Homework #45, Education in the good old days..

If you dig deep enough, there are bits and pieces of these articles that are interesting, yet as a whole it's hard to get into. There are these two philosophers, E.D, Hirsch, and Theodore R. Sizer, and they both have different opinions on the direction students should be taught. Sizer thought that schools should focus on teaching students how to think using the Habit's of Mind (like our school), and Hirsch thought that we should learn the things that will help us learn other things.

Coming from our school, and having been there since sixth grade, I've had to work with the H.O.M's a lot. Yet the main time teachers make us use the Habit's of Mind are when we're doing our exhibitions. When we don't include the Habit's of Mind in our exhibitions, we get points taken off. I'm not at all complaining, but we aren't told a lot to use the Habit's of Mind in our daily school routines. Yes, we need evidence in science when we're doing experiments. There are mostly no alternatives to solving math problems, since math is based around formulas. We may use the habits of mind subconsciously, but we are not constantly told by our teachers to use them.

In a way, it doesn't seem like Hirsh and Sizer's ideas contradict each other at all. They both thought that students should learn in a certain way. For Hirsh it says "Hirsch, whose campaign for cultural literacy has resulted in several hundred whole schools designed around his specific nuggets of information all children should be expected to learn". And for Sizer, he expects us to learn based around the Habit's of Mind.

It's hard to balance Sizer and Hirsch on a perfect scale, because Hirsch mainly focused on elementary schools, and Sizer focused mainly on high schools. At the moment I can't remember who was saying this, but someone said how there was a teacher that used to be a teacher at college, yet they felt like instead of working with the unprepared students in college, they should be working in high school and to prepare the kids for college. That kind of sounds like Hirsch and Sizer both, but Hirsch because he focused on elementary school.

Something that I really agree with Sizer on is when he said "we have to stop equating serious education with test scores." There are so many ridiculous tests like the S.A.T's and the regents, which shows if students are good test takers or not. I feel like Hirsch would agree with him here, because Hirsch wrote in his book The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them "Second, Romanticism concluded that a child is neither a scaled-down, ignorant version of the adult nor a formless piece of clay in need of molding, rather, the child is a special being in its own right with unique, trustworthy impulses that should be allowed to develop and run their course." There are teachers out there that want to play the hero, and shape students (us young people) into how the teacher wants us to be. Yet Hirsch wrote that we aren't clay that needs to be molded. We have our own individual shapes, and our own unique selves.

Something that I found kind of funny is how Sizer had written “Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.” The 'then get out of there way' part makes it seem like we're all going to sprint towards some piece of knowledge and tear it apart, or eagerly tear into it. I do agree with him though, sort of. We need to be inspired, then it's up to us what we do with our knowledge.

I think that both of the theories could definitely be 'adapted to work together'. They're both concerned with the same thing::the education of students. Sizer wants us to use the Habits of Mind, and Hirsch wants us to be able to learn the building blocks so that we can acquire other knowledge. Yet in a way the H.O.M's are a building block to a way of thinking, so those theories are kind of meshed together already.

Yet in the end, it is up to every individual how they chose to absorb information that is given to us, and every individual has their own perspective and way of pursuing what they want to pursue.