RETURN OF THE ZOMBIE?

Now that the teaching of reading is starting to recover from more than a century of EduExpert opposition to phonics, new concerns may lead to the revival of the Zombie idea of giving students some knowledge while they are in school.

RETURN OF THE ZOMBIE    

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
1 September 2023

For at least five thousand years, the idea of education was that ignorant students would go to school, get some knowledge, and become less ignorant, and the thought was that this would be better both for them and for the society in general.

Modern American educators have largely killed off that old idea, revealing that what is important in school is the instilling of politically correct attitudes, feelings and values. To give a picture of this change, look at the research interests of the Harvard School of Education faculty by looking at their website. By all means tell me if this is no longer a fair view: Some examples—
 

Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. For much of the past decade, Dr. Ferguson's research has focused on racial achievement gaps...
 

During the past two decades, [Howard] Gardner and colleagues have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project, a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with longtime Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James, he is investigating trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Underway are studies of effective collaboration among nonprofit institutions in education and of conceptions of quality in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on the topic ‘The True, The Beautiful, and the Good: Reconsiderations in a post-modern, digital era.
 

Nancy Hill’s area of research focuses on variations in parenting and family socialization practices across ethnic, socioeconomic status, and neighborhood contexts. In addition, her research focuses on demographic variations in the relations between family dynamics and children's school performance and other developmental outcomes. Recent and ongoing projects include Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students), a longitudinal study between kindergarten and 4th grade examining family-related predictors of children's early school performance; Project Alliance/Projecto Alianzo, a multiethnic, longitudinal study of parental involvement in education at the transition between elementary and middle school. She is the co-founder of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, an interdisciplinary group of scientists who develop theory and methodology for defining and understanding the cultural context within diverse families. In addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals, she recently edited a book, African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity (Guilford, 2005) and another edited volume is forthcoming (Family-School Relations during Adolescence: Linking Interdisciplinary Research, Policy and Practice; Teachers College Press).

This is really a random sample and there are scores of faculty members in the School, studying all sort of things. If I were to summarize their work, I would suggest it tends toward research on poverty, race, culture, diversity, ethnicity, emotional and social disability, developmental psychology, school organization, “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good...in a post-modern, digital era,” and the like, but as far as I can tell, no one there is interested in the academic study (by HS students) of Asian history, biology, calculus, literature, chemistry, foreign languages, European history, physics, United States History, or any of the academic subjects Thinkers of Olde thought should be the main business of education in schools.

However, now that the teaching of reading is starting to recover from more than a century of EduExpert opposition to phonics, new concerns may lead to the revival of the Zombie idea of giving students some knowledge while they are in school.

Matt Barnum writes in Chalkbeat: This has led some academics, educators, and journalists to call for intentional efforts to build young children’s knowledge in important areas like science and social studies. Some school districts and teachers have begun integrating this into reading instruction.

Yet new state reading laws have almost entirely omitted attention to this issue, according to a recent review. In other words, building background knowledge is an idea supported by science that has not fully caught on to the science of reading movement.

It is too soon to say if the idea of knowledge for students will truly come back to life in the public schools, but fortunately for many students, they have discovered that they do not need to go to public school to diminish their ignorance…