke instructie centraal in het onderwijs. Precies Core Knowledge maakt ook toepassingen van de
kennis mogelijk. Zonder kennis b.v. van de hefboomprinicpes kunnen toepassingen
niet begrepen worden. Hetzelfde geldt voor wiskundige basiskennis, voor de
kennis van de wiskunde als cultuurproduct. Ook voor het kunnen begrijpen van teksten
heeft men veel kennis nodig van de werkelijkheid die in die teksten aan bod
komt. Daarom ook beklemtonen we b.v. dat het voor de hogere leerjaren van het
lager onderwijs belangrijk is om uit te maken welke basiskennis voor
geschiedenis, natuurkennis en aardrijkunde aangeboden moet worden. We vinden dat dit ook
op een gestructureerde, cursorische wijze aangepakt moet worden.
Jammer genoeg werd/wordt
de voorbije 40 jaar ook bij ons het belang van (rijke) basiskennis al te vaak
en radicaal in vraag gesteld. De O-ZON beweging tegen de ontscholing en onderwaardering
van basiskennis e.d. werd precies opgericht om de balans weer in evenwicht te brengen.
Een bijdrage van E.D. Hirsch over de aanvallen op het klassieke
onderwijsconcept in de VS kan hierbij ook inspirerend zijn. Er zijn heel wat
gelijkenissen met wat zich in Vlaanderen afspeelde. In Vlaanderen hebben we
gelukkig een veel sterkere traditie inzake core knowledge en leerplannen (per leerjaar) dan in de VS.
Romancing the Child:
Curing American Education of its
Enduring Belief that Learning Is Natural
by E. D. Hirsch (Core Knowledge Foundation)
The Disney Corporations Celebration School sounded like yet
another fairy tale from the creators of
the Little Mermaid and the Lion King. It was supposed to be the ideal school,
set in Disneys newly created Florida community, Celebration. According to the New
York Times, the school was to follow the
most advanced progressive educational methods. In fact these new methods were
rebottled versions of earlier progressive schemes going back at least 100
yearsas Diane Ravitch documented in her book Left Backschemes such as multi-aged
groups in which each child goes at his or her own pace; individualized
assessments instead of objective tests; teachers as coaches rather than sages; projects instead of
textbooks.
Such methods, although they have been in use for decades,
have rarely worked well. The Celebration School was no exception. As the Times
headline put it, there was Trouble at the Happiest School on Earth. The Times
article began, The start of the school year here is just a few days away, so
it was no surprise that there was a line of parents at the Celebration School office
the other day. But the reason for the line was: they were queuing up to
withdraw their children. Parents said they were dissatisfied with the lack of
clear academic goals and measures of achievement, as well as with the lack of
order and structure that accompanied the progressive methods.
The Celebration Schools failure was wholly predictable. In
the 1980s, the distinguished sociologist James Coleman conducted carefully
controlled, large-sample research that demonstrated the ineffectiveness of
progressive methods in raising general academic achievement and in closing the achievement gap between
advantaged and disadvantaged students. Colemanfound that Catholic schools
achieve more educational equity than public schools because they follow a rich
and demanding curriculum; provide a structured, orderly environment; offer lots
of explicit instruction, including drill and practice; and expect every child
to reach minimal goals in each subject by the end of the year. All of this
stands in stark contrast to the progressive ideals of unstructured, implicit
teaching and individually tailored instruction that now predominate in public schools. As a result, disadvantaged
children prosper academically in Catholic schools, and the schools narrow the
gaps among races and social classes. When criticized for condemning public schools,
Coleman pointed out that the very same democratic results were being achieved by
the few public schools that were also defying progressivist doctrine. Along
with large-scale international
comparisons, Colemans work is the most reliable observational data that we
have regarding the validity of progressive ideas, and it has never been
refuted.
The evidence against progressive educational theories mounts
still higher if you combine Colemans data with the research on so-called
effective schools. Effective schools are characterized by explicit,
agreed-upon academic goals for all children; a strong focus on academics; order
and discipline in the classroom; maximum time on learning tasks; and frequent evaluations
of student performanceall principles repudiated by the Disney school and also
by many new education reforms. In fact, the progressive way of running a
school is essentially the opposite of what the effective-schools research has
taught us. A review of this research by the late, great scholar Jeanne Chall
may be found in The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the
Classroom? (2000).
One would think that the failures of progressivism might induce
more skepticism among both its adherents and the public. Yet the unempirical
theories of progressive educatorsgenerally dressed up with empirical
claimsremain highly influential among teachers, administrators, and distinguished
professors. Their unspoken assumptions work a hidden sway over the American public
as well. For example, test-bashing wouldnt be so popular if progressive
theories about education didnt resonate somehow with widespread American
beliefs about children and learning. One can understand why progressives should
want to bash tests, when their methods consistently fail to improve test
scores. But why should others accept the disparagement of, say, reading tests,
which are among the most valid and reliable of existing instruments?
In my mind, progressive educational ideas have proved so
seductive because their appeal lies not in their practical effects but in their
links to romanticism, the 19th-century philosophical movement, so influential
in American culture, that elevated all that is natural and disparaged all that
is artificial. The progressives applied this romantic principle to education by
positing that education should be a natural process of growth that flows from
the childs natural instincts and interests. The word nature in the romantic
tradition connotes the sense of a direct connection with the holy, lending the
tenets of progressivism all the weight of religious conviction. We know in
advance, in our bones, that what is natural must be better than what is
artificial. This revelation is the absolute truth against which experience itself
must be measured, and any failure of educational practice must be due to faulty
implementation of progressive principles or faulty interpretation of
educational results. Thus the results of mere reading tests must not be taken
at face value, because such blunt instruments cannot hope to measure the true
effects of education. The fundamental beliefs of progressivism are impervious
to unfavorable data because its philosophical parent, romanticism, is a kind of
secular theology that, like all religions, is inherently resistant to data. A
religious believer scorns mere evidences.
The Chasm Between
There are many disputes within the education field, but none
so vituperative as the reading and math warsthe battles over how best to teach
children to read and to solve arithmetic problems.These arent just disputes
over instructional techniques; they are expressions of two distinct and opposing
understandings of childrens nature and how children learn. The two sides are
best viewed as expressions of romantic versus classical orientations to
education. For instance, the whole language, progressive approach to teaching
children how to read is romantic in impulse. It equates the natural process of
learning an oral first language with the very unnatural process of learning
alphabetic writing. The emotive weight in progressivist ideas is on naturalness.
The natural is spiritually nourishing; the artificial, deadening. In the 1920s,
William Kilpatrick and other romantic progressivists were already advocating
the whole language method for many of the same reasons advanced today.
The classical approach, by contrast, declines to assume that
the natural method is always the best method. In teaching reading, the
classicist is quite willing to accept linguistic scholarship that discloses
that the alphabet is an artificial device for encoding the sounds of language.
Learn the forty-odd sounds of the English language and their corresponding
letter combinations, and you can sound out almost any word. Yet adherents of
whole language regard phonics as an unnatural approach that, by divorcing
sounds and letters from meaning and context, fails to give children a real
appreciation for reading.
The progressivist believes that it is better to study math
and science through real-world, hands- on, natural methods than through the
deadening modes of conceptual and verbal learning, or the repetitive practicing
of math algorithms, even if those old fashioned methods are successful. The
classicist is willing to accept the verdict of scholars that the artificial
symbols and algorithms of mathematics are the very sources of its power. Math
is a powerful instrument precisely because it is unnatural. It enables the mind
to manipulate symbols in ways that transcend the direct natural reckoning
abilities of the mind. Natural, real-world intuitions are helpful in math, but
there should be no facile opposition between terms like understanding,
hands-on, and real-world applications and terms like rote learning and
drill and kill. What is being killed in memorizing the multiplication table?
The progressivist says: childrens joy in learning, their intrinsic interest,
and their deep understanding.
The romantic poet William Wordsworth said, We murder to dissect;
the progressivist says that phonemics and place value should not be dissected
in isolation from their natural use, nor imposed before the child is naturally
ready. Instead of explicit, analytical instruction, the romantic wants
implicit, natural instruction through projects and discovery. This explains the
romantic preference for integrated learning and developmental appropriateness.
Education that places subject matter in its natural setting and presents it in
a natural way is superior to the artificial analysis and abstractions of
language. Hands-on learning is superior to verbal learning. Real- world
applications of mathematics provide a truer understanding of math than empty
mastery of formal relationships.
Natural
Supernaturalism
The religious character of progressivism is rarely noted
because it is not an overtly religious system of belief. Romanticism is a
secularized expression of religious faith. In a justly famous essay, T. E.
Hulme defined romanticism as spilt religion. Romanticism, he said, redirects religious
emotions from a transcendent God to the natural divinity of this world.
Transcendent feelings are transferred to everyday experiencelike treacle spilt
all over the table, as Hulme put it. M. H. Abrams offered a more sympathetic
definition of this tendency to fuse the secular and religious by entitling his
fine book on romanticism Natural Supernaturalism. The natural is supernatural.
Logically speaking, its a contradiction, but it captures the romantics faith
that a divine breath infuses natural human beings and the natural world.
In emotional terms, romanticism is an affirmation of this
worlda refusal to deprecate this life in favor of pie in the sky. In
theological terms, this sentiment is called pantheismthe faith that God
inhabits all reality. Transcendent religions like Christianity, Islam, and
Hinduism see this world as defective, and consider the romantic divinizing of
nature to be a heresy. But for the romantic, the words nature and natural
take the place of the word God and give nature the emotional ultimacy that
attaches to divinity. As Wordsworth said:
One impulse from a vernal
wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of Than all the sages can The Tables Turned (1798).
The romantic conceives of education as a process of natural
growth. Botanical metaphors are so pervasive in American educational literature
that we take them for granted. The teacher, like a gardener, should be a
watchful guide on the side, not a sage on the stage. (The word kindergartenliterally
children-gardenwas invented by the romantics.) It was the romantics who
began mistranslating the Latin word educare (ee-duh-kare), the Latin root word
for education, as to lead out or to unfold, confusing it with educere
(eh-diuke-re), which does mean to lead out. It was a convenient mistake that
fit in nicely with the theme of natural development, since the word
development itself means unfolding. But educare actually means to bring
up and instruct. It implies deliberate training according to social and
cultural norms, in contrast to words like growth and development, which
imply that education is the unfolding of human nature, analogous to a seed
growing into a plant.
The same religious sentiment that animates the romantics
fondness for nature underlies their celebration of individuality and diversity.
According to the romantics, the individual soul partakesof Gods nature. Praise
for diversity as being superior to uniformity originates in the pantheists sense
of the plenitude of Gods creation. Natures holy plan, as Wordsworth put it,
unfolds itself with the greatest possible variety. To impose uniform standards
on the individuality of children is to thwart their fulfillment and to pervert
the design of Providence. Education should be child- centered; motivation to
learn should be stimulated through the childs inherent interest in a subject,
not through artificial rewards and punishments.
Whether these educational tenets can withstand empirical examination
is irrelevant. Their validation comes from knowing in advance, with certainty,
that the natural is superior to the artificial.
A More Complicated
Nature
Plato and Aristotle based their ideas about education,
ethics, and politics on the concept of nature, just as the romantics did. A
classicist knows that any attempt to thwart human nature is bound to fail. But
the classicist does not assume that a providential design guarantees that
relying on our individual natural impulses will always yield positive outcomes.
On the contrary, Aristotle argued that human nature is a battleground of
contradictory impulses and appetites. Selfishness is in conflict with altruism;
the fulfillment of one appetite is in conflict with the fulfillment of others.
Follow nature, yes,
but which nature and to what degree?
Aristotles famous solution to this problem was to optimize
human fulfillment by balancing the satisfactions of all the human
appetitesfrom food and sex to the disinterested contemplation of truthkeeping
societys need for civility and security in mind as well. This optimizing of
conflicting impulses required the principle of moderation, the golden mean, not
because moderation was a good in itself, but because, in a secular view of
conflicted human nature, this was the most likely route to social peace and
individual happiness. The romantic poet William Blake countered, The road of
excess leads to the palace of wisdom. But again, that would be true only if a
providential nature guaranteed a happy outcome. Absent such faith in the hidden
design of natural providence, the mode of human life most in accord with nature
must be, according to Aristotle, a via media that is artificially constructed.
By this classical logic, the optimally natural must be self-consciously
artificial.
Renewed interest in evolutionary psychology has given the
classic-romantic debate new currency. Darwinian moral philosophers such as
George Williams reject the notion that evolution should be a direct guide to
ethics or to education. On the contrary, evolutionary psychology reintroduces in
its own way the classical idea that there are inherent conflicts in human
natureboth selfishness and altruism, both a desire to possess ones neighbors
spouse and a desire to get along with ones neighbor. The adjudication of these
contradictory impulses requires an anti-natural construct like the Ten
Commandments. Similarly, from the standpoint of evolution, most of thelearning
required by modern schooling is not natural at all. Industrial and
postindustrial life, very recent phenomena in evolutionary terms, require kinds
of learning that are constructed artificially and sometimes arduously on the
natural of the minda point that has been made very effectively and in detail
by David Geary, a research psychologist specializing in childrens learning of
mathematics at the University of Missouri. Geary makes a useful distinction
between primary and secondary learnings, with most school learnings, such as
the base-ten system and the alphabetic principle, being the unnatural,
secondary type.
The very idea that skills as artificial and difficult as
reading, writing, and arithmetic can be made natural for everyone is an
illusion that has flourished in the peaceful, prosperous United States. The old
codger Max Rafferty, an outspoken state superintendent of education in
California, once denounced the progressive school Summerhill, saying: Rousseau
spawned a frenetic theory of education which after two centuries of spasmodic
laboring brought forth
Summerhill
.The child is a Noble Savage, needing only to
be let alone in order to insure his intellectual salvation
Twaddle. Schooling
is not a natural process at all. Its highly artificial. No boy in his right
mind ever wanted to study multiplication
tables and historical dates when he could be out hunting rabbits or climbing trees. In the days when hunting
and climbing contributed to the survival of Homo sapiens, there was some sense
in letting the kids do what comes naturally, but when mans future began to
hang upon the systematic mastery of orderly subject matter, the primordial, happy-go-lucky,
laissez faire kind of learning had to go.
The romantic versus classic debate extends beyond the reading
and math wars to the domain of moral education. The romantic tradition holds
that morality (like everything else) comes naturally. The child, by being
immersed in real-life situations and being exposed to good role models, comes
to understand the need for sharing, kindness, honesty, diligence, loyalty,
courage, and other virtues. Wordsworths account of his own education, which he
called Growth of a Poets Mind, contained a section entitled, Love of Nature
Leading to Love of Mankind.
The romantic wishes to encourage the basic goodness of the
natural soul, unspoiled by habit, custom, and convention. The principal means
for such encouragement is to develop the childs creativity and imaginationtwo
words that gained currency in the romantic movement. Before the romantics,
using the term creativity for human productions was considered impious.
But that ended when the human soul was conceived as inherently
godly. Moral education and the development of creativity and imagination went
hand in hand. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, textbooks like the McGuffey
Readers strongly emphasized moral instruction and factual knowledge. With the
rise of progressive ideas, however, the subject matter of language arts in the
early grades began to focus on fairy tales and poetry. The imparting of
explicit moral instruction gave way to the development of creativity and
imagination. Imagination, the romantic poet and essayist Samuel Taylor
Coleridge said, brings the whole soul of man into activity.
When we exercise our imaginations, we connect with our
divine nature, develop our moral sensibilities.
Romance or Justice?
One cannot hope to argue against a religious faith that is
impervious to refutation. But there can be hope for change when that religious faith
is secular and pertains to the world itself. When the early romantics lived
long enough to experience the disappointments of life, they abandoned their romanticism.
This happened to Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. One of Wordsworths most moving
works was the late poem, Elegiac Stanzas, which bade farewell to his faith in
nature.
Similar farewells to illusion were penned by the other
romantics. There is a potential instability in natural supernaturalism.
Romantic religion is vulnerable because it is a religion of this world. If
ones hopes and faith are pinned on the here and now, on the faith that
reading, arithmetic, and morals will develop naturally out of human nature,
then that faith may gradually decline when this world continually drips its
disappointments.
So far, progressivism has proved somewhat invulnerable to
its failures. But its walls are beginning to crumble, and none too soon. Only
when widespread doubt is cast on public educations endemic romanticism will we
begin to see widespread improvements in achievement. Everyone grants that
schooling must start from what is natural. But schooling cannot effectively
stay mired there. With as much certainty as these things can be known, we know
that analytical and explicit instruction works better than inductive, implicit
instruction for most school learning. To be analytical and explicit in
instruction is also to be artificial. Also, it is to be skeptical that children
will naturally construct for themselves either knowledge or goodness.
The romantic thinks nature has a holy plan. The classicist,
the modernist, and the pragmatist do not. And neither does the scientist. In
the end, the most pressing questions in the education wars are not just
empirical, scientific questions, but also ethical ones regarding the
unfortunate social consequences of the progressive faith, especially the perpetuation
of the test-score gaps among racial and economic groups. Are we to value the
aesthetics of diversity and the theology of spilt religion above social
justice? That is the unasked question that needs to be asked ever more insistently.
Economic and political justice are strenuous goals. They cannot be achieved by
doing what comes naturally.
This article originally appeared in a 2001 volume of
Education Next, and was adapted from a speech given at Harvard University in
October 1999.
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