Opening Doors (or, "Why We Teach")

It seems that Public Education is constantly fighting a losing battle with Progressive reformers seeking to dumb down our schools for a host of "wonderful" reasons. This is well documented in Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform by Diane Ravitch.

One especially galling example is the head-long assault on the "academic curriculum" (reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, and geography) by reformers insisting upon usefulness. John Franklin Bobbitt was one such reformer who wrote the influential book The Curriculum, which became a standard text in Schools of Education nationwide in the 1920s. Professor Ravitch writes, "Bobbit saw no justification for teaching science or any other subject unless it had some functional value in real life." This sounds reasonable, but Ravitch continues, "Studies such as history and literature were merely leisure activities, he held, and not more than one in a thousand students had any real need to learn a foreign language."

Of course there are grains of truth in all this. The vast majority of students will not get a job requiring knowledge of either history or literature. Most will never journey overseas, and those that do travel will probably use English. The same goes for science, and even mathematics.

How many people are employed in fields where knowledge of algebra is important? Or the scientific method? When you stop to consider it, there really is little justification in studying all these classic subjects, and that we should "accept usefulness as our aim rather than comprehensive knowledge" as W. W. Charters opined in 1923.

But take a moment to futher consider how ridiculous this proposition is, which we call the "James Bond Gadget Curriculum." In every James Bond movie he's given some highly specialized gadgets which later in the movie he needs to use, to escape some fix he's in. In the movie where he has a laser-beam wristwatch, he uses it to escape from handcuffs. The movie that had him driving a submersible car also just happened to require 007 to go underwater. It's part of the fun of the James Bond movies to not only see what gadgets he'll be given, but how he'll use them.

But the reason why we bring this up is he's given the very specific gadgets he'll need later specifically because the filmmakers know what's coming later! Progressive reformers talk a good game when they say we need to stop teaching "dry, boring facts" such as History, because they're reasonably confident that any given student will not become a historian. But the end result is that with the dumbed-down "utilitarian" curriculum, doors become closed in our children's futures.

When they say that only 5% of students will actually use algebra in the real world, they make a good argument to only teach it to 5% of students. And if they can't identify which 5% of students will need algebra, this same argument can be used for the elimination of algebra altogether.

But this means that no one learns algebra! This doesn't bother the reformers in the least, since they don't need algebra, having already completed school with no desire to learn anything more. (It is no small coincidence that you won't find any Progressive Education reformers who are also scientists or engineers!)

If their attitude seems drastic, think about the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards and the philosophy of the large number of math programs developed from those standards. A major premise behind these NCTM-based programs, the argument goes, is that the classic sequence of Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus is flawed because not all students will take Calculus!

They then argue that their "wonderful" alternative?such as MathLand, MathScape, or Everyday Math?should be used. The end result is that all students are unprepared for calculus, or any other higher math courses!

But if only 5% of students will need algebra, what percent of students will need American History? Probably less than 1%. And if one stops to think about what percentage of students will, in the real world, need to know both American History and algebra the calculation becomes so infinitesimal as to become farcical. So much for the "utilitarian" school of curriculum.

What we propose is this. Teach the academic subjects of Reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science, History and Geography to all students regardless of any demographic details, and you will open doors in their futures. Of course everyone won't need algebra, or the scientific method, or even proper grammar! But if you teach them to all students you not only enrich their minds, you increase the potentialities in these children's lives.

Fail to teach them, and you can almost hear the doors slamming.