Summer affords all educators some much-needed time to reflect upon and improve our practice and industry. Like many of you, I am bent on mastering the art and science of teaching and my latest quest for answers took me to a book that most would find terribly dense and boring: The Struggle for the American Curriculum from 1893-1958 by Herbert Kliebard. It’s a book for those curriculum nerds like me who want to understand why we teach what we teach. It’s a short history of the key curriculum changes in American secondary schools during the early 1900s.
Kliebard begs to explain why we do what we do and he names the men (very few women voices were heard in the 1920s and 30s) whose philosophies shaped what was (and is) taught in American schools. This list of thinkers includes John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, Charles Eliot and others. While I would not recommend the book to the casual reader (it’s certainly not a page-turner), I would suggest it to anyone who is thinking about tinkering with curriculum standards in any school or district.
The text brings to light a long-standing battle over what should be taught in our schools and what kinds of citizens (and thinkers) we’re trying to craft for the next generation. This is very much the point of this blog in developing leaders with a true instructional soul. It brings us to one of the key questions surrounding learning in our schools: What’s the point of studying all of this history, science, and literature if it doesn’t serve to make us deeper thinkers and better communicators? In other words: “So what?”
What to Teach? What’s the Point?
So what if I know the policy of the Jacobin party during the French Revolution? So what if I know that it was Mark Antony and not Brutus who gave the last funeral speech in Julius Caesar? If we do what Covey (and many others) ask and “begin with the end in mind” we force ourselves as curriculum leaders to wonder aloud about the things that kids are learning in school and whether they are critical to our end-goal of informed citizens who are critical thinkers and readers – a highly literate faction who can write and speak with a command of the language and a knowledge of the world around them.
Let’s make something clear. I would never advocate that young students not have an understanding the French Revolution or other key events in history. Nor would I support excluding the reading of Shakespeare from our schools. Still, I would support the exclusion of the trivial details that our students are asked to memorize for tests and I would replace all that instructional time with a greater inclusion of cross-curricular connections that help students see their studies as sense-making activities that are pieces of a “great picture.”
That phrase – “great picture” — comes from a report that is referenced in Kliebard’s book (p. 235). In 1935, the National Council of Teachers of English issued a report titled A Correlated Curriculum in which the council members argue for greater correlations between English and other subjects. “The failure to correlate the various subjects of instruction leaves the student unaware of their connections as related parts of the scheme of life.”
Kliebard’s book also spends a great deal of time addressing the key recommendations (and squabbles) among the Committee of Ten, a group of thinkers who in 1893 issued a report that was designed to standardize what was taught in schools. In its report, the committee tackles the teaching of history and social studies and includes a number of value statements that serves to “broaden and cultivate the mind” and to “prepare the pupil in eminent degree for enlightenment and intellectual enjoyment in after years” (meaning the years after formal schooling ends) (p. 239).
What to Think. How to Think.
Of course, most of that kind of lofty thinking was rebuffed and replaced with a more pedantic list of content specific names and dates. David Snedden (1917) was one of the most outspoken critics of the “memorization of highly concentrated facts and generalizations of almost encyclopedic extent and variety.” As Kliebard puts it: “For Snedden, it proved diffcult to imagine how facts and generalizations in history would function in the future lives of students” (p. 240). Unfortunately, there were (and still are) too few David Sneddens with too little clout.
Even today, most middle schools and high schools suffer from too much teaching of too much stuff – and nearly all of it is loosely connected or disconnected from what is taught in the classroom across the hall. That is why I make a plea for teaching less stuff well.
In a report issued by the Yale University faculty in 1828, the professors there made an impassioned call for a system of education that focused on two things: “the discipline and the furniture of the mind” (original papers, 1829, p. 300). In short, they were referencing the powers of the mind to think critically (discipline) and the actual content knowledge (furniture) that was needed for students to function in society (Kliebard, p. 5). The balancing of those disparate missions continues today with the furniture winning out in most schools on most days.
Maybe it’s time for a little more mental discipline in our schools whilst the furniture be paired down to only what is necessary, and the rest taken to the curb and sold at cost.
