One of my favorite fables is sometimes called “Belling the Cat.” After losing many of their number to a particularly lethal cat, the mice confer to develop a solution. One of the most popular proposals is to tie a bell to the cat’s tail, so that they would hear the cat approaching. There is a lot of enthusiasm for this proposal until one mouse squeeks, “But who will tie the bell to the cat’s tail?”
You could say this is a parable for pragmatists, but it could also be a cautionary tale for those who propose solutions without having tried them. That’s how I view E. D. Hirsch, who says we should have a well-structured curriculum, assigning topics and authors by grades. That proposal is recalled in his NY Times Op-ed piece “Testing for Dummies.” http://neologophilia.pbwiki.com/Literacy-in-the-News.
For thirty years Hirsch has made the commonsense claim that knowing the content of a text is the best qualifier for comprehending the text. Those of us in the business of educating K-12 students call this “prior knowledge.” Who could disagree with that? He cites a study where a reading population was classified for their prior knowledge of baseball, then given texts to read about baseball. And–can you imagine– the baseball experts did better on the tests of comprehension!
Educators do not quibble with the importance of prior knowledge in reading, but, naturally reading includes more than applying facts to text. You have to apply the right facts (relevance), decide what the facts mean (inference), make predictions about how those facts can be used (application) and many other reading skills that are typcially tested on standardized tests. And besides, should everyone be experts on baseball? (I have to admit, I gave that question a second look).
Hirsch correctly argues that prior knowledge is among the most critical factors in reading, but his proposal is like “belling the cat.” School administrators take complete control of what is read and learned in each grade, so that students can be accountable for the content as well as the skills of reading. So we would test students on fairy tales in third grade, making sure all students had read an approved canon of fairy tales before then.
Anyone who has taught knows that this is not how kids learn-whether they are 8 or 18. Learning is associative: we make connections based not only on prior knowledge, but our own experiences, our culture, our view of current events, our choice of popular media and numerous idiosyncratic elements of our lives. And we are motivated by these elements: they constitute our complete prior knowledge, the world we use to understand new phenomena. This is why teaching a completely centralized curriculum is fruitless. It fails to account for the universe of learning, but only the “delivered curriculum.”
Even a first-year teacher gets this, but not the so-called policy experts. They can propose the centralized curriculum, because they have never tried it or compared it to engaging students with current and relevant topics. They imagine rote learning as the solution, because they have not noticed what it does to learners, how enervated they become when their curriculum is rigid and longitudinally determined. They were all primary and secondary learners at one time, but they were probably not forced through the narrow chute known as “cultural literacy.”
More obvious is the 21st Century problem that there is too much to know and no one can decide which knowledge is essential for everybody in school. So we are faced with belling more cats than we can imagine. There is an endless battalion of cats to bell!
The “belling the cat” solution will not die as long as policy-makers and educators who have forgotten how learning proceeds try to structure our curriculum. They must be so vexed with the rest of us, who fail to concede the obvious: that students read better about the subjects they know better. But we get it. We just don’t buy it. We’ve moved on past the silly solutions, looking for the plausible ones.