In our on-going desire to bring educational and thought provoking information to parents of school aged children, as well as the community at large, the North Bay Educational Foundation (NBEF) will share news, articles, case studies and announcements on this blog. Our hope is to stimulate conversation about improving education in the North Bay community and to provide a forum to openly examine educational alternatives for our children.
Laura McInerney, popular education writer for the Guardian who is currently pursing a PhD in Education Policy on a Fulbright scholarship, recently posted this article addressing misconceptions regarding the Core Knowledge curriculum and explaining its benefits.
McInerney writes in her blog, “When Daisy Christodolou, author of The Seven Myths of Education, first told me about E.D. Hirsch, and the curriculum he was advocating as a great innovation for American schools, I was more than a little incredulous. Fearful it would simply require students to sit, dead-pan, learning about ‘dead white dudes’, it was a relief to see that this is not what Hirsch advocates.”
McInerney discovered a curriculum which is challenging and interesting and includes “a year-by-year list of things it makes sense for students to be taught during their first 8 years of school.” Core Knowledge provides a strong foundation and gives equal access to all children by providing a systematic and sequenced syllabus which includes language arts, world history, American history, geography, visual arts, music, mathematics and science.
While some might argue that Core Knowledge requires didactic teaching, McInerney found that it allows teachers to focus on creative teaching methods and to share lesson plans and activities rather than “spending their time reinventing the wheel or buying expensive packages from publishers.”
“The Core Knowledge curriculum describes fairy stories, songs, paintings, political speeches, biographies and an incredibly wide geographical spectrum – were any of us ever taught the Japanese feudal system?! … I was nevertheless impressed with the exciting depths of the sequence.”
Read more about how McInerney debunks myths about Core Knowledge point by point … (Link)
