I know the idea of a “common curriculum” in the United States will raise some immediate hackles, but if advocates for let’s-call-it a national movement for curriculum reform want to win over a few conservatives, they should try following the lead of CitizenshipFirst Executive Director Robert Pondiscio; it could even awaken some pockets of enthusiastic conservative support…

You [Deborah Meier] write that the struggle to define democracy and liberty continue to evolve and that schooling “ideally prepares us to join in that struggle.” I strongly agree, but here again I must insist on specificity. Do you expect children to absorb what they need to know to contribute to this discussion by osmosis? Through patient and persistent modeling of democracy in our schools? Or do you wish, as I do, for children to learn the story of America’s founding, study the American Revolution, read the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and become familiar with major historical events and movements of the past 250 years, warts and all, so that they might understand, in your excellent phrase, “precisely what protects other rights such as fairness, liberty, equality, privacy, and happiness.” Yes or no?

The civic virtues we both prize are empty platitudes without history to make them meaningful. Why is it so difficult to say—loudly and proudly—there are things all Americans should know to be competent citizens, so there must be a common curriculum…

My sense of how we got to the current moment in education policy, dominated as it is by the “Common Core”, is that a group of establishment-type education reformers thought that a national focus on “standards” would be less acrimonious than a national focus on “curriculum”, but that this turned out to be a horrible strategic misstep.

As Mr. Pondiscio has argued in other places (and I agree with him) the focus on doing education right and making it better should be on imparting knowledge. You may find it surprising that this point is contentious, or maybe you won’t, but splitting the discussion over “standards” apart from the discussion over “curriculum” seems to raise the level of contention more than it ameliorates it.

Experts and many non-experts both understand that knowledge to be taught is contained(?) (<< have to think some more if this is right verb) in the curriculum, meaning that trying to discuss “standards” apart from “curriculum”, and hyper-emphasizing a discussion of standards first, has had the unintended consequence of suggesting that there are more important parts to education than imparting knowledge. Proponents of the Common Core don’t help their cause when they try to argue that conservatives should be in favor of standards, because the idea of standards is supposed to be a conservative one, when in other discussions, “standards” are regularly used to mean something very different from a guide to the specific knowledge that students are expected to possess, which is the idea of “standards” that conservatives might be predisposed to support.

Ultimately, if the curriculum reformers who believe that imparting knowledge is the essence of education want to successfully bring conservatives on to their side, they need to enthusiastically make the case that knowledge exists which is worth having — as Robert Pondiscio does in the above excerpt — and make clear what that knowledge is. Debates about standards and curriculum, and testing and accountability, and most of everything else about education cannot fall into their proper place until this basic issue is resolved.