In our eagerness to raise standards and hold schools accountable, are we neglecting the liberal arts?A cademic Atrophy* and The Hollow Core** together survey liberal arts education, in the public schools and in selected colleges and universities. 1 Although produced independently, they employ a common measure of the condition of the liberal arts: a core of academic studies that offers young people the best preparation for civic life, for vocational opportunities, and for meaningful private lives.Applying this measure, Academic Atrophy documents a new species of curriculum erosion in public schools, the unintended consequence of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. School curricula narrowed to favor the tested subjects are particularly evident, moreover, in high poverty/high minority schools, where they undermine NCLB's own laudable goal of enriching the education of all children. The Hollow Core, examining higher education, documents the empty 25
Massachusetts' History and Social Science Curriculum Framework emphatically describes history and social science as a core academic subject at the elementary school level, devoting a separate section to its study in primary grades. It carries out a provision of the 1993 Massachusetts Education Reform Act for standards-based improvement, calling for more substantive study in elementary schools. The Framework's appearance should result in serious new attention being given an area of school study that, as social studies, has had little or no demonstrable academic effect and has left students largely indifferent. But teachers and schools charged with bringing existing elementary curricula into alignment with the Framework's Core Knowledge requirements in history and social science may face both a departure from what is currently done and an encounter with unfamiliar subject matter and resources. “What's a teacher to do?” The author addresses curriculum and course design by organizing some chief considerations of elementary history and social science study into a three-step plan for implementation that discusses the selection and organization of topics for elementary study, their classroom presentation, and the resources available to support the alignment effort.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.