A Proposed Educational Revolution for the GOP

The Problem

In Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, the con man, Harold Hill, convinces the residents of River City, Iowa, that he has developed a new method for learning music, called the "think system". Hill’s theory is that if a musician uses the "think system" properly, he or she does not need to rely on written music. Instead, the musician only needs to think about the song long enough and hard enough, and he or she will be able to play it flawlessly. By the end of the play, the townspeople know they have been conned because it is obvious that the "think system" doesn't work, but Hill is saved by the local music teacher. It's a delightful story, but real life doesn't end that way.

As the noted educator, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has tried to tell us for a generation, the American people have been conned since the 1930s with a version of the "think system", but there has been no happy ending. Hirsch’s central premise is that the decline in educational performance in our schools is directly related to a conscious decision by professional educators to abandon the use of a content-based curriculum in our public schools. Instead of a content-based curriculum, the education establishment has promoted a “child-centered” method of teaching that leaves each child to discover knowledge on their own.

As Hirsch makes clear in his most recent work, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, this trade-out has produced societal illiteracy, because it led to a systemic failure to pass on the basic knowledge of language, history, and culture every American needs in order to function as a productive member of our society.

The illiteracy has led to a social nightmare in many communities, where up to 50% of students who start school will never graduate from high school, and 87% will never graduate from college. We are under-educating too many people, thereby condemning them, their families and their neighborhoods to chronic crime, deviancy, underemployment and poverty. Merely giving parents the choice to move their children to other schools that use the same teaching methods, or raising school and teacher performance criteria without addressing classroom content, will not fix this problem. Instead, the source of the problem—the content of our schools’ curricula—must be squarely addressed.

Let’s look at a practical example of how this problem plays out in our classrooms. When children enter pre-school or kindergarten, at some point they realize that there is a clock on the wall, but they do no yet know what it means, why it is there, and what you do with it. This information has to be taught and reinforced so the student will process it in many diverse contexts over years. So, in these early classes when students are introduced to reading a clock, their science instruction should be coordinated to teach about the rotation of the earth; math instruction should give equations and story problems that introduce real problems related to calculating and managing time that are age-appropriate; vocabulary lessons should introduce time-related words (e.g., minute, hour, day, night, month, season, year, and annual); grammar lessons should use these words in context; and short stories should be read that discuss time and seasons in context. Provided with this foundation, the child can begin to manage and understand time, but also will possess some of the linguistic and conceptual tools needed to later understand: the stories of Nathanial Hawthorne and poems of Robert Frost in which the setting in a specific season is critical to the meaning of their works; the relationship of time to the cadence and meaning of a Poe story or poem; why Washington’s army had to camp at Valley Forge, and why his winter crossing of the Delaware River was so dramatic; the importance of annual floods along the Nile to the building of the Egyptian empire; and much more.

If contextual facts are not taught early and incrementally, the student will find it hard to progress in school. Simply learning critical-thinking skills and how to apply them, without being taught contextual facts (and then learning to build on them with more contextual facts in diverse contexts), will impair a student's ability to continue to learn. Take a child who has lived in a home and neighborhood in Houston where many adults don’t have regular jobs, or where adults don’t functionally interact with their children. In the context of the previous example, have those children seen the seasons change enough to comprehend it? Have they seen a rhythm to their parent's daily routine, or heard people discuss deadlines and time commitments, enough to understand the concept and importance of time? If not, how will they discover the facts needed to critically think about these ideas?

By not teaching incremental, age-appropriate, comprehensive factual content--or core knowledge--cognitive science tells us that these students, who have no where else to “discover” such factual content, will fail. And guess what...students from these neighborhoods have failed and dropped-out of school in alarming numbers, while never having discovered the knowledge of language, history and culture they actually needed to succeed. It's like we've been asking our children to hum a tune they've never heard, or play a song on an instrument without learning the notes of the song or how to play the instrument--we've asked them to do something that can't be done, except by pure accident. We should never have left something so important, and so expensive, for our society to pure accident.

As Hirsch points out, we know how to fix this problem—we need to address the content of what we are teaching our children. If we fix this problem, it will be much easier to fix the structural tax and spending issues related to delivering education. If we don't fix this problem, no amount of tinkering with salaries, standards, taxes or budgets will improve the education of our children.

The GOP Solution

The GOP at all levels must address this problem as part of our effort to reconnect with the American public. Remember that the only institution in American life, which has involved, at some time and in some way, every individual, every family, every neighborhood, and every level of government, is our local school, and its problems affect us all—now and into the future. Recently, I stated during a candidates’ forum that I believe a central mission of a revitalized GOP must be to rebuild not just our commitment to liberty, but also the obligations that come with liberty, in order to defeat the Democratic Party’s embrace of statism. I call this commitment an effort to “Renew the American Community.” As part of this renewal of our sense of community with our neighbors, we must fix our schools.

What has been lost from our education is an understanding and appreciation by our children of the “American Story”: the cumulative wisdom of Western thought, together with the core principles and contexts underlying the structure and operation of American society. While our politics—both liberal and conservative—has focused almost exclusively on improving the process of delivering education, it has ignored the loss of this content from our classrooms. As a result, as many as 87% of our children in certain neighborhoods in Harris County do not possess the tools they will need to succeed in today’s economic environment, and virtually no one is being educated to succeed as a citizen—unless by accident, or outside of the public school system.

This American Story should become the context in which the student’s exposure to every other academic discipline is processed, and in which he or she would then process a lifetime of learning after leaving school. This story, properly taught, should instill the student with the means of understanding not only the physical world they inhabit, and the political and economic system of our country, and of other countries; but also with the ethical means to make the right decisions as a member of the community. Once we decide on this course of action, textbooks must be developed in every discipline to mutually support this curriculum, and a modern and efficient delivery system must be developed at the state and local levels to provide this education.

The American Story should never be used to promote an ideology, religion or political party in any classroom or discipline. Instead, it refers to the contextual knowledge every child needs to possess in order to fully comprehend and use the language, mathematics, science, art, literature, history, economics, law, and culture of our society. The American Story provides a frame of reference to each child that is consistent with the great philosophical and political traditions championed by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and with the theology of all the major religious traditions observed in this country, but without indoctrinating any child with a specific point of view. This story gives them the tools to function as adult citizens who will contribute positively to their families and neighborhoods.

As the party that prides itself on being the custodian of our society’s basic principles, and on preserving local control of our schools, the GOP must work to end the current social fraud caused by our educational "think system". The Republican Party at all levels must fight to improve the content of the education we provide to all our children, so that they, and their future families and neighborhoods, flourish. For if they flourish, they will be more inclined to embrace the individual obligations that come with the gift of liberty, which, in turn, will help us "Renew the American Community" without embracing an ever-growing government. As part of this fight, the HCRP should champion reform of the content of the curriculum in our local schools by supporting educators, school board candidates, and legislators who will address this issue.