hirsch vs sizer

In the open debate on school systems, there are two names that can not be ignored. Hirsch and Sizer. these two men can be compared to two warlords with their armies facing off. Born in 1932, Sizer founded the coalition of essential schools. Before starting the coalition Ted Sizer went around and studied high schools. He interviewed watched classrooms and interviewed various people around school. The end result was Horace's Compromise. In this book Sizer discusses many of the common problems of schools. While he mentioned things such as too much focused on sports, his main philosophy was that schools shouldn't just skim over a lot of subjects. they should go deeply into a few. Thus he created the habits of mind to achieve this goal. he stated he want to create schools where " students clearly exhibit the mastery of their school work."

Its hard for me to generally beleive in this idea even while attending a essintial school, infact its because I attend one that I'm not keen on the idea. While doing deep into a subject is good, it can backfire. It backfires when the students dont care about the subject. When students have to dive deeply into a subject they dont care about, the feeling can be described as beatting your head against a wall. We can all see why that isnt good.

On the other end of the battle field is E.D. Hirsch. Hirsch, born 1928, believed more in cultural literacy. He beleived that students would do better in life if they knew about many diffrent things, even if they werent experts in the subbjects. A jack of all trades master of none kind of thing. He says that students need a understanding of common cultural refrences. As an example he uses the sentence "Jones sacrificed and knocked in a run.". Now if you dont know baseball that sentence makes no sense. But understanding baseball will allow you to make sense of that sentence.

I prefer this philosophy better. High school's job is to prepare you for the future. A way to do that is to widen ones view of the world. If you take two students, student A and student B. student A learns about three subjects in depth. student B learns about 5 subjects but with only half the depth as student A. While student A knows more about those subjects, student B knows has a more spread out knowledge. Student A doesnt know about the 4th and 5th subject that B learned about. What happens if subject 5 enters his life somehow later, he wont be as prepared as student B. Another thing to think about is the more you learn about the better chance you have of finding something you like. Mabye student A would have loved subject #4 and want to turn it into a career, but because he spent so much time learning 1-3 he never got a chance to expirence it.