Curriculum manifesto and perspectives

¶ … Traditionalist Views on Knowledge and Experience

Dewey and Hirsch have a fundamental disagreement on the educational merits of experience vs. knowledge. Dewey believed that students should learn through experiences as opposed to passively sitting back and waiting for their teachers to fill them with information. Hirsch believes that a student needs to have a baseline amount of knowledge in order to be a productive member of society.

For Dewey, the goal of education was to train people who could enjoy their freedoms as well as handle their responsibilities as citizens in a democracy. He believed that an unhealthy deference to authoritative knowledge made people amenable to control and political authoritarianism, which was anathema to a democracy composed of free-thinking citizens. Dewey believed that students should learn through experience, where they would be able to create knowledge themselves.

For Hirsch, the goal of education is to equip students with the basic competencies they will need to thrive in the modern world. Politically, Hirsch is concerned with the declining competitiveness of America, especially compared with countries like China and Japan, which emphasize rote learning and respect for teachers. He attributes this decline to the American education curriculum, which emphasizes learning through experience and does not hold students to a common, national standard. Hirsch's disagreement is largely a reaction to the excesses of the individual-centered education system created by Dewey, which has left America with a lack of enforceable standards.

Unlike Dewey, who believed that standard knowledge produces an unhealthy deference to authority, Hirsch believes that standard knowledge is "shared knowledge" which is essential for communication within a community. Hirsch believes that this shared knowledge is important for the functioning of society, e.g. understanding literary allusions used by others, having a common historical context when evaluating new events or ideas.

Progressive and Traditionalist Views on the Value of the Didactic Method

Although Freire and Adler both believed that the primary purpose of education was train effective, conscientious citizens, the two differed greatly on the issue of transmitting knowledge and the role of written authority in this training. Adler believes that the didactic method is one of the three fundamental branches of learning which provides the basis or the substance for further learning. Freire believes that the didactic method produces an inadequate understanding of reality and encourages an unhealthy obsequiousness to authority, especially political authority.

Philosophically, Freire believed that words and concepts are inadequate, easily outdated stand-ins for reality. Because words and concepts are essential to the didactic method, they result in what Freire calls the "banking" concept, where students seek to gain education by receiving deposits of knowledge from teachers who have more knowledge than them. Students who are educated through the banking concept will have a false understanding of reality and, even worse, will be so reliant on words that they fail to verify what they "know" through action. Freire believes that students should be critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher instead of just docile listeners.

Adler's notion of the didactic method was not as simplistic as the notion defined by Freire. He recommends that the teacher should not just stuff a student's memory, but pique the student's curiosity about the subject through dialogue and having the students organize their thoughts through exercises and exams.

Values in the Curriculum

Dewey sought to develop self-aware, conscientious citizens by focusing on individual development in the curriculum. Dewey recommended that teachers organize subject matter and activities that builds on the student's prior knowledge and experiences, which would make the task more meaningful and enriching to the student.

Hirsch's seeks to create a common pool of shared knowledge by installing a curriculum which consists of a systematic checklist of important concepts, people, and events in our cultural heritage. For a student to be "culturally literate," students would be expected to know certain the items on this checklist at certain stages of development.

Adler's curriculum consisted of the "three columns": the acquisition of organized knowledge through lectures and textbooks, the development of intellectual skills through supervised practice, and the enlarged understanding of ideas and values through Socratic dialogue. Adler believed that children should read the great classic books first, to learn fundamental concepts underlying our civilization and to practice comprehending difficult ideas.

Freire's curriculum was based on what he called "problem-posing education," where students were to learn through experience, particularly experiences where they attempt to solve real-world problems. He believed that political activism was one way in which teacher and student would engage in a confrontation with reality directly.

Personal Thoughts

I believe that progressive education theorists such as Dewey and Freire tend to underestimate the merits of knowledge. Dewey and Freire tend to characterize knowledge narrowly as the mere memorization of facts and events. However, knowledge is deeper than just memory. A baseline pool of reliable knowledge prevents us from wasting time by re-inventing the wheel. Also, knowledge provides us the necessary substance for the synthesis of ideas and a deeper understanding of the world.