School Leader

From Socialist Teacher to Conservative Professor

This essay was originally published on the website The Chalkboard Review on December 8, 2020. Sometime in 2022 the website was purchased by new owners who, without notifying me, removed all of my published essays. Given that the website operator has failed to respond to my inquiries about this removal, I can only conclude that my essays were deleted because of the philosophical or policy content. Therefore I am reposting these essays here.

Geographically, I have not traveled far as an educator. While I have lived away for a period of years, the university where I now serve as professor of education administration is the in the same town where I began my career as a social studies teacher at a nearby middle school 24 years ago. I live just 25 miles from where I grew up, the son of an elementary school teacher who never anticipated his own career as an educator.

Philosophically, though, my journeys have been broad, from socialist to libertarian to conservative. My core values have, by and large, never changed, but my understanding of how to effectively enact those values, especially in public policy and particularly in education, have shifted considerably. In a time when teachers unions and other forces within the education establishment try to pretend educators are monolithic in their (progressive to leftist radical) political views, it is more important than ever to tell our personal stories of dissent against the myth that teachers all share common views of school choice, pension reform, accountability, or even the purpose of education itself.

My parents were hard-working Baptists. There were socially conservative but between my factory worker father’s New Deal, labor-focused life experience and my schoolteacher mother’s Civil Rights era progressivism, by high school I had inherited a pretty ferocious left-leaning view of the world that made me decidedly liberal for our little Southern town. It was all deeply imbued with the Christian Social Gospel, a concern for justice and fairness for “the least of these, my brothers.”

When I started reading political theory in late high school, I discovered a strain of socialism that portended to be “democratic” and I was soon a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Contemporary socialist star Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez was in diapers at that point in time. Outside a small circle of left-wing political nerds, no one knew who Burlington mayor turned congressman Bernie Sanders was, but I did. I was reading Dissent, Mother Jones, and In These Times, organizing student groups to protest the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, writing screeds that I tried to pare down as op-eds for the college newspaper, and wondering how I could make a living as a professional agitator with a degree in philosophy and religious studies.

After a year of graduate school studying religious ethics, I was looking for a way to be more “in the trenches” serving “the people” while also devoting time to writing and activism, and that’s when I first considered becoming a teacher. A few semesters later I had turned a minor in history into a certificate and was teaching middle school.

The year was 1996. A well-read libertarian friend was poking holes in my socialist worldview and I started picking up copies of Reason and Liberty magazine. The charismatic and well-spoken Harry Browne was the Libertarian Party candidate for president that year and he deeply impressed me. But the most important factor in me giving up socialism was becoming a public school teacher.

I was in a great school, but even as a first-year teacher, I immediately saw the enormous waste and inefficiencies of the system. I saw how many children were being poorly served, despite the best efforts of many teachers, because a government monopoly inevitably tends toward one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately leave untold numbers of kids behind. I saw how unprepared I was a teacher for what my students really needed, how weak and inconsistent the curriculum was across classrooms, and, sadly, I saw incompetence on the part of some portion of my colleagues that was routinely ignored by school leaders and defended by their unions or professional associations.

I loved my job, but I could see that the public school system was deeply flawed, and its flaws mirrored virtually all of the bureaucratic, top-down, impersonal structures of socialism that were supposed to bring about equality of outcomes and peace on earth but never did, and in fact had historically wrought misery.

Over the next decade or so I drifted from right-libertarianism to left-libertarianism and back depending on which party held political power and what the major issues of the day were. I loved the clean, logical consistency of libertarianism even though I knew well there wasn’t a single place in history where such a system could be found in practice. But the realities weren’t that important because I was childless and busy building a career and had little time for practical politics anyway. My plans to be a professional rabble rouser quickly gave way to a new trajectory. I moved rapidly from teaching into school administration, eventually landing in a district-level role, earning a PhD along the way.

My views began to shift again when I started a family and became a professor at the college where I had earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree. I want to avoid over-generalizing because there is still much I admire in libertarianism, but it is a philosophy that tends to assume humans are totally free and unencumbered individuals just sort of floating in space until they voluntarily choose to associate with others for mutual benefit, or until someone else’s will is imposed on them, which always involves violence and something akin to slavery.

I did not find that view of the human person or of society particularly helpful as a parent. My children and I are bound together by love, yes, but also of necessity and nature. We don’t choose our families, and families are the most basic and necessary structures of human society.

Atomized individuals can’t effectively raise kids. Strong, intact families matter, something I had already observed in my own students. Whether their own families attend or not, healthy kids need lots of people in their community to regularly attend churches that actually press them to become better human beings and not just feel good about themselves (what sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” the de fact religion of most American Christians). Successful families also need strong neighborhoods, vibrant communities of voluntary associations like sports leagues, church youth groups, and civic organizations that engage people in service to and with their neighbors.

All of these “intermediate institutions,” as the great conservative sociologist Robert Nisbett called them, have experienced enormous decay over the generations in ways directly related to the hyper-individualist, Progressive-driven, endless expansion of government on the one hand and the classically liberal/libertarian, all-mighty free market on the other, aided and abetting by a militantly secular (and later I would discover, Marxist) shift in Western culture itself.

I saw all of this first hand as a parent and as an educator. It didn’t happen overnight, but one day I woke up and knew I was a conservative in the sense that Russell Kirk understood the word. Tradition and values matter in preserving a civilization worth handing on to our children.

Kirk saw conservativism as an attitude and disposition more than a political program. But the conservative worldview has real policy implications, and I saw those more clearly than ever in education. From the professional protection and distance of a tenured university professorship, I began pursuing education policy work, especially around the issue of school choice. These efforts led to my involvement as a policy advisor and supporting scholar for state-level education reform groups, and eventually to an appointment on the state board of education.

The education establishment in my state, desperate to maintain its monopoly, has ferociously fought back against any effort to expand education choice for families yearning to give their children a different option. Thus far school choice supporters have lost more battles than we’ve won, but every day momentum builds, especially as parents have become more aware of how their children are doing in school during COVID and how every kid has unique needs not just any school can meet.

But conservatives have more to contribute to education policy than just school choice. The excellent collection of essays issued earlier this year, How to Education an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, makes clear that conservatives should care not just how education is delivered, but about its actual content.

In my own experience, far too many schools, whether public, private, or charter - and far too many educators, including conservatives - have implicitly or explicitly adopted the attitude that education is all about vocational preparation: how we sort kids toward careers and train them in work habits that will make them productive contributors to the economy.

Certainly, this is an important goal for our schools, but it neglects the much older purpose of education, and one that is deeply connected to the cultivation of culture and the protection of our civilizational heritage. The first goal of schooling is to help families and communities cultivate virtuous citizens. The classical sense of liberty is to be free enough of selfishness that one can actually choose the good, the true, and the beautiful. And this should once again be the self-conscious goal of schools.

Along these lines, I have increasing turned my attention toward the dearth of meaningful instruction in social studies, science, and the arts, especially in early grades, and how standards and curricula in those subjects can be improved for all schools. I have argued that schools should not be shy about training students to be critical patriots, capable of loving their country even as they recognize and understand her many flaws. The battle for school choice definitely goes on, but there’s a battle to be fought for higher quality learning in all schools, no matter who they serve.

With such a journey from socialist to libertarian to conservative, is there a chance my views will change yet again in the future? I certainly hope I continue learning new things, appreciating new perspectives, and growing in wisdom.

What seems clear to me is that for the most part, my values have not changed in all these years, but only the means by which I think we best get there. I maintain the same commitment to equality of opportunity as I did as a loud, young, socialist teacher, but now with a much greater appreciation for the role that robust institutions of family, church, local communities, civic organizations, and other structures of civil society play in accomplishing those goals – and a deep concern to guard them for the future generations.

Meanwhile my intellectual past gives me a common language with – and a great deal of understanding and compassion for – those who occupy the political and philosophical spaces I used to tread. Though we may differ about tactics, I still believe the vast majority of educators share the same goals for what our schools should accomplish, and so there is much work to be done through constructive disagreement, and I still welcome that conversation.

Restoring the purposes of Catholic education

I've recently joined the team at Missio Dei, a network publication of Catholic writers dedicated to evangelization through the written word. My first two essays were on theological themes. The first was on the Christian conception of love (caritas) and the second explored the resurrection of the dead and why this is such an important Catholic teaching. But my last two essays have turned back toward my core area of expertise: education.

As a former Catholic school teacher and principal, and now as a Catholic parent, I'm keenly interested in the quality and integrity of Catholic education. In Restoring the "Catholic" in Catholic Schools I argue that while Catholic schools have seen a recent surge in enrollment, we should expect this to last. The learning in many Catholic schools is increasingly similar to their secular, government-run schools. Catholic schools need to rediscover their core reason for existence, and orient their work toward three purposes, and in the proper order. Read the whole thing here.

As a follow up, my most recent essay is geared toward Catholic parents, who should understand themselves to be the primary teachers of their children. Parents are even more responsible that teachers for seeing that  children grow up immersed in the core purposes of Catholic education and embed those principles in the everyday life of the family. I offer a 7-part roadmap for Catholic parenting.

My hope is to build on both of these essays with tools geared toward Catholic educators and parents for further discussion, reflection, prayer, and planning.

Memory and hope: Restoring temporal continuity in our teaching of American history

Update: I was delighted to have a version of this essay published by The Imaginative Conservative.

In my most recent series of essays (see links below) I've argued for a much more intentional and self-consciously patriotic approach to the teaching of American history and civics. I have repeatedly cited political scientist Eliot A. Cohen's essay, "History, Critical and Patriotic" as a key inspiration. Cohen argues that there is no contradiction between nurturing in students an appreciation for America's past and form of government and also acknowledging the failures of our past and our collective struggle to live up to the core principles of the nation's founding. 

Nevertheless, some social studies educators have reacted to my proposal with deep skepticism, insisting - often in direct contradiction to my own words - that I am seeking to indoctrinate students in some type of blind allegiance to America that denies her complicated and often morally messy past.

What is indoctrination, however, is the approach to American history that has pervaded our schools over the last generation, one that is so common many social studies teachers have taken it for granted as the American story and the way to teach it to students. This approach presents America in the worst possible light, distorting the full truth of our past and ultimately damaging our political health.

In my last post I cited Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen's essay, Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange, to support this concept of the critical patriot. I've taken further inspiration from another essay by Deneen, found in the same collection, Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, called "Progress and Memory: Making Whole Our Historical Sense" (text of an early version, presented as a speech, can be accessed here).

In "Progress and Memory," Deneen argues that three key ideologies tend to dominate American political thought, each with its own distorted attitude toward time, particularly the past. Deneen identifies these maladaptive philosophies, which promote various kinds of disconnection between present, past, and future, as liberalism, progressivism, and nostalgism. He argues for the concept of "temporal continuity," which he associates with a healthy conservatism, that unites a "felt-presence of past and future in the present."

I believe that temporal continuity is precisely what is missing from our current approach to the teaching of American history and civics in many of our K-12 schools, primarily because of the dominance of liberal and progressive ideas within the education establishment. A restoration of temporal continuity could be a key to revitalizing history and civics education that forms young people who both appreciate the gifts of the past and also possess the capacity for independent and critical thinking, especially as they engage as virtuous citizens in our democratic republic.

Deneen argues that liberalism, which originates primarily in the thought of John Locke (but also proto-liberals like Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, and Hobbes), "begins with a radical critique of the ancestral:"

That which is bequeathed us from the past is understood to be a form of generational oppression...Liberalism inaugurates a project in legitimacy that can only be conferred upon a human institution when that institution has been chosen...The anthropology of liberalism divorces us from time past and time future. Humans are de-cultured and a-historical creatures: in the State of Nature there is only Now-time, absent culture or memory, history or planning...The claims of the ancestral - of the past - are to exert no preferential claim upon us.

I remember from my own experiences learning - and then teaching - social studies, that we took (and taught) the construct of the social contract as a given. That the purpose of governments was to secure maximum liberty, understood as the freedom to do as we please as long as we don't interfere with the "right" of others to do as they please. The liberal lens tends to see history as one long struggle to liberate individuals to pursue their own happiness in a realm of pure choice, free of the stifling restraints of family, religion, and societal expectations. 

So consider the common way the Pilgrims are now presented in American classrooms. They are not heroes of religious freedom, brave political pioneers whose Mayflower Compact helped lay the groundwork for self-government in America. No, the Pilgrims were intolerant theocrats who suppressed the religious liberties of dissenters in their midst and brought disease and destruction upon the Native Americans. That both of these things is, at least partially, true is too complex a picture for the liberal mind bent only on advocating for the perpetual liberation of the individual over the very society which forms him.

Meanwhile, progressivism is a form of liberalism that is utterly dissatisfied with the personal "liberty" liberalism alleges to have secured for us. It is not enough to be free, we must also seek a particular kind of justice. Simply put, the present is not good enough, and progressives fix their eyes on an idealized future.

If liberalism put all human institutions on the footing of choice - even family - Progressivism regarded all such institutions as fundamentally illegitimate, partial expressions of our true social and even "cosmic" consciousness. Thus Progressivism set in its sights all partial and intermediary institutions, whether marriage, family, church, fraternal association, neighborhood, partial political units such as the States, even and ultimately the Nation itself. In the end all such partial allegiances were to be dissolved in favor of the universal embrace of humanity itself, and thus - in the name of the Future - efforts to accelerate the dissolution of those partial associations were justified in the present...Egalitarianism is posited as a desirable future condition, an aspiration that justifies the beneficent and paternalistic rule of sufficiently progressed elites in the Present.

And thus, with the heightened presence of progressivism in our schools and culture, our education system has tilted even further toward a theory of history that encourages young people to seek out the villains, and to see the past and our collective political and social heritage as a collection of crushingly conformist and illegitimate institutions that must be eliminated in the name of equity, grievance, or restitution for past wrongs. Perhaps the best example of this attitude is captured in the New York Times' historically inaccurate 1619 Project, which has been adopted as a curriculum in numerous schools around the U.S.

E pluribus unum: Another essential principle of "patriotic" American history

Update, 10/28/20: Portions of this post recently appeared as an essay published by The Imaginative Conservative called, "What is Patriotic Education?"

My on-going series (see parts 1, 2, and 3 linked below) of posts calling for a more patriotic approach to the teaching of American history has generated a range of reactions, some very negative, from a handful of educators. In a Twitter exchange with a social studies educator, I was admonished for using the term "our collective identity as Americans." He claimed that the phrase "sounds awfully racist."

His suggestion that it might be racist to believe we have a national identity that is bigger and more encompassing than our individual racial, religious, or other identity-group affiliations perfectly illustrates why I think we need a more comprehensive and appreciative approach to American history.

In my most recent post, I articulated the key values, principles, and assumptions of patriotic history, and I argued that those were also the exact same principles, values, and beliefs that motivated the American Founding and its central documents and structure of governance.

But evidently I overlooked another essential principle, which is encapsulated in our national motto, "E pluribus unum" - "from the many, One."

For the American republic to function, we do indeed need to have an understanding that while we or our ancestors came from many different places and in many different ways, while we are plural in our religious traditions and ways of life, we nevertheless share a common bond as Americans.

And it is through that bond - forged in faith that our Founding principles are good and true and enduring enough to be defended and to guide our path forward to a "more perfect union," that we will overcome our on-going economic, social, cultural, and political challenges.

Few Americans embodied that faith better than Martin Luther King, Jr.

Commemorating the MLK holiday earlier this year, the Dallas Morning News editorial board celebrated his "audacious faith in the future:"

The central tenet of the American experiment, and really the democratic experiment, is that people are not made to organize themselves into perpetually warring tribes and factions. The promise is that, in a democracy, a plural people can live together in harmony and prosperity in a system where each voice matters.

King believed in that possibility. He believed in the American experiment, even as he viewed it in the unsentimental light of a man who had experienced its oppression, its contradictions and the consequences of the lies about humanity that had made slavery and segregation possible.

Nevertheless, he believed.

As King saw it, the citizen of good conscience had to work not to tear down America but rather to insist that it live up to its ideals, its founding principles of liberty, but that it do this work while facing its failure to fully embrace the promise of equality.

This is what sets MLK aside from today's iconoclasts who seek to destroy monuments to American figures as diverse as Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, who tell an historically inaccurate version of America that implies we have made no progress as a people, and that in fact the American experiment was corrupt and racist from the start and must be torn down and replaced by....something. Their vision of the future is not audacious, like Martin Luther King's. It is simply a future of violence and silencing of opposition and tyranny.

There is no "America" when there is nothing that unifies us beyond our different identities and divisions.

As I have said repeatedly, this kind of audacious faith in America does not involve "whitewashing" our history, neglecting to explore the contradictions between our professed values and our lived experience. It is rather to tell the whole story of our past, which includes the bad with the good. This is why I have so frequently quoted political scientist Eliot Cohen and his call for a history that is both "critical and patriotic."

Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, writing just after the events of September 11, 2001 in an essay called Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange, thoughtfully explored this dynamic between patriotism and criticism, or what he termed political theory.

Patriotism is not always a good thing, Deneen reminds us. The word theory, he explains, comes from a Greek word that described a specific job in ancient Athens. The theoroi were city officials whose job was to leave the city and study other lands and people. Their position was critical in that they were looking for new ideas, perspectives, and practices that could make Athens better. But this kind of theorist did his work because he first had an "abiding appreciation for the customs and practices of his own way of life:"

These are not mutually exclusive qualities, but intimately connected. A theorist was, by definition a patriot—one who treasured his cultural inheritance and traditions, knew intimately the stories and histories of his homeland, and saw these as fundamentally constitutive of his identity. At the same time, it was by means of deep familiarity and love for that cultural inheritance that the theorist was able to move fellow citizens to a renewed devotion to those practices, in some instances, or to subtle questioning of dubious customs, in others.

Deneen contrasts this kind of critical patriot with the "theorizing" of Rene Descartes, whose approach most closely mimics that of modern cosmopolitans who dismiss patriotism as small-minded and parochial:

Rather than proceeding from a sympathetic stance toward the inheritance of his own legacy, Descartes begins with radical suspicion toward all that has preceded him in act or thought, and especially all that is a result of the common endeavors of a community or a people...Descartes inaugurates modern philosophy’s estrangement from the place where philosophy begins—among, and with, one’s fellow citizens—and ultimately, modern philosophy’s estrangement from the world. He is the very model of the proudly ungrateful anti-patriot.

Deneen concludes his essay be rejecting any patriotism that is also not critical, but also rejects criticism that is not rooted in a deep appreciation for what has come before, including the capacity and right to be critical of those very institutions. "After September 11, it is all the more imperative that we citizens of a democratic country make that 'sacred journey' of the theorist," he writes, "one that intensifies our vision, one that starts and ends in gratitude, and from which we may hope to deepen those devotions that America deserves—and that, through such patriotic vision, it will deserve ever more."

So yes, we are descendents of immigrants from Africa or Europe or Asia, or perhaps immigrants ourselves. We are people of all skin colors and religions. The stories of how we have struggled over those differences and some of our fellow Americans have suffered - and sometimes continue to suffer - immensely as a result are central to our story.

But this nevertheless is "our story," the story of one, immensely diverse and frequently flawed people, who nevertheless keep striving to be e pluribus unum.

Related posts:

• Our schools need patriotic American history now more than ever 
• Reclaiming American history: standards and curriculum 
• The principles and values of "patriotic" American history 
• Memory and hope: Restoring temporal continuity in our teaching of American history
• Fighting racism; rejecting critical theory
• Kentucky's social studies standards need more work
• Kentucky teachers are being trained to use "inquiry methods" to indoctrinate students in Leftist attitudes
• More misuses of inquiry learning to propagandize K-12 students
• See for yourself: Biased Kentucky teacher training materials for social studies
• Two books help fight back in the war on history

The principles and values of "patriotic" American history

Update: Portions of this post recently appeared in an essay for The Imaginative Conservative called, "What is Patriotic Education?"

In a recent series of posts I've been arguing that, given widespread efforts to rewrite American history and portray our Founders and the Founding itself in the worst possible light, schools need to rethink the way we teach this vitally important subject. I argued that we should be approaching the study of American history in a way that is, in the words of political scientist Eliot Cohen, both "critical and patriotic." 

I don't presume to know exactly what the process of establishing such a critical and patriotic approach should look like. This endeavor requires the input of history scholars, social studies teachers, school and civic leaders, local and state boards of education, and political officials who share a common commitment to revitalizing the study of the American past. On this blog, however, I'd like to try to stake out the key assumptions, issues, concerns, and components of an intentionally patriotic approach to our story as Americans, and invite further discussion and dialogue with others.

Most recently I suggested that any discussion of a more patriotic approach to the teaching of history first requires a fresh look at our standards for social studies, and then a deeper look at the curricula schools use to address those standards. This will be the topic of future posts. 

In the meantime, I've heard from a handful of educators, mostly social studies teachers, who have responded with deep concerns about what I'm proposing. So in the next few posts I'd like to elaborate a bit on what we're talking about when we say we need a more intentionally patriotic approach to U.S. history - and also what we do not mean. As I acknowledged in my first post on this topic, taking a patriotic stance toward American history will undoubtedly be controversial. But it's important that we don't misunderstand what we mean and make this seem even more controversial than it actually is.

I am not entirely surprised that social studies teachers have pushed back on me about this topic. It's easy to read this as a criticism of how they've been doing their jobs. And I won't pretend that shifting our focus doesn't have critical implications for the way we've been teaching history. I just think the vast majority of social studies teachers aren't intentionally trying to undermine their students' attitudes toward America. They are teaching the way they've been taught, the way textbooks are often organized, and have come to take for granted the myth that the delivery of history can and should somehow be unbiased. Before all the logistics of how we take a more patriotic approach to this subject, it's first important to note that what are talking about is a philosophical stance, full of explicit values and assumptions. These assumptions include, but are not limited to, the following:

The belief that America's Founding was a good thing. This includes believing that the events of 1776, and the subsequent efforts to iron out a workable constitution, and the next 244 years of trying to help the U.S. live up to its founding ideals, represent a significantly positive development in human political and social history. It includes the assumption that the United States is an exceptional country, not in the sense that it is better than any other nation, but that it is unique, and offers a uniquely valuable model of political organization that is worth cherishing and defending. This does not mean that we hide, in any way, the complex character of our Founders, who were clearly flawed human beings and products of their own time. It does not mean that we gloss over or neglect the many ways that we have failed to live up to our Founding principles. In fact, the story of extending basic political rights and equal opportunity to all Americans is a key to our history. But it does mean rejecting ahistorical ideas, such as those presented by the 1619 Project, that America's "true" founding was based entirely around the institution of slavery and white power, or that our Founding itself was irredeemably flawed, as were the Founders, because of their moral blind spots and costly errors. It means, as the organizers of the 1776 Unites project declare, 

[We] uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who assert America is forever defined by its past failures, such as slavery. We seek to offer alternative perspectives that celebrate the progress America has made on delivering its promise of equality and opportunity and highlight the resilience of its people. Our focus is on solving problems. We do this in the spirit of 1776, the date of America’s true founding.

This core belief that America's founding is something worth defending and admiring, along with the beliefs articulated below, does not require us to force students to share this belief. They may come to their own conclusions about America's worth in the world. But this assumption should be a starting point that guides our selection of curriculum materials, our instructional methods, and our goals for what we seek to accomplish through the teaching of history.

The understanding that America's political traditions are inextricably linked to an older English heritage. The American Revolution did not happen in a vacuum, but rather reflected key political beliefs that can be traced back through hundreds of years of English common law, dating all the way back to the Magna Carta and beyond. There was a great diversity of political philosophies at work in the American Founding, of course, as Yoram Hazony has documented, but the general consensus was that the American experiment was building on values and institutions that preceded it (updated: see Ofir Haivry's discussion of this topic here, and Daniel McCarthy's here). This is why Americans rejected the bloodbath that become the French Revolution, which sought to destroy every existing institution of civil society and ultimately led to a totalitarian state under Napoleon. Americans have a rebellious spirit, yes. But as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830's, they also have a reverence for tradition and the institutions of civil society that make a republican form of government possible.

A confidence that our founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and their historical antecedents like the Magna Carta, represent a uniquely valuable roadmap for political organization and human progress. To the extent that America needs to always be reformed, it is ideally done so through the same mechanisms established by these documents and the core principles that animate them.

And that means a faith in the core principles of the Founding. These principles include, but may not be limited to, the following:

• the dignity of the individual
• the rule of law
• equality of opportunity
• a lightly-regulated economy that provides opportunities for all individuals to excel through hard work, determination, and innovation
• government that is limited so that no faction can assume too much power and threaten the liberties of others
• subsidiarity - the belief that decisions should be made at the most local level possible to adequately address policy problems, embodied in our concept of federalism
• republicanism - representative democracy as the best method of securing the values noted above
• an understanding that human flourishing is about far more than politics; that the institutions of civil society like family, religious organizations, civic groups, small businesses, etc., are where true happiness is found and where humans are formed in the virtues necessary to participate in and maintain a republic embodying all the other virtues described above

These are the guiding principles and assumptions of a patriotic approach to the teaching of American history, along with the express goal that graduates of our K-12 schools should understand and appreciate these principles, even if they don't completely share them. In the next post I'll say more about how patriotic history accepts that it has biases and can defend them, and rejects the idea that there are any "unbiased" approaches to this subject. I'll also try to say more about what patriotic American history is not: it is not ignoring or explaining away the social and political sins of our past; it does not require us to assess the depth or quality of students' patriotism; and it does not dictate nor proscribe specific instructional methods, although methods should take into account the underlying assumptions noted above.

I especially welcome the continued feedback and dialogue of social studies teachers to these ideas, as none of this is possible without a well-educated, passionate, and independent-minded cadre of history teachers to carry out the work.

Related posts:

• Our schools need patriotic American history now more than ever 
• Reclaiming American history: standards and curriculum 
• E pluribus unum: Another essential principle of "patriotic" American history 
• Memory and hope: Restoring temporal continuity in our teaching of American history
• Fighting racism; rejecting critical theory
• Kentucky's social studies standards need more work
• Kentucky teachers are being trained to use "inquiry methods" to indoctrinate students in Leftist attitudes
• More misuses of inquiry learning to propagandize K-12 students
• See for yourself: Biased Kentucky teacher training materials for social studies
• Two books help fight back in the war on history

 

Reclaiming American history: standards and curriculum

Tomorrow is July 4th, America's Independence Day, traditionally a celebration of the great blessings of freedom and prosperity our nation enjoys. As I wrote earlier this week, Independence Day 2020 comes under a cloud of deep civil and social unrest as the United States struggles mightily under the weight of a global pandemic and widespread urban violence. 

I joined the voices of millions who raised alarm at the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. It was a needed moment to once again review the many racial disparities in America, reflect on their sources, and seek out common sense policy solutions that can help us progress as a united people. But peaceful protests soon decayed into violence, looting, and anarchist takeovers of public spaces. Leaders of the U.S. Senate proposed the most sweeping federal police reform bill in American history, only to see their effort go nowhere, while in the streets of American cities and towns mobs tore down statues of...George Washington. It has become clear that a fair number of people do not want to see us move forward as a nation, and that in fact, they view America itself as the problem.

It is not my intent to argue why this is a deeply flawed and dangerous point of view. I'll leave that argument to others. I will simply state my own position, which I believe is shared by millions of Americans of all skin colors, that despite the deep flaws and social sins of our past, despite the work that still needs to be done, the United States has made incredible progress in terms of creating equal opportunities for every citizen, and remains the greatest nation in the world. It is the values and political institutions of America, which were founded, fought over, and defended by brilliant and courageous - if deeply human - people like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses Grant, that should be honored and defended.

My own sphere of expertise is education and education policy. As I argued earlier this week, it is within our schools where we must meet the challenge of helping future generations understand our complex national past, develop the citizenship skills to help us keep striving toward our national ideals, and appreciate - even revere - the founding principles, the history, and institutions of the United States. In this on-going series of posts I'd like to reflect on how to best accomplish this, including through education standards and curriculum, everyday school practices, and the role of local communities and boards of education.

Sadly, to insist that our schools teach an American history that is both "critical and patriotic," we will likely make them once again battle grounds in the culture war that is raging in our media and in the streets of our cities. But our schools are already battle grounds for these kinds of disputes. The question is not whether we are to fight in them, but how. Otherwise, we will cede our schools, as we have unconsciously been doing so for decades, to powerful forces of anti-Americanism that have led us up to this seemingly intractable place as a country.

The first place to start this discussion is on the condition of state standards for the teaching of American history. This is a topic I've been deeply immersed in. I am a former social studies teacher and hold a Master's degree in history. As a member of the Kentucky Board of Education from 2016-2019, I chaired the KBE Curriculum, Instruction, and Assesment Committee while the Department of Education led the process of developing new social studies standards as laid out by the General Assembly in 2017 legislation.

The first thing to say is that the new Kentucky Academic Standards for Social Studies are vastly superior to the vague, nearly content-free, standards that preceded them for many years. I made this argument against sharp criticisms of the standards from my colleague Richard Innes, education analyst for the Bluegrass Institute (where I also sit on the Board of Scholars), and others who were especially concerned about the lack of content specificity or presentation of certain topics. Several of my fellow board members also expressed criticisms of the standards but, probably because of my passionate defense of both the process by which the standards were developed and their outcome, they were eventually approved by a unanimous KBE vote.

You can read my complete defense of the new standards here. I was deeply honored late last year to receive the Meese Award for Leadership in the Social Studies from the Kentucky Council for the Social Studies, in large part for my support of the standards.

But I was wrong on one critical issue. One of the key points I made is that there is a distinct difference between standards and curriculum. And I still believe that local curricular decision are far more important for ensuring a rich delivery of social studies content. But now, in light of the complete rewriting of American history that seems to be underway in some political quarters, I believe I was mistaken about how much we should rely on local curriculum to ensure that every Kentucky student has a sufficient grasp of both the founding principles of our nation and the contributions of key historical figures.

When it becomes necessary to publicly defend Abraham Lincoln's role in ending slavery and bringing seismic racial progress in the United States, perhaps it is time to be explicit in asking every Kentucky student to know who Lincoln was and why he is to be revered by every American. Lincoln is not named in Kentucky's ground-breaking social studies standards. His role is implied by the events of the Civil War. But clearly in light of recent events that is simply not enough (nor is it enough to imply, but not name, the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the civil rights movement, for example).

In future posts I'll discuss further what some of these additions to Kentucky's standards should look like, and especially how local curricula must be carefully selected to ensure that the gallery of America's heroes (of all colors and backgrounds) are taught and celebrated in Kentucky's schools. Doing so does not in any way ignore the dark parts of our collective past (and present), but rather encourages a balanced view that helps us appreciate how far we've come, and how far we need to go, as Americans.

Update: See my expanded discussion of the deficiencies in Kentucky's social studies standards here and the deeply biased materials used to train teachers in their implementation here.

Related posts:

• Our schools need patriotic American history now more than ever
• The principles and values of "patriotic" American history
• E pluribum unum: Another essential principle of patriotic American history
• Memory and hope: Restoring temporal continuity in our teaching of American history
• Fighting racism; rejecting critical theory
• Kentucky's social studies standards need more work
• More misuses of inquiry learning to propagandize K-12 students
• See for yourself: Biased Kentucky teacher training materials for social studies
• Two books help fight back in the war on history

Our schools need patriotic American history now more than ever

As a citizen, a father, and an educator, I have never been more concerned about the future of our country. Amid an economy-crushing pandemic, outrage over the police killing of George Floyd has erupted into something sinister and dangerous that amounts to an existential threat to the American republic. A legitimate concern about hundreds of monuments to the racist regime of the Confederate South has morphed into widespread mob attempts to destroy statues of George Washington, Ulysses Grant and St. Louis and to even remove a statute of Abraham Lincoln commemorating his Emancipation Proclamation. It has become necessary to actually point out the historical fact of Lincoln's role in the ending of slavery, in response to those who believe that, contrary to all available data, America has made no progress on racial issues, and that in fact the entire American experience is rooted in irredeemable racism. Whereas Martin Luther King, Jr. once called Americans to live up to the ideals of our nation's founding, the blatantly neo-Marxist leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization condemn the entire American enterprise and promise to "burn down this system."

And all of this happens with the tacit, or sometimes explicit, endorsement of elite, liberal media and political leaders.

Of course racism does still exist in the United States. Racial disparities in educational opportunity and attainment, in criminal justice, in housing and employment, whatever their origins, are obvious. Personally and professionally I am most familiar with the devastating legacy of education achievement gaps based on race (but also based on socio-economic status). These gaps persist for many reasons, including perhaps many unrecognized biases on the part of educators who unconsciously lower their expectations for students of color, but even more so because of an insufficient sense of urgency to change our practices and coordinate all the resources of our local communities to do better by these students.

We need a stronger collective commitment to honestly examine both the existence and the origins of disparities in education and criminal justice and to set this aright as far as we can do so in public policy. But if that should happen it will be because of our unified self understanding as Americans. Now more than ever, we need a stronger understanding of the founding principles and values of our nation and how those principles actually point us toward a society that is more prosperous, free, and with far more equitable outcomes than any historical alternative. The lack of this national self understanding can be laid, in part, at the feet of our education system. And reclaiming a national identity will require a far more intentional and comprehensive approach to the teaching of American history.

We don't have to sugar coat our past. We can and should be honest with ourselves about the social sins of America, past and present. But we should also be honest and explicit in teaching our students about the great blessings and accomplishments of this nation, which its past both illustrates and proves. In short, we should once again explicitly teach kids to be proud of their country and the men and women of all ethnic backgrounds who made it a place worth defending as Americans.

Eliot Cohen, writing in this year's noteworthy collection of essays, How to Educate an American, calls this approach to American history both "critical and patriotic:"

Civic education is inextricably interwoven with patriotism, without which commitment to the values that make free government possible will not exist. Civic education depends not only on an understanding of fundamental processes and institutions (why there is a Supreme Court, why only Congress gets to raise taxes or declare war) but also on a commitment to those processes and institutions, and on some kind of admiration for the country that created them and the men and women who have shaped and lived within them. In a crisis, it is not enough to know how the walls were constructed and the plumbing laid out in the house that Madison, Washington, and Lincoln built. One has to think that the architects did remarkable work, that as their legatees we need to preserve the building even as we modernize it, and that it is a precious edifice like none other.

Sadly, these words are likely to divide, rather than unify us, precisely because there appear to be so many people willing to exploit the very real issues of racial injustice, not just for political purposes, but for the purpose of actually tearing down not just the symbols of America, but the structures itself. This is not an exaggeration. Listen to their rhetoric, and more importantly the larger cultural anti-Americanism that pervades our campuses and the media. As Andrew Sullivan writes, their goal may be some kind of Maoist utopia, but just as the followers of Mao discovered, such impulses always end in tyranny. 

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

This is why we need to choose patriotic history even if it is controversial, and insist that it be taught in our schools. Doing so will actually increase the likelihood of having meaningful discussions about race, power, and injustice in our society, and how we continue to heal these issues as Americans.

In upcoming posts, I'll reflect on how our education system slowly arrived at this point, and what we can do about it, especially on a local level.

Related posts:

• Reclaiming American history: Standards and curriculum 
• The principles and values of "patriotic" American history
• E pluribum unum: Another essential principle of patriotic American history
• Memory and hope: Restoring temporal continuity in our teaching of American history
• Fighting racism; rejecting critical theory
• Kentucky's social studies standards need more work
• Kentucky's teachers are being trained to use "inquiry methods" to indoctrinate students in Leftist attitudes
• More misuses of inquiry learning to propagandize K-12 students
• See for yourself: Biased Kentucky teacher training materials for social studies
• Two books help fight back in the war on history

Bringing classical education to more Kentucky schools

This week I was privileged to attend the National Classical Education Symposium in Phoenix, Arizona. The symposium is a convening of the Institute for Classical Education, an organization rooted in the Great Hearts network of charter schools based in Arizona and Texas, but representing a wide array of educators interested in promoting classical education. The Symposium is part professional development for classical educators and part networking opportunity to strengthen the nation-wide movement to create more, and better, classical schools. (Video of every general session at the Symposium is available on the Institute's Facebook page).

Classical education is a language-rich approach to curriculum that emphasizes history, science, art, and great literature as the foundation of learning and expects students to develop a well-trained mind adept at logic and rhetoric and capable of participating in the Great Conversation of ideas that has shaped and driven the development of Western civilization.  It represents the best of what is sometimes conceived as a "liberal arts" education, though that term has become so watered down as to be nearly meaningless, and classical education does not shy away from mathematics and hard sciences but rather provides a strong foundation for advanced studies in all disciplines.  Above all classical education understands that education should primarily be about the acquisition of virtue, and only secondarily about vocational preparation.

I have come to believe strongly that a key weakness in most American schools is far too little attention to curriculum. Classical learning, which emerged in Greek and Roman antiquity and was systematized in the Middle Ages, fills this gap in a comprehensive way. The classical curriculum is organized around the Trivium, the three, stair-stepping realms of grammar (content knowledge), dialectic (logic), and rhetoric (communication). Under this approach, students should be immersed in rich, content-specific curriculum in the early grades, and by middle school start to engage in learning experiences that tap into and apply critical thinking and problem solving, and by high school pursue authentic, real world tasks that ask them to communicate and collaborate with others in a variety of ways that demonstrate real independence (see my classical education reading list here).

According to Symposium organizers, roughly a half million American students are now being educated with classical curricula, including around 100,000 students in private schools, 100,000 students in charter schools, and somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 students in homeschooling environments.

In Kentucky I'm familiar with several homeschooling families who use classical curriculum (many participate in the Classical Conversations community), and several private classical schools scattered throughout the state. My chief concern as an educator and policy maker is how we make the richness of classical learning available to far more students, including in traditional public schools and public charter school environments. While classical education does intersect in many ways with the Judeo-Christian dimensions of Western civilization, Great Hearts Academies, the Barney charter schools initiative associated with Hillsdale College, and other charter experiments in classical learning demonstrate that this kind of education is also appropriate and much-needed in a tuition-free, secular school setting as well.

The task ahead of us in Kentucky, and I believe nation-wide for the classical school movement, is how we provide this method to far more students of all ethnic, income, and ability backgrounds. Classical curriculum doesn't appear to have made even a tiny dent in the world of traditional public schools (although we learned of some promising new experiments, which I hope to write about another time). From the networking taking place at the symposium, however, I'm hoping we can start to connect people eager to take classical schools to the next level in this regard. And such work will inevitably be done in close collaboration with families and educators at the local level. Curricular decisions cannot be dictated from the state-level, as in my role as a member of the Kentucky Board of Education. But perhaps we can foster a policy environment that encourages such innovations in local schools and places a stronger emphasis on curricular reform as the key to school improvement and closing achievement gaps.

Inevitably, though, the only way to make classical learning available to more students is to give more families the ability to choose their child's school. Far too few families in Kentucky, as in many other states, are able to choose the school that is the best fit for their child and their family's aspirations for their children. This is an injustice that disproportionately affects low-income families. When schools maintain a monopoly on educational delivery, they are forced to try to be all things to all students, an impossibility that simply pushes schools to acquiesce to whatever methods they believe will suit the majority of families. Majoritarianism is not democracy, and one size does not fit all, especially when it comes to learning.

Kentucky adopted its first charter school law in 2017; now, two years later, we still don't have a policy mechanism by which education dollars can follow students to a charter when they are no longer being educated by their assigned school. Thus, we still have no charter schools in Kentucky, and untold numbers of students are still being denied the kinds of learning opportunities classical education might provide. Likewise, we need to implement scholarship tax credits so more families can access the classical schools that already exist here. Innovations in learning like those represented by classical education cannot occur until more families have more school choices.

Above all we need to encourage far more discussion among educators about how we can re-emphasize the importance of curriculum, and especially the strengths of a rich, knowledge-based curriculum, which is thoroughly appropriate and necessary for developing the kinds of critical thinking and highly-touted "21st century skills" students need to be economically successful as well as personally fulfilled in the modern world.

Likewise, student literacy is essential to the language-heavy learning required by a classical curriculum. Kentucky Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis has been urging a statewide conversation about how we can get far more students reading proficiently by the end of third grade. As Dan Willingham pointed out in his opening keynote address to the Symposium, these goals of reading proficiency and content knowledge are not just compatible but absolutely interdependent. Students often don't read well precisely because they lack sufficient content knowledge. Helping educators understand this linkage, and committing to both universal literacy by fourth grade and a content-rich curriculum in the early grades will set a firm foundation for the growth of classical learning in Kentucky and elsewhere.

These are some of the key challenges and linchpins upon which the growth of classical education in Kentucky will depend. I'm eager to continue these discussions with my fellow educators, parents, and policy makers and excited about what the future holds. 

Usual disclaimer: Views expressed on this website are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of anyone affiliated with Western Kentucky University (where I am professor of educational administration, leadership, and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I am a member and chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee).

Related links:

• The false choices of "What School Could Be"
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution
• If caring is king, content is queen
• Why Knowledge Matters: The Most Important Education Book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II
• Seven Myths About Education
• What if everything you knew about education was wrong?
• A classical education reading list
• A School Choice Primer, Parts I, II, and III
• Kentucky charter school basics
• Charter schools and the profit question
• Why the education establishment feels so threatened by school choice

The false choices of "What School Could Be"

Ted Dintersmith's new book, What School Could Be, profiles dozens of schools across the United States that are engaging students in rich, real-world learning, and contrasts their experiences with the vast majority of other schools. Dintersmith calls on schools to innovate in ways that closely parallel some of my own frustrations and desires for education in Kentucky and beyond. But unfortunately the vision of What Schools Could Be is wrapped up in a badly overstated diagnosis about what ails us. Dintersmith reinforces dangerous, false choices that all too commonly frame our debates about schooling and mostly obscure, rather than clarify, the path forward.

Dintersmith, an entrepreneur and former representative to the United Nations General Assembly under President Obama, is best known as co-author with Tony Wagner of Most Likely to Succeed and producer of the documentary film by the same name. Last year he was honored by the National Education Association with its Friend of Education Award, the group's highest recognition. What School Could Be extends the themes of Most Likely To Succeed, arguing that students are too often bored, that teachers focus too narrowly on annual test score increases, and that schools are failing to adequately prepare students for the economic and social realities of the 21st century. On all counts, I agree.

To look for alternatives, Dintersmith spent a year traveling to all 50 states, touring schools and conducting hundreds of interviews with students, teachers, parents, and education policy leaders. In every state he found exciting examples of schools taking students to a different place of learning, especially at the high school level, like the Big Picture Learning network of schools which focus on meaningful career preparation, the Albermarle schools in Virginia which are pioneering project-based learning as the focal point of the school experience, and the Eminence Independent Schools here in Kentucky, the state’s first officially recognized District of Innovation.

What unites these examples, according to Dintersmith, are a combination of factors he calls “PEAK principles:”

• Purpose - Student attack challenges they know to be important, that make their world better.
• Essentials - Students acquire the skill sets and mind-sets needed in an increasingly innovative world.
• Agency - Students own their learning, becoming self-directed, intrinsically motivated adults.
• Knowledge - What students learn is deep and retained, enabling them to create, to make, to teach others.

In addition to these PEAK principles, and the many school profiles he offers to illustrate them, Dintersmith makes some important points about how education in the U.S. has, in the recent past, over-emphasized the idea of college for all students with several detrimental effects, and suggests that popular, misguided policies like “free” college serve to reinforce those problems. In one short but potent chapter, Dintersmith also argues effectively that parents and schools have infantilized adolescence, babying our children in various ways and shielding them from the kinds of challenges and hard problem solving they will actually face in the real world. If nothing else, schooling should at least prepare students to be independent, self-sufficient citizens.

The arguments about college and creating more independent learners are valuable, if perhaps a little dated and argued more effectively elsewhere by other authors. The best part of the book, though, are the profiles of innovative schools, and had Dintersmith let that be his primary focus, What School Could Be would be a useful tool for practicing educators. Unfortunately, Dintersmith tries to make his book about education policy, seeking a bogeyman to blame for why schools aren’t what they could be and making an endless stream of poorly-supported claims and straw man arguments that distract immensely from the book’s usefulness.

Dintersmith wants to force educators and parents into a series of false choices, and framing the problems our schools face in these artificial binaries may actually undermine the long-term effectiveness of the innovations he longs to see enacted.

False Choice #1: Accountability versus Innovation

According to Dintersmith, the number one reason why schools aren’t what they could be is because of standardized testing. Such tests measure only a small portion of what schools seek to accomplish with their students, but because of accountability pressures teachers devote the vast majority of their time to low-level skills that, he claims, get the biggest test score increases, and neglect rich, engaging, real-world learning.

The author is not completely wrong here. The modern era of federally-mandated school accountability (which came into being with 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act) has caused an narrowing of curricular focus and a long-term neglect of the kinds of meaningful, whole school reform efforts that would make a sustainable difference in student achievement. But Dintersmith completely mischaracterizes the purpose of these accountability mechanisms and the long history of morally unacceptable achievement gaps.

Seven Myths About Education

Over the last few years I’ve become keenly interested in the importance of curriculum and concerned about how curricular approaches in P12 schools have deprived students of critical content knowledge, especially in the early grades. E. D. Hirsch’s latest book, Why Knowledge Matters, is a masterpiece in this regard, arguing why and how this move away from content has exacerbated achievement gaps (see my posts on Hirsch’s book here and here). But I’ve recently discovered another great little book from the United Kingdom, heavily inspired and influenced by Hirsch’s work, that serves as a great companion piece to Why Knowledge Matters.

Seven Myths About Education, by Daisy Christodoulou, explores how certain myths have pervaded the assumptions and practices of educators. These myths suggest that knowledge is actually of little importance, and encourage teachers to use more “student-centered” methods, but in doing so actually undermine students’ ability to engage in critical thinking, which is inherently dependent on rich, domain-specific knowledge.

For each myth, Christodoulou explains its theoretical origins, but also shows how the myth really does influence teacher practice, often using the recommendations of the Office for Standards in Education (OfSted), the U.K.’s national education inspectorate that are hugely influential on what happens in British classrooms.

Christodoulou makes this case to answer the argument often made by defenders of current educational practices that no one actually suggests knowledge is unimportant or neglects the teaching of content (Hirsch shows how this neglect is very real in the U.S.). Christodoulou's strong conviction is that these myths do, in fact, heavily impact teaching practice and undermine the teaching of meaningful content in schools. That she is writing from a British perspective does not diminish the value of Seven Myths for American educators because education practices in these two countries are so similar and U.S. teachers will easily see the same patterns in their own context. This point is driven home in glowing forwards written by Hirsch himself, and by formative assessment researcher Dylan Wiliam, who says Seven Myths “may well be the most important book of the decade on teaching.”

The seven myths include the following:

• facts prevent understanding
• teacher-led instruction is passive
• the twenty-first century fundamentally changes everything
• you can always just look it up
• we should teach transferable skills
• projects and activities are the best ways to learn
• teaching knowledge is indoctrination

That some of these statements are myths will likely come as a shock to most educators trained in the last generation (e.g., teacher-led-instruction is passive; projects and activities are the best ways to learn). Christodoulou, citing the currently-popular education scholar John Hattie, notes that "traditional," teacher-led methods like direct instruction are extremely powerful when used effectively. Furthermore, she shows how "student-centered" instruction often involves vapid assignments requiring little to no actual critical thinking, and usually devoid of meaningful content. I've written before about Hattie's finding that project-based learning is a largely ineffective method, unless it is used by students to apply content knowledge they've already acquired.

Other myths tackled by Christoudoulou seem more recent to our education discussion, like the notion that an over-emphasis on facts prevents meaningful understanding, that in the era of Google what students know is less important than their capacity to find the right information, and that in the 21st century students need special skills like teamwork and effective communication. I routinely hear these arguments from educators, policy-makers, and business leaders. And I have to admit that I have made such arguments myself in the recent past.

But authors like Hirsch and Christodoulou have convinced me there are no such thing as transferable skills of any sort that don't require the use of domain-specific content knowledge. Even knowing how to effectively "Google" something requires a relevant vocabulary and framework of referent knowledge to know what to look for, how, and how to make sense of what is found. And Christodoulou easily dispatches the notion that there is anything unique about the skills needed for effectively navigating the 21st century:

It is quite patronising to suggest that no one before the year 2000 ever needed to think critically, solve problems, communicate, collaborate, create, innovate, or read...It probably is true that in the future, more and more people will need these skills, and that there will be fewer economic opportunities for people who do not have these skills. But that would suggest to me that we need to make sure that everyone gets the education that was in the past reserved for the elite. That is not redefining education for the twenty-first century; it is giving everyone the chance to get a traditional education.

This point seems exactly right to me based on my own experiences as a learner. I certainly hope that I possess "21st century skills." But my own education was not skills-driven, from elementary school through my doctoral studies. To the contrary, it was content-laden, and heavily supplemented by a voracious personal appetite for knowledge that my parents actively supported and encouraged. A favorite childhood past-time of mine was sifting through the World Book Encyclopedia, exploring any and every interesting idea or concept I encountered on a daily basis, with a dictionary close at hand to help, and a houseful of other quality books that introduced me to the world. To the extent that I am an effective 21st century learner, it was because my mind was steeped in content knowledge from my earliest days.

Closely related to the myth that learning in the 21st century is unique, Christodoulou tackles the myth (also handled aptly by Hirsch in the closing chapters of Why Knowledge Matters) that articulating a specific body of knowledge that all children should master is somehow politically biased toward the experiences of the traditionally empowered (like men, white people, and the wealthy classes) over the traditionally disenfranchised. But Christodoulou argues that it is just the opposite: that guaranteeing a rich, content-specific education to those who have historically been deprived such an opportunity is deliberately empowering and actually gives the marginalized tools for challenging societal and economic power structures. 

Hirsch is likewise emphatic on this point when he argues that current practices in American elementary schools, which have systematically squeezed out social studies, science, and the arts in favor of a time-consuming and skills-driven approach to reading, have actually deepened achievement gaps by denying children from low-income families the cultural and domain-specific knowledge they need for later academic and life success.

I have written a lot in recent years about my concerns that the factory model of education we inherited from the industrial revolution (which was not, in fact, designed to educate all students to high levels of knowledge) is not sufficient to meet changing economic demands and issues of justice that do, in fact, require us to give all students what was once an elite education. Moreover, the current system, based on arranging students by age cohort with little regard to their actual readiness levels and operated as a government monopoly, does a poor job of educating students at their individual readiness levels or providing the kinds of diversity of instructional and curricular approaches required in a pluralistic society.

But too many of my fellow educators have intentionally or accidentally, in the name of moving beyond the factory model of learning, thrown content out the window in favor of these myth-driven ideas about education. I'm all for personalizing student learning - but that should be primarily meeting students at their individual readiness level as they work through a rich, content-driven curriculum, not about sacrificing the complex body of knowledge we want every educated person to master. 

Of course it is true that we want students to do more than recall a bunch of disconnected facts. It's a poverty of good instructional knowledge and creativity that causes us to think we must either teach students content or teach them to think critically (as if they could think critically without something meaningful to think about). But from a practical perspective, educators simply haven't been taught how to do both. And doing so does require intentional planning and a comprehensive program of instruction. Paideia (better known as "Socratic seminars") represents one method, requiring students to engage in thoughtful collaborative discussion of serious texts.

But the best approach I've seen for this is classical education, based on the medieval Trivium of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric, and captured beautifully in Dorothy Sayers' 1948 essay, The Lost Tools of Learning. As I wrote last year in summary:

According to Sayers, the early grades should focus on intensive absorption of a rich and varied, language-based curriculum.  In direct contrast to our modern trend of reserving social studies and science for the upper grades, classical education incorporates science and history from the earliest grades onward, along with the study of classical languages like Greek and Latin.  By the middle grades, students should be introduced to dialectic (logic) and start to synthesize all the content they've learned previously.  And finally the upper grades should have a focus on rhetoric, or argumentation, in which students learn to articulate their own ideas and opinions with evidence from the treasure trove of world civilization and participate fully in a virtuous life as adult and citizen.

This highly-intentional approach to learning ensures that as students absorb new content knowledge, they are systematically instructed and assessed on how to apply it through critical thinking tasks associated with logic and rhetoric. While classical education is spreading like wildfire in American parochial and independent schools and among homeschoolers, there are also promising signs of this approach in charter schools like the Great Hearts Academy network. I would love to see traditional public schools adopt a classical curriculum, perhaps using Hirsch's Core Knowledge Sequence as a foundation.

Such schools provide a laboratory for exploding the myths described by Daisy Christodoulou in Seven Myths About Education and demonstrating how the teaching of knowledge can - and in fact must - be the foundation for serious critical thinking.

Usual disclaimer: Opinions expressed on this website are mine alone and do not reflect the views of Western Kentucky University (where I serve as associate professor of educational administration, leadership and research) or the Kentucky Board of Education (where I serve as a member).

Related posts:

• Why Knowledge Matters: The most important education book of 2016
• Why Knowledge Matters, Part II: Strengthening standards with a content-rich curriculum
• If caring is king, content is queen.
• Yes, kids need to know about the American Revolution.
• The New Era of education has arrived.
• A classical education reading list.
• Classical education, Montessori, and the tension between the "what" and "how" of learning.