The Core Knowledge Curriculum

Jack and I have been spending a fair amount of time at the library lately, though he seems more interested in the computers than in the books so far. He loves the books once we get them home, so it may be that he is overwhelmed by all the choices. He follows me around for a bit as I collect bedtime stories from my list and when I prompt him to select a few books for himself, he grabs three at random from nearby shelves without really looking at them -- then he heads over to the play area and he's done.

(Oddly enough, he does enjoy our trips to the library -- any time Dad is out for the evening, Jack's first choice is to go to the library... )

That leaves me to entertain myself nearby for a while.

From Piano

Lucky for me, the children's library has a shelf of homeschooling books amongst the parenting books, and a few days ago I found a copy of the Core Knowledge book for kindergarten. I have been making my way through it and so far it seems reasonable, if not terribly challenging.

From Wikipedia:

Core Knowledge is an educational reform movement based on the premise that a grade-by-grade core of common learning is necessary to ensure a sound and fair elementary education. Based on a body of research in cognitive psychology and effective school systems worldwide, Core Knowledge posits that, in order to attain academic excellence, greater fairness, and higher literacy, early education curriculum should be solid, specific, shared, and sequenced. By teaching a body of specific, lasting knowledge in a way that allows children to succeed by gradually building on what they already know, the Core Knowledge mission is to provide all children, regardless of background, with the shared knowledge they need to be included in our national literate culture.

According to this book, the Core Knowledge checklists were developed not for home schoolers, but to make mass education more fair and egalitarian. Core Knowledge would help to ease the transition from one classroom to the next.

It is an ongoing problem for teachers and children that there is no consistency between one school district (and sometimes one classroom within a district) and another in what is covered within a grade. That means that some children are bored by repetition while others are left behind by the assumption that they received information in the previous grades that was never taught in their classrooms.

The Core Knowledge movement also makes education more fair across socio-economic classes. Far too often, the schools give up on poor kids before they ever arrive at the school's doors. The education offered to them is dumbed down to such an extent that they are handicapped in trying to pursue further education. With the Core Knowledge reform, that would be less the case.

At any rate, I picked up the "What your Kindergartner Needs to Know".

This programs is intended to cover about half of the curriculum for the kindergarten year. The book is set up to be read along with the child, so it is one story or poem or essay after another, written at the right level for an average kindergartner. It covers language and literature, History and Geography, Visual Art, Music, Mathematics, and Science. (I think we could actually cover all of it before Yule -- but homeschooling is like that. With no herding and no bureaucratic paperwork to do, everything goes much faster.)

Rather than using the book directly, I have started to look for materials that cover much the information in more depth to use as a supplement to our Classical education materials. There are parts, however, that are so well done that I may well read them with Jack. One catch is that at the kindergarten level, the history is very basic US history.

That actually makes sense, but I will be augmenting that with similar materials about Australian history. Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck finding materials about Australian History written for the kindergartner -- not even in online book stores in Australia!

I am taking a slightly different approach next -- I will look for biographies of important figures in Australian history (Captain Cook, Ned Kelly, et al). Failing that, I will get a couple of adult histories and write my own children's histories. With Lulu and similar companies, I can even make "real" books and Jack won't need to know that I wrote them myself!

I have been thinking, though, about why all this is so important to me. Why is the classical and core education so appealing to me when in many ways unschooling and progressive education fit so much better with the rest of how I see the world?

I have come to the conclusion that it is because I was raised during a time when progressive education was all the rage. 'Following your bliss' and making education relevant sound good -- but somehow I always felt ripped off. There was so much I wanted to know, so many books I didn't have the frame of references to understand! I thought that education should have given me a jump start on that knowledge and a leg up with those frames of reference, but they never did. Instead we wasted time with "relevent" twaddle. I was bored.

Rod has described an education much like the one I craved -- and has mentioned that he feels bad for the kids who came right behind him. By the time his younger brother went through the schools, the education had been diluted in the same way mine was. I do plan to keep the best of the progressive educational model. Jack will have the opportunity to explore anything that catches his attention and once he is aware that a topic is out there to be explored, if he's bored by it, I will be willing to drop it for the time being. But I want his education to have the depth and richness of the classical education.

The Core Knowledge materials will help to ensure that he has not only the classical education of the Victorian and Empire eras, but also the knowledge that his peers from more "normal" educational backgrounds can be expected to be familiar with. It's no good to give him the experience of having the background to understand the past without the information to understand the present!