Teach Effectively!

Over on Teacher Magazine, founding editor Ronald Wolk has a column decrying public education’s core curriculum. He recommends an examination of and debate about the core curriculum. I wonder whether there is need for such debate. In fact, I wonder what people mean by “the core curriculum.”

Be that as it may, I was pleased with Mr. Wolk’s emphasis later in this column. There he turned the argument to the importance of teaching reading.

Being able to read proficiently is the crucial prerequisite to becoming educated. Many of the people who built this nation and made enduring contributions to society had little or no formal education: George Washington, Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson, Robert Fulton, Thomas Edison, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and millions of ordinary citizens. Once they could read, they acquired the knowledge they needed to be productive workers and good citizens (even without a core curriculum or the enormous benefit of the Internet). And, by and large, they learned what they wanted to learn, and the more they learned, the more they wanted to learn.

I’ll quibble with whether they learned what they wanted to learn, but it would be a minor philosophical debate about the meaning of the verb “to want.” Otherwise: Here! Here! Let’s teach reading. And let’s teach it effectively.

Link to Mr. Wolk’s column.