Pedagogical Advocacy.

Although I am affiliated with Harvard's Graduate School of Education, that is usually not enough to redeem me in the eyes of scholars in the arts and sciences or in other professional schools, at Harvard, as well as at other universities. Indeed, education schools have always been at the low end of the academic totem pole because their courses, their research, and their ideas on pedagogy and curriculum have not been viewed as warranting intellectual respect. Regrettably, there is good reason for this judgment.

Education schools have not tended to promote pedagogical ideas that result in the qualities that college faculty have traditionally sought in their students: disciplined study habits, a knowledge base that enables them to study the subject matter of their courses in its mature form, a capacity for analytical thinking, and the ability to write clearly and cogently about the substance of their courses. That many students enter college with these qualities is usually not a result of the training their teachers received in schools of education. Nor do education schools have a track record of promoting pedagogical ideas that have worked, or worked well, for those students who do not go on to postsecondary education. But today, in a stunning perversion of their primary mission, education schools now promote pedagogical and curricular ideas--whether associated with a multicultural approach or a constructivist approach--that undermine or inhibit the development of analytical thinking, the ability to read advanced levels of English prose, and an adequate knowledge base for informed participation in our civic life, all in the name of broadening the curriculum to include "other ways of knowing" and to address "equity" concerns.

In my book, Losing Our Language, I have tried to show how these outcomes are being facilitated as part of a multicultural approach through the selections provided in reading instructional textbooks for grades 4 to 6 and the pedagogical recommendations given teachers in accompanying teacher guides.(1) In this essay, I indicate, briefly, what I found in my analysis of these textbooks. I also indicate how schools of education are further corrupting academic goals and our civic culture through pedagogical and curricular ideas associated with a constructivist approach to learning, through what is being done in the name of educational research, and through neglect of the crucial role of teacher competence in subject matter.

Multiculturalism and Elementary Reading Instruction

One key way in which reading textbooks for the upper elementary grades undermine the development of analytical thinking is by emphasizing children's feelings in response to what they read. Children are frequently asked to tell how they feel or to imagine how others feel, especially when discussing selections that deal with victimized or oppressed groups of people. For example, after children read a politically innocent story, "Petranella," about a nineteenthcentury immigrant family to Wisconsin, Silver Burdett Ginn's fourth-grade teacher's edition calls for the following lesson plan (under what is ironically titled "Appreciating Cultures"):

 
   Appreciating Cultures. Tell students to imagine how homesteaders and Native 
   Americans must have felt during the settling of the frontier. Discuss how 
   they would feel if the government suddenly told them they had to leave so 
   that people from other parts of the country and the world could move in. 
   What are some  problems that would develop? Have students find out what 
   happened to the Native Americans when they were forced out.(280) 

Although one might well think that this story deals with a clash between Native Americans and a group of settlers, there is not one Indian in the story. Nor are Indians ever discussed. Nor is the Homesteading Act mentioned in the story--or information given about it. A negative emotional response to European immigrants is what the multiculturalist is after. Children are not asked to discuss the culture of these immigrants, the Homesteading Act, or what propelled immigrants like these to this country in the nineteenth century.