User:Russil Wvong/education

Notes on education

Pre-school

What Do People Do All Day? (ISBN 0394818237), by Richard Scarry. 1968. An excellent model of how the world works, suitable for small children.

"Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor," by Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Scientific American, February 2002.

Elementary school

The Core Knowledge website includes an overview of the entire Core Knowledge curriculum: K-2, 3-5, 6-8.

Recommended by Roger Shattuck. "The Shame of the Schools," by Roger Shattuck. New York Review of Books, April 7, 2005. Describes Shattuck's experiences on the board of his local high school in Vermont, in particular the lack of a curriculum.

Nothing says a school or a district has to draft and write its curriculum document from scratch. ...

The alternative would set aside existing Vermont curriculum documents. My district can examine and evaluate and finally select one from among a number of independent, off-the-shelf curricula now available, both public and proprietary. The New York State Board of Regents, the International Baccalaureate, New Standards, Success for All, the Edison Project, the Core Knowledge Sequence, Direct Instruction, America's Choice, New American Schools—all these programs make differing claims, including comprehensive school reform. I have spent much time in the past three years searching for and scrutinizing these programs and their curricula.

I have found only one curriculum that moves grade by grade (in this case K–8), that uses simple lists of specific content, that does not prescribe teaching methods, that is cross-referenced, and that turns out to be informative and even a pleasure to read. The Core Knowledge Sequence (now in its third edition), prepared and published by the Core Knowledge Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, accomplishes all this in a no-frills two hundred-page booklet adopted since 1986 by 480 schools and under consideration by four hundred. The moving spirit here is the dedicated teacher-scholar E.D. Hirsch.[3] Everyone concerned about what is being taught in our public schools should examine the Core Knowledge Sequence. The considered selection of such a curriculum by my district would represent the full and proper exercise of local control and a means of coordinating the preparation of students in the five elementary schools feeding Mt. Abe.

E. D. Hirsch, "The Primal Scene of Education," New York Review of Books, March 2, 1989. Argues that facts are important as well as skills. There's a subsequent exchange with Herbert R. Kohl.

Commentary by Paul MacFarlane on Harold Stevenson, "Learning from Asian Schools," Scientific American, December 1992. Compares elementary schools in Chicago, Sendai, Taipei, and Beijing. Obituary for Stevenson.

High school

The Story of Mankind (1922), by Hendrik van Loon. A history of the world, written for older children. Winner of the Newbery Medal.