- Which facts?
- Who decides which facts?
Before answering these two questions, the following are some other questions to consider:
- Why does the learning gap for the haves and have nots grow wider as students move through the school in the U.S. while the opposite occurs in other countries?
- Why do more 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant students drop out of school than 1st generation immigrant students?
- What makes our schools unfair?
- What does educational justice mean?
Some points to consider while pondering the answers to these questions:
- Educational justice means equality of educational opportunity
- Imparting a universally shared core of knowledge helps overcome inequality
- Classroom learning can go forward more effectively when all students share some common points of reference
- ALL children will learn relatively well in an effective school--High quality tends to be correlated with high equity
- Some students are learning less than others because of systematic shortcomings in their schooling and social and economic differences rather than because of their own innate lack of academic ability
- New knowledge expands exponentially
- There is a "Matthew Effect"--the more background knowledge and the richer the vocabulary a learner has, the greater will be his/her ability to accumulate more knowledge
- Detailed guidelines provide clarity
- A diverse country has a greater need of a core-knowledge system than does a homogeneous one
The work of E. D. Hirsch's, Cultural Literacy, has been criticized not only in the multicultural education arena, but also in the general education arena. Yet, before criticizing him too harshly and "throwing the baby out with the bath water," it is my opinion that we need to have an understanding of why his work on core knowledge could be helpful to diverse learners:
- It addresses the snowball effect that allows a small knowledge difference in kindergarten to become a huge gap in learning within a few years
- It builds from year to year on the background knowledge learners need to be academically successful
- A teacher can identify what background knowledge a learner is missing
- It does not stipulate everything a learner should know. In fact, it is meant to comprise only 50% of the school's curriculum leaving ample time to address other learning needs, including more ethnically-centered curricula
- Because cosmopolitanism is a true friend to diversity, core knowledge has adopted a cosmpolitan approach to history and literature in order to reinforce the fact that no longer are Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and other ethnic groups invisible in the past or the present
- In order to be fair to diverse learners, it is critical that schools not neglect or reject the current dominant culture
- The Hirsch core knowledge is not the work of one person, but the work of many, including multicultural advisors, who combined scholarly research with grassroots experience to develop this sequence consensus
- It was empirical science and not ideology that originated cultural literacy and the core knowledge movement
- There is evidence that supports the connection between core knowledge and educational justice. In fact, the correlations between fairness and core knowledge are 100 percent.
As the U.S. becomes more diverse it is critical that we find ways to not only acknowledge the diversity and benefit from the richness that diversity brings, but also find ways to bring us together. It is my opinion that the principles of Hirsch's Cultural Literacy and core knowledge can help do both.
