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Episode 7: America’s Education Past and Future

Episode 7: America’s Education Past and Future

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 Thanks for joining me for another episode in our America’s Education Past and Future mini-series. I left off last week’s episode with the promise of looking at our pedagogy and curriculum. Before we dive into that, I want to just define a few things. First, pedagogy is the how. It is the methods you use to teach content. Standards are what you teach or the content. Curriculum provides the scope and sequence for the standards to be taught and combines it with the how it is to be taught, pedagogy. I want to discuss each of these components separately and then look at how they are woven together and the impact they have on the quality of our education. However, I want to remind everyone of what I said in episode one. I am in no way shape or form shaming anyone when I discuss these topics. We do what we do in education today, because that is all we have known, until now. This includes me. I have taught in the current system and lead teachers in this system. Yet, with so many people shedding light on the current state of our education system, we cannot continue to ignore it. I believe Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” It is time to get off the pedagogy Ferris wheel of the progressive model, and stand firm on the pedagogy of our past, the classical Christian education model. More on that soon! Let’s start with pedagogy. Any educator can tell you that you spend the last two years of college learning all about pedagogy and putting it into practice. This is where your professors teach you how to teach.In today’s education system, pedagogy is constantly changing. I like to call it the pedagogy Ferris wheel. If you stay in education long enough, the strategies you were told to use to teach come back around wrapped in a shiny new package.I cannot tell you how many times I have heard educators who have been it longer than me say, “This is what they had us doing 15 years ago, just under a different name.” Raise your hand if you have said that or heard that before. I know I am not the only one raising my hand right now.Outside of the fact that content areas have been untwined and siloed, nothing about educational pedagogy has stayed the same. Right now, we are in the Science of Reading kick. The science of reading offers numerous effective strategies. And in case you did not know this already, the Science of Reading has been around since the 1980s. It is just back in a new shiny package.Whatever the new pedagogy is, it drives our curriculum, which is built off our academic standards. Yes, we are going there. The highly controversial topic of Common Core standards.In 2004, David Coleman launched the Common Core initiative. It was sold as a way to make academic standards the same across the nation. So that no matter where you were in the country, all 6th graders were learning the same set of skills. This meant moving from one state to another would not adversely affect a child’s academics. In theory, they should be able to hop right in where they left off at their previous school.I don’t think anyone had an issue with having a set of national academic standards. This is evident by the fact that all but nine states adopted these new standards. What made common core an issue was all the things behind the scenes. Data mining, new pedagogical approaches, significant historical content revisions, and the implementation costs of these new standards.With forty-one states adopting the common core standards, curriculum companies quickly rewrote all of their curriculum to align to these standards. All subjects took a hit, but I would say math and history took the hardest hits. With the rewriting of curriculum progressives were able to literally rewrite history to meet their agenda.Suddenly, the heroes of our nation’s past were evil. Men and women who were once viewed as being on the side of wrong, now to be praised for their contributions to society. Think about how many of our founding fathers have been slandered by our new curriculum. That is just the tip of the iceberg. Do we even study our founding documents anymore?In David Barton’s book, Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant, he mentions a conversation he had with a well-accomplished attorney. The attorney was adamant that the words separation of church and state were in our constitution. David responded by pointing out that those words are not mentioned in any of our founding documents. At the attorney’s insistence that they were, David asked him to find the phrase in the constitution. The man could not and responded with, “I can’t believe this! In law school they always taught us that’s what the First Amendment said!” (Separation of Church and State, What the Founders Meant...

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