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.