The Carnegie Units:
The Common Core of High Schools
Q. I
believe in a liberal-arts education that is well-rounded and keeps my son's
options totally open. I believe a young person facing today's Information Age
must have knowledge that is both broad and deep, and not too specialized, since
the world is changing so very fast. I keep thinking about typewriter repairmen;
they were knocked completely out of the water by the spread of computers, with
skills that were irrelevant practically overnight. I don't want something like
that to happen to my son! How can I help him make the most of the offerings
that are available to him in his high school?
You can voice your opinion to your school board, high school
administration, and teachers that you support a curriculum based on the
Carnegie Units. Those are the traditional, classic liberal-arts subjects that
for centuries have formed the basis for a solid education. Besides public
libraries, the American inheritance from industrialist Andrew Carnegie was this
listing of how many years, or "units," each student should have in high school
in order to earn a diploma. Here's a typical list from a challenging high
school:
English, 4 years (including at least one year each of
composition and literature)
Math, 4 years (such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry and
calculus)
Science, 4 years (biology, chemistry, physics)
Foreign Language, 2 years (of the same language, and of
course, 4 years is better)
Social Studies / History, 4 years (American and world
history required)
The Arts, 2 years (a little bit of everything is preferable,
with multi-year study in one form, such as music)
Usually, there are requirements for physical education and
technology as well
Somewhere along the way, Political Correctness and special-interest
agenda groups slipped in so many extra "musts" that today many high schools
have allowed the "core curriculum" represented by the Carnegie Units to erode,
and now all kinds of other classes are allowed or even required. Example:
service learning, or forced voluntarism, which is ironic, indeed, since if you
want to foster voluntarism, you probably shouldn't force it.
The erosion of the Carnegie Units means that students can
satisfy their school's watered-down math requirement after sophomore year, for
example, and then take study hall, "lifestyle classes" and other questionable
uses of in-school time while ruling themselves out for certain jobs and college
majors because of a skimpy math preparation.
But the nation's scholars and educators have had enough of
that. They're joining forces to press for a stronger liberal arts and science
curriculum in the nation's public schools as a way of combating what they
described as a disturbing lack of critical content knowledge.
The group, called Common Core, hopes to convince school
boards and the public that the arts, foreign languages, history and social
sciences, and science are essential to providing a complete education to the
nation's schoolchildren.
The federal education law, No Child Left Behind, requires
that mathematics and reading be tested annually in grades 3-8 and at least once
in high school, and beginning this school year, science must be tested three
times throughout a student's K-12 career.
Common Core intends to take up the mantle of the Council for
Basic Education, a nonpartisan group that advocated a strong liberal arts focus
for public schools for 48 years before it folded in 2004 for budgetary reasons.
The new organization is located in Washington.
"Of course children must know how to read and compute, but
children must be knowledgeable in addition to being skilled," said Lynne
Munson, Common Core's executive director and a former deputy chairman of the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Too many students, she said, are getting
an "incomplete education." Part of the problem with a skimpy amount of
background knowledge is that reading comprehension suffers; too much of the
time, the student doesn't have an existing knowledge base on any given topic
large enough to "scaffold," or "construct," additional knowledge sufficient to
grasp a concept, much less analyze and innovate.
She cited surveys that indicated that American high-school
seniors are ignorant of many important facts of U.S. history and literature,
and, true, to the old song, "don't know much about history . . ." and other
liberal-arts subjects. For more about what students DON'T know because of the
erosion in the Carnegie Units, see http://www.commoncore.org/_docs/CCreport_stillatrisk.pdf
Homework: For
more about quality liberal-arts education, see www.commoncore.org; for an idea of how
states use Carnegie Units as their graduation requirements, see:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d01/dt153.asp