ACTA's Must-Reads

Alas, as I've said elsewhere, most constituencies -- students, parents, employers -- are not concerned about the hollow core, in fact they by and large like the current arrangements, even employers -- which is why they are so widespread and stable.

Most of the recommendations of the panel are pretty silly -- for example, graduation rates are pretty widely available from U.S. News and the like. Is there any huge demand for more of this information? Not that I can see, except that government officials seem to want to increase "productivity" by juicing graduation rates. Great! The perfect incentive to lower standards even further.

My belief is that control belongs with trustees and legislatures, not with the federal government, certainly not some commission appointed by some political hack. ACTA would do well to go back to trying to influence the trustees and legislatures, if they are listening.

I don't see what graduation rates are supposed to mean anyway. Anyone can graduate any student, regardless of literacy status or presence/lack of basic skills: Just issue the requisite credits. Until there is some relationship linking an award of academic credits and actual learning/skill, what does the issuance of credits mean (beyond, of course, the receipt of the agreed amount of tuition)?

That was the point of that last NAAL: All those people had graduated, yet only 31% of them had proficient literacy skills. We must therefore question what graduation means these days -- and it does, in many cases, mean nothing more than payment of fees and some appearance in class from time to time.

Re graduation: That is exactly my point!

Re NAAL: I've looked at the report in detail, but without more information, I'm dubious about its interpretation.

For example, as far as I can tell, it measured college graduates of all ages. So it's hard to tell what the results mean about recent college graduates.

Here's another thing: the overall proficiency of the entire population -- college grads, non-graduates, and people with graduate education -- is increasing. So the news is not all bad.

It may be that within the category of college grads, proficiency is decreasing, but there is a higher fraction of college grads, and they are pulling up the overall average.

But the point about graduation rates remains: one way to increase "productivity", by far the easiest, is to lower standards for graduation, so more marginal people can get through.

Will this blog outline what ACTA's ideal curriculum requirements would look like exactly? No reasonable discussion of the issue can take place without specifics.

ACTA has both studied the lack of core curricular undergraduate requirements (see ACTA's study, The Hollow Core: The Failure of the General Education Curriculum) and offered definitions and examples of core curricula in Becoming an Educated Person: Toward a Core Curriculum for College Students. The first report is available as a PDF download from ACTA's website and the second can be procured on request from ACTA. ACTA has also conducted several studies on declining historical literacy and how to make historical education more effective--see Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century, available as a PDF on ACTA's site; Restoring America's Legacy: The Challenge of Historical Literacy in the 21st Century, available as a PDF on ACTA's site; and "We the People," A Resource Guide to Promoting Historical Literacy for Governors, Legislators, Teachers and Citizens, available from ACTA on request.

I guess I wonder if Ms Eliot has identified any aspects of the curriculum that she'd like to see changed, and if so, what her position would be towards people endorsing her view, and taking ACTA's approach towards changing the curriculum accordingly.

Clawmute, I am sympathetic, in part, to attempts to fufill the sort of democratic educational mission as laid out over a century ago by Horace Mann. I do think that, to fully exercise one's freedom and power as a citizen of a democracy, one should be educated as fully as possible at public expense.

I also believe one should be educated, as Martha Nussbaum has argued persuasively in *Cultivating Humanity*, as a world citizen.

My problem with the sort of core curriculum as discussed in ACTA's *The Hollow Core* begins with the way ACTA so rigidly defines what can constitute a "core" body of knowledge. For example, a college decides to set up a required literature course. What's more central, Hellenic Greek literature, Renaissance English drama, Romantic British poetry, republican and renaissance American literature? What's more central in a required philosophy course: Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Locke and Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, James and Peirce?

This ultimately can only be decided by the *mission* of the education. Is the goal to teach disciplinary ways of thinking or the consensus of knowledge in a discipline? Which is to say, is the goal to teach students how to think historically or memorize certain narratives above specific histories of specific nations in specific periods?

If your goal is the latter, then you'll have to justify why American history is required and not British history. Or why American and British and not European. Or why "American" history is restricted to the United States. If your goal is the former, you can justify why a course on, say, "The History of Hollywood Cinema" can fulfill a history requirement. Such a course would still teach students the fundamentals of a historicist methodology, even if it didn't run through the Constitutional Convention and the D-Day invasion.

A core curriculum with the goal of "cultural literacy" would ultimately get in the way of the depth of professional education at the college level. A core curriculum focused on the goal of specialized ways of knowing is more modest, even if it is seemingly more vague. I agree with Hirsch that you can't just teach "critical thinking." But that doesn't mean you can't teach, say, the scientific method, or historicism, or formal analysis of literature, or functionalism in sociology, or the history of musical forms. And you can teach those ways of understanding as much through courses like "The History of the Comic Book" and "Hispanic Immigration Novels" and "Expressionism in German Art" and "The Evolution of Muskrats" as through courses like "American History I" and "Western Civilization" and "European Art" and "Music of the European Masters."

My questions are thus: why dedicate so much time and energy to forcing colleges to shoulder the responsibility of the core curriculum? Why are so many of the supporters of ACTA the same people who opposed multiculturalism a decade or two ago? Are colleges being used not as a last stand in cultural literacy but rather as a last stand in American nativism?

[And one final, almost silly, question: How much of the American student's ignorance can be chalked up to the natural tendency of humans to forget knowledge they aren't forced to use regularly? I mean, I had a great public education at inner city school and state colleges, I received nearly perfect scores on all the standardized tests, but I can no longer remember my symbolic logic, my derivatives, my chemical equations, the timeline of all the Presidents and their parties, and so on. Is one more required college class in each field really going to change such forgetting ten years after the college student has become a lawyer, a doctor, a gym teacher, an engineer? And isn't it easier to remember a way of thinking than a series of facts?]

"My questions are thus: why dedicate so much time and energy to forcing colleges to shoulder the responsibility of the core curriculum?"

Uh, because it's their JOB, and they get billions in tax dollars to do it.

If they refuse to teach, defund them and let them survive on whatever value (if any) individual consumers grant them.

Michael--

The NAAL evaluated not only the general population, but the specific subpopulation of college graduates as well. Those latter figures (31% proficiency) are the numbers that ground my concerns.

Federal Dog: "Duh" is not an argument.

Teaching a core curriculum is not the job of university. De facto. Nor is it the JOB of the university. All the caps in the world won't make it so.

Training citizens in the fundamentals of math, science, history, literature, art, music, and physical self-care is the job of the public school. It's been that way since Horace Mann, among others, convinced us it should be that way. Training professionals is the current job of the university. De facto.

It would be far smarter to structure K-12 around a core curriculum and let college students begin to decide freely the course of their educations.

Mr. Dog: Yes, the NAAL evaluated the college graduate population. But the problem, as I stated, is that "it measured college graduates of all ages. So it's hard to tell what the results mean about recent college graduates". The relevant qualifier is recent. I'm not saying the results are good, only that they have been overinterpreted, as far as I can tell.

My real guess, based on my own observations, is that recent college grads are not as skillful as grads in the past. If so, there are a lot of reasons for this, some of which are hardly discussed at all.

"Federal Dog: "Duh" is not an argument."

This remark has nothing to do with me, as you would easily see if you read my post. The fact that you are confused about whether the job of teachers is to teach means you have nothing to contribute to a serious discussion of the modern academy.

I asked:

"I guess I wonder if Ms Eliot has identified any aspects of the curriculum that she'd like to see changed, and if so, what her position would be towards people endorsing her view, and taking ACTA's approach towards changing the curriculum accordingly."

I've ferreted about in her lengthy response, and while I'm sure I'm much the better for it, I still haven't a clue whether or not she has identified any aspects of the curriculum that she'd like to see changed!

Maybe my original question was too complex or ambiguous (it was a complex question, and in retrospect, I should have worded it differently).

So I'll rephrase my query thusly:

Ms Eliot: have you identified any aspect(s) of the curriculum that you believe it's important to change?

Clawmute

Karen Eliot wrote:

"Teaching a core curriculum is not the job of university. De facto. Nor is it the JOB of the university. All the caps in the world won't make it so.

"Training citizens in the fundamentals of math, science, history, literature, art, music, and physical self-care is the job of the public school. It's been that way since Horace Mann, among others, convinced us it should be that way. Training professionals is the current job of the university. De facto."

Really! How do you know? Has Horace Mann produced a Revealed Truth, perhaps written in stone, a Truth known only to a select few oracles, of which you are one, a Truth that is indisputable, one never to be questioned?

Is Horace Mann infallible? Is truth subject to the democratic process, or by definition is truth what you declare it to be after having consulted an authority?

Or, is this simply your opinion, certainly an invaluable one, but one that people of good faith might nevertheless legitimately disagree with?

Clawmute

Clawmute:

Of course Horace Mann isn't infallible. If you'd paid attention to the actual language of my posting, you'd notice that I wrote "since Horace Mann, among others, *convinced* us it should be that way." Convinced is the key word. Feel free to disagree with him.

But I don't see any important disagreement with Mann in your or ACTA's ideas. Mann believed that to be a good American citizen, one needed a solid education. He also believed that such an education should be guaranteed and provided at public expense.

ACTA wishes to further Mann's goals at the college level, and it seeks to do this through the imposition of a core curriculum.

I disagree with this approach. I think that the core curriculum -- if it's really the essentials of what any educated citizen should know -- must be taught from K-12. That's the only guaranteed, public education Americans receive. State colleges aren't free, and education there isn't guaranteed (that is, not every resident of NJ is guaranteed a spot at Rutgers). If to be a good citizen one must know the core curriculum, then it must be taught to all Americans equally.

As far as college curricula go, I think we do an injustice if we seek to impose a rigid core curriculum. Pragmatically, the top professors will seek jobs where they have the most control over their own teaching. Academically, a core curriculum means reducing the number of specialized courses a student can take in his or her field of interest. Right now, different colleges over more or fewer "core" offerings. This means that students and professors can self-select, depending on their interests and goals as educators and learners. If state colleges are forced to teach a core curriculum, they risk alienating those students and professors attracted to more freedom to choose how they teach and learn. This could create a gulf between private and public college education; those who can't afford private colleges will be subject to less freedom to decide on the course of their own education.

Do I see areas where curriculum reform will be useful? Of course I do, especially at the level of writing. I think all freshman and sophomore level college courses should contain a rhet/comp element. I don't think the priority is as high for required college math. If a high school student received a B or higher in pre-calc, s/he really doesn't need any more math (unless his/her major involves math, of course). But given the way English is taught at many high schools, an A in senior English doesn't mean that student can write a sophisticated essay.

I'm not a fan of a total free for all education, like Brown offers. As a college student, I had math, science, humanities, and language requirements. But I do think students and professors need to have a certain degree in freedom in designing courses and choosing courses that will fulfill such requirements.

I don't think there's any reason why a student couldn't be trilingual and familiar with something like ACTA's core curriculum by grade 12. College, like adulthood, should be a realm of greater freedom and responsibility. It shouldn't be one last ditch effort to establish general knowledge.