What are we teaching our kids?

[Dave Monroe]

What are we teaching our kids?
The Barke Montepelier Times Argus
August 21, 2005

By Hamilton E. Davis

Last spring, the New York Review of Books ran a
5,000-word article titled "The Shame of the Schools,"
illustrated with a Norman Rockwell drawing of an
old-time school master conferring an academic award on
a bespectacled young boy. The thesis was that
Vermont's elementary and secondary schools have no
curriculum at all, thereby rendering specious its
claim to be delivering education based on specific
academic standards. The article also suggested that
the same situation might be common throughout the
country.

The setting for the article was the Mount Abraham
Union High School district, based in Bristol and
encompassing the towns of New Haven, Lincoln, Monkton
and Starksboro. The author was Roger Shattuck, now 81,
who lives in Lincoln. Shattuck wrote his piece based
on research carried out while he was a member of the
union and district boards from 2000 to 2004.

There hasn't been much reaction to the Shattuck
manifesto in Vermont — the New York Review of Books
probably doesn't have a wide readership in the state.
It has percolated through the education community,
however, which appears to hate it. That's not
surprising, for the Shattuck piece attacks tenets of
the Vermont system: the principle of local control and
so-called constructivist educational philosophy, which
emphasizes broad concepts and student self-esteem over
student discipline and mastery of facts and skills.
Moreover, the article implicitly denigrates the whole
performance of the Vermont public school system.

It is to say the least unusual for a single local
school board member in Vermont to roil the system like
this, not to mention commanding a small but
prestigious audience in one of the country's most
important intellectual journals. So, who is Roger
Shattuck?

#

A native New Yorker, Shattuck graduated from Yale
after World War II. In 1950, his career took wing when
he was chosen as a junior fellow at Harvard, a
three-year program designed to be an alternative to a
doctorate and one of the most prestigious appointments
in American academia. He spent most of his career
teaching French literature and culture in various
universities — Harvard, the universities of Texas and
Virginia, and Boston University.

His reputation rests, however, on the books and
scholarly articles that have flowed from his pen over
the last 50 years. His books include "The Banquet
Years," a study of the artistic avant-garde in France
around the turn of the last century, a book that is
recommended by the Encyclopedia Britannica; a second
major work was "Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus
to Pornography," which ranged more widely, from
existentialism in Camus to the Faust story to an
assessment of the Marquis de Sade.

[...]

This recitation, already lengthy, touches only on the
high points of Shattuck's work over the last 50 years.
On that basis, therefore, a fair answer to the
question of "Who is Roger Shattuck?" is that he is one
of the most prolific and important American thinkers
of the 20th century. Well, then, why is he picking on
Vermont schools?

[...]

Shattuck believed that he saw in these cases and in
his own teaching experience the importance of
memorization, the importance of voice and the spoken
word, and the power of language to underpin culture.
He also began to read widely in the education
literature, particularly the work of John Dewey, an
educational theorist, who set up his own experimental
school in Chicago in the early 1900s.

[...]

So he shifted his attention to the materials that were
formally in place to deal with curriculum....

[...]

"I'm not saying that our district curriculum is
watered down or lopsided or old-fashioned or
newfangled. "I'm saying that these 600 pages contain
no useful curriculum at all."

Shattuck was also scornful of the emphasis in the
curriculum documents on teaching style; he quotes them
as recommending an inquiry approach, which is based on
constructivist principles." Constructivism, he wrote,
refers to the "half truth that full understanding
occurs only when students learn for themselves from
hands-on experience without direct instruction or
teacher intervention."

The problem with this philosophy was illuminated by
the experience of John Dewey, according to Shattuck.
Dewey started out, in effect, as a constructivist,
with the child rather than the teacher the core of the
learning experience. But he began to modify that view
as soon as he opened his experimental school in
Chicago. He concluded, finally, that education rests
on two interacting factors: the immature mind of the
child and the organized knowledge of the adult.

Competing theories of education tend to take one of
these sides or the other, Shattuck says, whereas Dewey
concluded that you need both, a single process that
incorporates the curiosity and inventiveness of the
child and the formal knowledge of the teacher. Dewey,
Shattuck says, "allowed practice to guide theory to a
sturdy synthesis."

In Vermont, however, the educational establishment has
come down clearly on the side of the primacy of the
child at the expense of content and intellectual
discipline....

[...]

If this critique is valid, what is the effect of the
lack of curriculum? Did we ever have such a thing?

In the United States in the past, Shattuck says,
curriculum was mainly embedded in standard textbooks;
the intellectual content was developed in significant
measure in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with
rigorous schools in Boston playing a major role. An
example of these standard texts was David Muzzey's
work on American history.

In the middle of the 20th century, however, educators
moved in the direction of what they called standards,
an effort to add rigor to the school system and to
better compete with European and Asian students. The
movement also reflected academic pulling and tugging:
History, for example, gave way partly to other
disciplines such as sociology, psychology and
anthropology, and morphed into social studies. English
in many cases became language arts.

Whatever its intentions, the standards movement has
drifted into irrelevance, because it is not
accompanied by a specific curriculum, he says. There
are specific books to be read and specific topics to
be mastered, but no broad, clear-cut curriculum. This
fact, he asserted, lies at the root of the teacher
discontent about the No Child Left Behind legislation:
Their bitter refrain is that they must "teach to the
test."

"If there is no coherent curriculum to teach and base
tests on, then one has to teach to (someone else's)
test," he wrote.

[...]

Shattuck says that he can't demonstrate the effect of
a lack of curriculum on elementary and secondary
education, but that he believes it is damaging across
the board — to elite students as well as those who do
not go to college. It hurts in practical ways. A
mechanic must know how to make basic mathematical
computations. A sales representative must be able to
write a business letter. A voter should be able to
read editorials in a newspaper. It's not that there is
no education going on, he says. There is, but it could
be much better with real curriculum.

[...]

His own choice would be the Core Knowledge Sequence,
which was developed by E.D. Hirsch, a professor at the
University of Virginia. This curriculum is very
detailed and traditional and is used in nearly 500
schools in the United States and is under
consideration in that many more. Another possibility
would be the international baccalaureate program,
which is based on European educational programs and is
in use in some U.S. high schools....

[...]

That's pretty much where the issue stands today.
Shattuck has made his case to the local school
district, to the national intellectual community with
his piece in the New York Review of Books, and to the
800,000 teachers who subscribe to the American
Educator. The question remains whether his words will
have any direct impact on his own school system or on
any of the school systems across America.

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050821/NEWS/508210319/1002/NEWS01

Shattuck, Roger.  "The Shame of the Schools."
   NYRB, Vol. 52, No. 6 (April 7, 2005):   -   .

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17907

http://susanohanian.org/atrocity_fetch.php?id=3922

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