Letter to Dr. Hirsch: Week 3

Dear Dr. Hirsch,

Your many laudable accomplishments no doubt make you an expert in your field. As a fellow pedagogue, I am delighted to see that we both share a passion for literature, so much that we have devoted out professional lives to it. No doubt you have been inspired by Wordsworth, Shelly, and Keats as much as I have; yet I find it equally hard to imagine that a right brain man like yourself would truly believe that our educational goal is to force facts on our students.

I cannot reject your entire theory; students undeniably need to know core knowledge in order to then generalize it and apply to real-life situations. For instance, I understand that knowing the definition of “metaphor” is an important step to extrapolating metaphors from text. Nevertheless, I believe that creating an original metaphor is the ultimate learning tool. How can we take that away from our students? Like many of your critics, I too feel that “because a child's experience cannot be assumed by a teacher, teaching must allow for hearing and seeing -- for listening to and interacting with the child”(Feinburg 1). While your ideas seem to over-simplify educational goals, you also ignore the myriad of reliable research which has formed our policies up to this point. Your theories lack essential components which foster curiosity, promote experience, and create motivation for our students.

I have a proposal which I believe will further enlighten the weaknesses of your ideas. You speak of creating socioeconomic and racial equality in our schools through uniform content knowledge, so I propose that you test out your theory in a low socioeconomic, urban environment. Try to implement repeated practice and memorization as your founding elements of instruction. It would be difficult to imagine what would happen to student motivation and classroom management as a result. How will you connect you instruction to students’ previous experiences? How will your students benefit from memorizing terms and facts such as “abominable snowman”, “absolute zero”, “absenteeism”, etc.? I can hear the questions now, “Why do we have to know this?” and unless you can provide a meaningful answer, you will loose your students.

Is our educational system ideal? No, but to revert to the basics of feeding facts and expecting a result is archaic and obsolete. Unfortunately, life is not a game of Trivial Pursuit and our successes are not measured through an engaging conversation about Lincoln. I respect the dedication you have put into your work, but even you at times must admit that all you have accomplished has not been merely through a memorization of facts.

Respectfully,
Alla