Core Knowledge Lauded in
New York Review of Books

by Mary Kathryn Hassett

In the April 7 edition of the New York Review of Books, Roger Shattuck, renowned literary scholar, cultural critic, and more recently a champion of public school reform, singles out Core Knowledge as the curriculum of choice for K–8 schools that want a high-quality education for their students.

Shattuck’s essay recounts his foray into the world of public education in his small, rural Vermont community. After forty years of college teaching and many notable publications, this citizen scholar turned his attention to primary and secondary education, where he made some disturbing discoveries. Serving on his local school board, he discovered that despite the state’s Framework of Standards and the district’s Curriculum Guidelines, Course Selection Guide, and course syllabi, which, by law, must be filed by all teachers, there was nothing in his district that amounted to “a coherent, sequenced, and specific curriculum.” Visiting several classes verified this perception. “I am not saying,” Shattuck explains, “that our district curriculum is watered down or lopsided or old-fashioned or newfangled. I’m saying that those six hundred pages contain no useful curriculum at all.”

Shattuck’s full-length essay traces the pervasive influence of John Dewey, whose call for “child-centered” schools was misinterpreted as an attack on the need for a rigorous academic curriculum. As Dewey worked in the famous experimental school he established at the University of Chicago, he came to recognize, Shattuck claims, the need to focus both on the child and on the curriculum. The current emphasis on standards can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of curricula in contemporary education, but, asserts Shattuck, standards are “empty promises and dummy documents” if they are not derived from actual course content. “Without a specific curriculum,” he argues, “there can be no standards.”

Since Vermont, like most states, allows local districts to develop their own curriculum or, more efficiently, to select an already existing one, Shattuck went in search of one that would be genuinely helpful to teachers and genuinely inspiring to students. He reports studying many, many curricula existing on the market and finding that none in the K–8 area matched the Core Knowledge curricula. “I have found,” he said, “only one curriculum that moves grade by grade . . . that uses simple lists of specific content, that does not prescribe teaching methods, that is cross-referenced, and that turns out to be informative and even a pleasure to read.” He praises the work of E. D. Hirsch, Jr. as the moving force behind the development of this curriculum and he acknowledges that the challenging process of implementing it would be best done with the professional assistance of the Core Knowledge Foundation established by Hirsch.

Finally, Shattuck ruminates on the likelihood that his quest to help schools find a nourishing curriculum might be labeled “quixotic.” He reports being consoled, however, in knowing that at least those students who have been exposed to Core Knowledge in other places would know what the word quixotic means since they study a version of Cervantes’ novel in fifth grade.

The staff at the non-partisan Core Knowledge Foundation are happy to be at the destination point of Mr. Shattuck’s quest. We urge him forward in his great public service endeavor, an endeavor to which he has sacrificed, no doubt, a retirement of peaceful repose.

Core Knowledge Lauded in New York Review of Books

Core Knowledge Lauded in
New York Review of Books