E .D. Hirsch Jr., the American educationalist and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out that may throw some light on why France has such a problem integrating its Muslim population. Called Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children From Failed Educational Theories, it’s a comprehensive attack on the progressive approach that has done so much harm to schools in the West. Hirsch identifies three ideas in particular: that education should be ‘developmentally appropriate’, with the emphasis on learning through discovery; that it should be ‘child-centred’, taking account of different ‘learning styles’; and that the overarching aim of education should be the cultivation of ‘critical thinking’ skills.
I’ve spent the best part of a decade fighting these ideas. One of the main reasons I’ve helped to set up four free schools is to demonstrate that a more traditional education, with all children learning a core body of subject-specific knowledge from an early age, is more effective. I don’t just mean that children taught in this way will leave school knowing more than their peers. I mean they’ll perform better in standardised tests and be more-likely to go to good universities. This is particularly true of those from low-income families.
Having read Why Knowledge Matters, I now realise that my efforts may be in vain. Not because progressive educationalists are impervious to reason (although they are) but because the case against their wrong–headed approach has been conclusively-proven in France. Chapter 7 of Hirsch’s book is devoted to documenting the catastrophic effect of a 1989 law brought in by Lionel Jospin, then the socialist education minister. The loi Jospin abolished the notoriously rigorous elementary school curriculum, which embodied the ideas set out by Condorcet in his 1790 pamphlet ‘A Common Education for Children’, and instead directed primary schools to develop their own, locally determined curriculums instead.
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