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.
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In Brevard County Florida, we have a mandatory, uninterputed 90 minute reading block. I tend to agree, on many levels, that reading is the most important skill: it can lead to the ability to have behavior under rule governance, is applicable throughout other subject areas, etc. However, what I am against is the ineffective, untested idea that devoting a 90 minute duration necessarily promotes better reading. If we aren’t teaching reading correctly or better, what will the longer duration mean?
Andrew, I agree that the 90-min rule probably has not been tested expressly. Furthermore, I agree with your observation that what happens during the time is critically important. I surely don’t want to see 90 minutes of book tubs or DEAR!