conservativeBrand

… and Education Secretary Arne Duncan should pay attention as well. E.D. Hirsch has been writing about core education values for several decades; now an experiment in traditional teaching begun in Massachusetts in 1993 has produced the kind of results that the edublob (that would include administrators, teachers unions and education schools) only talks about.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_hirsch.html

A brief taste of the article: “Hirsch’s description of the Founders’ educational views is both reverential and elegiac. Most American leaders, well into the nineteenth century, believed passionately that schools’ main task was “the making of Americans,” Hirsch writes. He refers here not only to the millions of European immigrants arriving throughout the nineteenth century but also to native-born Americans from different regions and religions, who needed common schools as the means of acculturation into the “common language community” of a still-new country.”

“Lincoln’s famous Lyceum speech of 1838, Hirsch notes, was primarily about common schooling and shared knowledge as democratic touchstones. In the speech, Lincoln assigned schools the task of teaching the American credo of “solidarity, freedom, and civic peace above all other principles.” Let these principles, Lincoln said, “be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges—let it be written in Primmers [sic], spelling books and almanacs.” These beliefs were already reaching young Americans through Noah Webster’s grammars and dictionaries and William McGuffey’s readers.”