What Can We Agree to Teach?
Robert Pondiscio is the guest-blogger on Bridging Differences again today.
Dear Deborah,
I trust you had a restful Thanksgiving with family and friends, and that you're recharged and ready for battle. You asked for an argument in your last about the "nitty-gritty details" of schooling. Let me see if I can accommodate you.
It is all well and good to be concerned with schools as places where "we all educate each other" and where we are "respectful of each other's budding voices." But these are slogans and homilies. No one will disagree. The tough, essential, and unavoidable question is what, if anything, we expectall children to learn. What are the basic, non-negotiable things? Is there a baseline of common knowledge that a free people must command in order to prize, preserve, and protect the freedom and liberty we both agree are essential?
Let's quickly get out of the way that this question is not answered by Common Core State Standards. By their very nature, standards do not answer the question "What must all children know?" any more than auto safety standards answer what car you should buy, or food safety standards tell you what to have for dinner. You don't teach the standards. You teach a curriculumto the standards.
So what shall we teach? You and I have agreed that our schools must teach for "democracy and