Education reform as revenge of the nerds

Since at least 1918, when the NEA issued the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, American educators have been divided between the nerds and the jocks. The nerds, including college professors (outside of ed schools) and a significant minority of secondary teachers, want education closely tied to subject matter. In contrast the jocks, who dominate educational administration, school boards, most ed schools, and teachers generally, think subject matter doesn’t matter. As E.D. Hirsch, Jr., recalls in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (p. 55), conventional educators often expressed astonishment that Hirsch actually enjoyed learning the facts that went into his Core Knowledge curricula. One snarky “educator” asked if Hirsch thought that learning facts made him a better person.

School reformers are trying to return content and those who love it to the center of public education, as they were a century ago here.

For subject-matter enthusiasts like Hirsch, the answer is self-evident. To quote the fictional Faber College motto, “knowledge is good.” Teachers should model love of knowledge to students. All else equal, more knowledgeable teachers are better teachers, better at guiding students, creating assignments, and finding links across subjects. Teachers who earned good grades in challenging majors at good colleges, like TFA types, are exactly the sort we want teaching. They are also the sort who are teaching at prep schools serving elites like the Bushes and Obamas.