REAL-LIFE PROGRESSIVISM
LOOK INSIDE COMMON CORE: LESS A NEW PARADIGM THAN OLD PABLUM
Wednesday, December 24, 1992
By Robert Holland
Brother, can you paradigm? Paradigm, paradigm, everyone's touting a
new paradigm these days. Politicians, pundits, futurists, columnists,
assorted other cranks -- all God's chilluns got paradigms.
And now the State Board of Education is boasting that its draft of a Common
Core of Learning for Virginia's public schools is "based on a new paradigm, that
of transformational outcome based education." This is supposed to be the
centerpiece of the long promised World-Class Education.
Paradigm is nothing but a prissy word for model or example. The central
bureaucracy in Richmond is unveiling a New Model for public education.
Goodness knows the old model needs more than a tuneup. But Virginians
should follow the sound principle of "buyer beware." They should make sure
they are not taking delivery on a lemon. They should kick the tires and
get behind the wheel and see how this baby handles.
Copies of the 40-page document should be circulated in every school and
parents and other interested citizen should be brought fully into the review
loop before the Core's scheduled 1996 phase-in. The education department's
Common Core "Team Leader," Harvey Carmichael says that 4,000 copies of a rough
draft have gone out to school officials, but that there needs to be "much
cleaning up" of language before a public "marketing campaign kicks in. I
say forget the PR and let parents in on the ground floor.
CHANGE IS NOT the issue. Radical change -- such as Baltimore's turning
nine inner-city schools over to a private contractor, or Milwaukee's voucher
experiment -- might benefit education. The question is whether proposed
changes are for the better --indeed, if they are genuine change.
The draft asserts that "relevancy" is the most pressing issue for education
today. (Anyone else hear echoes from the "relevant" '60's when education
standards went into a nosedive?) It knocks the old ideas of knowledge for
knowledge's sake, distinct academic disciplines, paper-and-pencil testing, and
competition at which some pupils succeed and some fail. Instead, the
school of the New Paradigm should be geared to problem-solving in "real-life"
situations.
The Common Core consists of 38 "student outcomes categorized within seven
Dimensions of Living" Let me try to make a little of this real to you:
One Dimension of Living is "Environmental Stewardship." The "Life
Context" includes such assertions as these: "expanding imbalance resulting
in irreversible changes within the natural environment...a rapidly growing world
population...steadily diminishing natural resources such as fresh water, fossil
fuel, and endangered species."
The desired "Student Outcome" looks to be the production of little greenies
who will buy wholly into that gloom-and-doom scenario. How is such blatant
propaganda supposed to encourage higher-order thinking?
SOME OTHER Dimensions of Living, are "Local and Global Civic Participation,"
Interpersonal Relationships," and "Cultural and Creative endeavors." There
are repeated references to "unequal distribution of resources" (both globally
and within the United States), to "cultural diversity" and "multicultural
contact," and to being, yes, a good citizen of the world. It all sounds
New World Orderish. And vaguely ominous.
At the back of the document, a few examples are helpfully provided.
There is an instructional unit for 8-year old students --8-year-olds! -- on
homelessness. The students are supposed to sally forth into the community
to research this issue. No doubt it is old-fashioned to believe the
youngsters' time would be better spent in class reading the classics of
children's literature -- notably, regarding the homeless, Dickens.
The designers of the Common Core anticipate children as young as 4 and 5
being immersed in community activism -- indeed, early childhood education would
lead the phase in, in '96. One problem: Public education is not yet
compulsory for those ages. Does part of the master plan remain to be
told?
IS ALL THIS "real life" education truly a New Paradigm? In a history of
Virginia public schools, J. L. Blair Buck wrote of a core curriculum plan
implemented by the state in 1932 that:
Instead of continuing the conventional requirements of social studies,
science, and English for all pupils, it was proposed to allot about the same
amount of time to challenging social problems...The problems were of a kind
about which both pupil and the community might be really concerned:
problems of health, of conservation, of community improvement, and
beautification. The proposed way of studying these problems was to set the
stage for cooperation rather than competition, intuitive and self-control rather
than discipline under duress...
That pitch 60 years ago sounds an awfully lot like what has again become the
central bureaucracy's idea of revolutionary reform. In earlier days the
real-life or holistic model traded under the name of "progressivism." To
the extent that strains of that sappy philosophy are found in modern education,
intellectual rigor suffers. (Buck did write that by 1942 the attempt in
Virginia to organize instruction around "social and economic problems found very
little acceptance.")
The State Board of Education means well but it ought to re-examine the
assumptions behind its Common Core of Learning which is supposed to undergird
all learning in local schools. Attempts to impose this kind of scheme do
not have a happy history. There's not a paradigm's worth of difference in
utopias concocted by central planners. Better that the board looked to
making teachers, principals, and parents freer to innovate at the classroom
level.
Nor should competition and failure be viewed as dirty words. One learns
from failure. And students will have to compete when they leave the unreal
world inside schooling's cocoon.