National curriculum needed

School scheduling became pretty chaotic for my son and family this fall, so they decided to homeschool until things settle down. Since my two junior high grandsons are comfortable in their public schools, and my daughter-in-law is a former school board member, this wasn’t an easy choice.

Their dilemma reminded me of one of the windmills I tilted at back when I was in the public school business myself. Not many people become intensely interested in the word “curriculum,” but I did, and still am, and maybe that explains why my wife thinks a stay-at-home order is perfect for me.

The language arts curriculum my grandsons are now following seems pretty traditional and neither dumbed down nor overly complicated. It will probably do just fine. Nevertheless, I maintain reservations about do-it-yourself education, but that’s not my point here.

All over America, parents are facing the same scheduling dilemma. Meanwhile, teachers are trying to maintain contact with their students, but online is no substitute for face-to-face relationships. And, lessons prepared for both online or in-school use are more work to prepare, plus difficult to follow up with individual feedback.

Obviously, schooling is a hodge-podge right now, and on top of these personal and localized logistical problems is the fact that there is no widespread plan nor expected outcome for this hodge-podge except to hope that somehow it all stumbles along until life can go back to normal. There is no national curriculum, no national agreement about the foundational question of education: what are the students learning?

Of course, there was no national curriculum before COVID either, and in my opinion, as well as the opinion of actual experts, that’s a major flaw in the way Americans do education. COVID just makes the problem worse.

In short, with or without a pandemic, we need a national core curriculum as a source of confidence that every American student, no matter the type of schooling (home, private, public, online, mid-covid, post-covid, whatever), is studying and being held accountable for the in-common intellectual and academic foundations necessary for further education, economic competence and competitiveness, civic engagement, and individual maturity in America.

That’s the windmill I poked at in both naivete and futility for many years.

There have been notable efforts at something like this. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., (still active in education in his ‘90’s) writes both in theory and in practical form on the subject, including an entire curriculum series; Wikipedia says that over 1,200 schools use Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Sequence. Montana joined most other states some years ago in a core curriculum effort, but the initiative is on a 10-year completion schedule, enough time for plenty of protesting, meddling, and apathy.

There are other examples proven and ready-made, but availability doesn’t matter much if the whole nation doesn’t adopt the idea.

Why don’t we? Politics.

Conservatives look upon the idea as some kind of government overreach, plus they fear liberals might taint the text (“Evolution? Eek!”). Liberals fear that such curricula might be too rigorous, or might mention God, or might show racial, social, cultural or gender bias. So we muddle along, concerned about the topic only when once again we read that American public education performance falls behind that of other nations – including those top countries such as France, which uses a national curriculum.

But since Americans can politicize something as simple as wearing face masks during a pandemic, I guess it’s no surprise that we can politicize something as complex and critical as an academic structure which would help bring Americans together rather than further fragmenting them. I doubt that habit will change anytime soon.

Ron Rude, Plains