Common Knowledge, the E-Newsletter of the Core Knowledge Foundation

Feature Articles:

A Letter from the President by Barbara Garvin-Kester

Announcing New Book on Reading by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

A Classics Professor's Love Affair with Core Knowledg e
by Jeremiah Reedy, Ph.D

Why Is the Sequence Sequenced? by Robert Shepherd

Cultural Illiteracy: Scope, Causes, Consequences
essay published in EducationNews.org

National Conference News

A Letter from the President

Barbara Garvin-Kester

It is hard not to notice the recent flurry of articles and research reports on the subject of the persistent achievement gap in our nation’s schools and what needs to be done about it. The new buzz further strengthens our commitment to social equity and our resolve to eradicate the gap in student achievement. In a number of communities across the nation, neighborhood forums are being established to talk about the achievement gap and to define what parents, businesspeople, elected officials and community leaders might do to ensure that all children have a fair and equal chance to reach their potential.

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Announcing New Book on Reading by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

This March, Houghton Mifflin will publish a new book by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that will answer questions plaguing educators all across the country. Why do American children fail to perform as well as children in other industrialized countries? Why, after fourth grade, do students experience a slump in reading comprehension? Why, despite federal government spending of a billion dollars a year on the Reading First program, do so many schools fail to meet the goals established by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB)?

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A Classics Professor's Love Affair with Core Knowledge

I finished my Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Michigan in 1968 and started my first real job at a liberal arts college the same year. As at most colleges in those days, all students were required to take freshman composition, two years of a foreign language, a history course, two courses in social sciences, and two courses in math and/or science, plus physical education. There was also a required course in religion.

Then the radical student movement, which began at Berkeley in 1964, arrived in the Midwest in 1968.

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Why is the Sequence Sequenced?

Dans les champs de l’observation le hazard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.
(In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.)

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., reminds us time and time again that “Knowledge builds on knowledge.” Newton famously remarked in a letter to fellow scientist Robert Hooke that he [Newton] was able to see far because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Those are different ways of saying the same thing that Pasteur said. In effect, every school child, at every point in that child’s school career, stands on the shoulders of his or her former self.

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Cultural Illiteracy: Scope, Causes, Consequences

The generation of Americans Tocqueville observed in the 1830s were not far-removed from the “steeped in, soaked in, marinated in the classics” founding generation. Cultural literacy would become steadily less important, however, beginning in the early twentieth century — as states extended authority over accreditation, curriculum, textbooks and teacher certification. In particular, cultural literacy faded with the professionalization of teaching, with the emergence of colleges of education. Is this coincidence?

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National Conference News

The allure of the Western Frontier has been an essential part of the American experience for hundreds of years. Unique qualities of the American Indian, Hispanic, and cowboy cultures come together in San Antonio, the host city of the 15th Core Knowledge National Conference. Let San Antonio and Core Knowledge become your gateway to the limitless Knowledge Frontier.

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