"So, What's the Problem?"

Roger Shattuck’s article, “The Shame of the Schools,” in the most recent The New York Review of Books (7 April 2005), contains a great deal of truth. Shattuck’s overriding premise and complaint, that schools fail to intellectually challenge, to emotionally address, and psychologically nurture our children, has become a pedagogical cliché in the waning years of the last century and the incipient years of the present one. In fact, the struggle for the American Curriculum (a characterization of education history made by curriculum theorist, Herbert Kleibard) has been fought over these charges from the very beginning of the common school movement in the early nineteenth century. That contentious debate has swirled through the classrooms for almost two centuries, well into the twenty-first century. Given the present educational climate, there is little hope that the struggle will soon subside. But Shattuck’s recent argument addresses the very charge that I and my colleagues—professional educators, self-called reconceptualists, scholars and practioners all--have been making for several years now. “The emperor wears no clothes,” we exclaim. “The curriculum contains no substance” we complain. “The schools are not functioning,” we grieve.

Of course, Roger Shattuck’s article fails to address the incredibly complex history which has brought our educational institutions to this position, and therefore, he does the schools an egregious disservice. It would seem from Shattuck’s argument that what he refers to as the shame of the schools is, indeed, for Shattuck, equivalent to the fault of the schools, and not the result of the social and political forces that vie for power in American society, and which use the schools as the tools and scapegoats to pursue their partisan agendas. Schools, alas, have been rendered veritably powerless in American society; teachers have been deskilled and reduced to mere technicians executing the directives of others; curriculum has been reduced to a ‘need to know’ knowledge grid, and intellectual rigor has gone the way of ethics and social responsibility. Indeed, schools have been made into the whipping posts onto which are tied every failure of American society. For me, now, an educator for thirty five years, the shame of the school has become, alas, in Shattuck’s title, my social disgrace, and all of America’s economic and social failures result from my incompetences. Ah, but that plaint is motive for another essay. For now, I want to study another and somewhat related, aspect of Shattuck’s argument.

After forty years of college teaching, Shattuck retired into the meeting rooms of the local school board in Lincoln, Vermont, to take his place as an elected member of that illustrious body. There, he learned that schools boards are overwhelmed with matters of school security, contract negotiations, administrative hirings, special education mandates and budget matters. And he also discovered overcrowded, overworked classrooms, and poorly and noisily ventilated classrooms. He discovered “teachers pushing loaded carts like the homeless,” and became aware firsthand of the increasing and constant demands placed on teachers for patience, firmness, and imagination. In his article, Shattuck does not note the remarkable absence of trust placed in the teacher for developing and implementing curriculum and managing other school affairs. Ah, but that is a matter not directly related to what Shattuck means to address, and motive, I think, for another essay.

Finally, at some point in his School Board tenure, Shattuck turns his mind to issues of curriculum, and discovers that, to his horror, “my school and its district have no ascertainable curriculum and no effective curriculum document.” Curriculum guidelines, yes, but curriculum, no. Curriculum standards, yes, but curriculum content, no. Curriculum strategies, yes, but curriculum material, no. Board Member Shattuck was not pleased.

Like the good scholar he is, Shattuck used his time on the board to re-educate himself about public education, elementary and secondary. He read the literature, the journals and the histories, and discovered, as we would expect (and even as we might hope), John Dewey. I mean, Dewey was born and raised in Burlington, Vermont, and attended undergraduate work at the University of Vermont. John Dewey is one of Vermont’s (bless its heart!) favorite sons. And Shattuck discovered in John Dewey the quintessential curricular theorist. Because it is in John Dewey that Shattuck discovers the quintessential pragmatist—a man who, like Shattuck himself, went into the schools and learned his lessons about schools. Dewey, Shattuck suggests, went back into the schools in the philosopher’s own thirties and, at the University of Chicago, operated a laboratory school in which Dewey himself learned about schooling and curriculum.

Shattuck characterizes Dewey’s newly learned wisdom as having resolved the perennial dualism between a ‘child centered’ and a ‘curriculum centered’ practice. That is, for Dewey, it could not be merely content that must be the substance of curriculum. Nor could curriculum be driven wholly by the child’s own needs. Rather, this dualism, which opposed the child and the curriculum, is resolved by Dewey when he suggests that the child and the curriculum are merely “two limits which define a single process.” That is, just as two points define a single line, so, too, do the two positions of the subject-matter content and the individual child define the curriculum. For Dewey, with the guidance of the wise teacher, the child must be led along that curriculum line, reconstructing his or her experience as the educational process enables her to do. If the school theorists wondered if the curriculum problem might be solved by focusing on content or on the child, if the problem set by school personnel concerned whether an emphasis should be on the content or the child, Dewey ironically queried, “What is the problem?” And Dewey responded, not quite innocently, to his own question, “There is no problem and never has been!” Dewey acknowledged, of course, curriculum must have content, but that content must derive from the child’s own experience.

When my children arrive home on Halloween, (a pagan rite if I might say, which might bear some cultural study), from a night of Trick or Treating, and they gleefully unload their sweet stashes on the floor, there is in my living room mathematics, science, and history (a term Shattuck prefers to social studies). And, Dewey notes, it is my responsibility as the teacher to know this fact, though it is only candy, candy, and more candy that the children see. When my child, disregarding my wise caution, jumps into the puddle on her way to school, wetting her shoes and pants which she must all day wear damp, there is a geography lesson in her actions. But she doesn’t know it: I do! It was the teacher, the central figure in the educational experience, who must be wise enough—who must in her own education be made wise enough—to understand the disciplines, to understand how the child’s actions are always already embedded in those disciplines, and to know what must next be done, and why, and how!!

I cannot here repeat what I have elsewhere eloquently argued: that the anti-intellectual nature of schooling which I and my colleagues decry, now joined by Roger Shattuck, characterizes the educational experience, even as Hofstadter argued eloquently that anti-intellectualism characterizes American Society. Certainly, the glee with which our present President reminds us of his educational mediocrities does not bode well for improving the intellectual climate. Indeed, every time that man speaks he denies everything for which in my thirty four years in the classroom I have stood and will continue to stand.

What Shattuck argues, that curriculum must be intellectually challenging and emotionally fulfilling, and psychologically relevant, has been the ignored cry of a most wonderful community of scholars whom I am proud to call my teachers and my colleagues. I can at a moment’s notice provide an extensive bibliography to help Mr. Shattuck begin the wonderful journey to a legitimate and viable curriculum. But for his plea, at least, I and my colleagues applaud Mr. Shattuck, and invite him to share and share in, our work.

Though we heartily concur with Roger Shattuck’s complaint, we are disappointed with his solution—the adoption of what Shattuck claims is the only “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.” This incredible document, it turns out, is the product of Core Knowledge, and is the work of none other than scholar E.D. Hirsch, who is 1989, in The New York Review of Books, argued “that the purpose of education is the transmission of an accumulated shared body of knowledge, and the continued enlargement of that same ‘shared’ body by a method of selection to which those privileged few are privy.” I responded in some small measure to Hirsch’s NYRB piece in The Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (1989, 8:3), and my criticism can be read there. This notion of core knowledge recreates the very dualism that Dewey’s work exploded more than one hundred years ago. Because the core knowledge here is merely a curriculum centered education totally unmindful of the children. In his conceptualizations, Shattuck should start not with Dewey’s rightly famous, My Pedagogic Creed which Shattuck says Dewey rose above after his work in the lab school, but with Dewey’s essay, “The Psychological Aspect of Curriculum,” (1897) in which Dewey dismissed the current dualisms which rendered education if not impossible, then certainly ineffective. There is nothing to my knowledge in Dewey which would advocate the core curriculum promulgated by Hirsch and his colleagues.

Rather, Dewey would continually argue that the content which my children address in school should be rigorous and intellectually stimulating, but must derive from their experiences!! There is nothing wrong with every student reading a different text, as long as the classroom is structured so that the voice of each student and each text is provided purpose and place. Education is not knowledge of the text, but the means by which that text informs the life of the reader of it. There is nothing wrong with every student in the class reading the same text as long as the voices of the students inheres in the chosen text, and so long as the environment is so constructed (by the wise teacher) that a complicated conversation with the text(s) at the center develops. It is from that conversation that the child’s experience may be reconstructed! This is an intellectual journey requiring an intellect which the curriculum should foster and offer.