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<div dir="ltr"><font color="#000000" size="2" face="Tahoma"><,<font size="3">our students will be well prepared to launch their careers as ignoramuses, >></font></font></div>
<div dir="ltr"><font size="3" face="tahoma"></font> </div>
<div dir="ltr"><font size="3" face="tahoma">Does the concept of a university developing a program leading to a teaching license and a "MASTER of Education... 0 years experience" seem to fit here? In what other profession can one achieve recognition as a master
of the craft, with no experience?</font></div>
<div dir="ltr"><font size="3" face="tahoma"></font> </div>
<div dir="ltr"><font size="3" face="tahoma"><font face="tahoma">In additon to my M.Ed., degree,</font> I also earned a Master of Photography degree. I can tell you that the latter does not - *can not* - happen with no experience in or deep ignorance of the
content and practice of the discipline.</font></div>
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<div dir="ltr"><font size="3" face="tahoma">Mark Bohland<br>
<font face="tahoma"><a href="http://www.mphoto.com/">www.MPhoto.com</a> <br>
</font><font face="tahoma"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/MaranathaPhotography">www.facebook.com/MaranathaPhotography</a>
</font></font></div>
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<font color="#000000" size="2" face="Tahoma"><b>From:</b> ohiogift-bounces+mbohland=mt-vernon.k12.oh.us@lists.service.ohio-state.edu [ohiogift-bounces+mbohland=mt-vernon.k12.oh.us@lists.service.ohio-state.edu] On Behalf Of Will Fitzhugh [fitzhugh@tcr.org]<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Saturday, August 11, 2012 8:10 AM<br>
<b>To:</b> Ohiogift@lists.service.ohio-state.edu<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [Ohiogift] "Deeper Ignorance" (brought to you by...)<br>
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<p style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px 0px 8px; FONT: 14px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="5">Skip the Knowledge!</font></span></p>
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<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">Will Fitzhugh</font></span></div>
<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">The Concord Review</font></i></span></div>
<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">August 11, 2012</font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">Poor James Madison, back in the day, spending endless hours reading scores upon scores of books on the history of governments, as he prepared
to become the resident historian and intellectual “father” of the United States Constitution in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia! If he had only known what we know now thanks to the new Common Core, he could have saved the great bulk of that time and effort
if he had only acquired some Thinking Skills instead!<br>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">Our schools of education have long understood that if a student teacher<i>
</i>[<i>sideguider</i>] can acquire enough pedagogicalistical sophistication and the right Thinking Skills, she will be able to teach [<i>sideguide</i>] anything, from Mandarin to European History to Calculus to Home Economics, to classes with any number of
students. </font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">The Harvard College faculty wasted many hours in the 1980s trying to derive a Common Core of knowledge which every undergraduate ought to
acquire. No one on the faculty wanted to allow any other member of the faculty to tell her/him what knowledge students needed to learn at Harvard, and none wished to give up teaching what he/she was currently studying to devote any time to a survey course
in the general knowledge of their field or any other field. So they agreed, thirty-odd years ago, on a Common Core of Thinking Skills instead.(1)</font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">It is not clear whether the knowledge-free curricula of the graduate schools of education, or the Core experiences at Harvard College, in
any way guided the authors of our new Common Core in their achievement of the understanding that it is not knowledge of anything that our students require, but Thinking Skills. They took advantage of the perspective and arguments of a famous cognitive psychologist
at Stanford in designing the history portion of the Core. Just think how much time they saved by not involving one of those actual historians, who might have bogged down the whole enterprise in claiming that students should have some knowledge of history itself,
and that such knowledge might actually be required before any useful Thinking Skills could be either acquired or employed. If we had followed that path, we might actually be asking high school students to read real history books—shades of the James Madison
era!!</font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">Just think of all the time and effort that was expended by Professor Hirsch and all those who worked to develop, and are now working to offer,
a Core Knowledge curriculum to thousands of our students. If they had only had the benefit of the cognitive psychology undergirding at least the history portion of the new Common Core, they could have skipped all that and gone straight to the Core Thinking
Skills now being promoted across the country.</font></span></div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; MIN-HEIGHT: 14px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"></span><br>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">The whole idea that knowledge is so important, or should precede thinking about anything, is so antedeluvian (which means—oh, never mind—just
more of that knowledge stuff!). What is the value of being 21st Centurians and right up-to-date, if we can’t ignore the past and skip over its history? </font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">Our advance into the brave new world of thinking skills was anticipated by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which, as far as I can
tell by looking over the research interests of the faculty, long ago left behind such mundane matters as the chemistry, foreign languages, history, literature and mathematics that students used to (and some still do, I suppose) study in our high schools. The
Education faculty has moved boldly on beyond all that academic knowledge to, in addition to lots of psychology/diversity/poverty/sociology/disability studies, the new bare essentials of Thinking Skills.</font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">During the discussions over Harvard’s Common Core decades ago, one physics professor pointed out that in order to think like a physicist
it is important to know quite a bit of physics, but then, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He had spent his whole career in the pursuit of a knowledge of physics, so naturally he would think that knowledge is more important than Thinking Skills, or, at least,
should come first in the study of physics or anything else.</font></span></div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; MIN-HEIGHT: 14px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"></span><br>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">We have finally come to realize that, after all, Google has all the knowledge we will ever need, and so, with keyboarding skills, and some
time in Common courses on Thinking Skills, our students will be well prepared to launch their careers as ignoramuses, and make their own unique contributions to the disappearance of knowledge, understanding and wisdom in the United States, and to the decline
of our civilization (which means—oh, never mind—just look it up!).</font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="LETTER-SPACING: 0px"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3">Let those history-minded Asian countries continue to ask their students to acquire lots of knowledge. Our students will have their new Common
Core Thinking Skills, and all the pride and self-esteem that the ignorance we have given them can support.</font></span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 15px" class="Apple-style-span">(1) Caleb Nelson, Harvard Class of ’88 (Mathematics) “Harvard’s Hollow Core,” <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>, September 1990</span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 11px Palatino"><span style="FONT-SIZE: 15px" class="Apple-style-span">=================</span></div>
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<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 16px Palatino"><b><span style="FONT-SIZE: 14px" class="Apple-style-span">“Teach by Example”</span></b></div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">Will Fitzhugh [founder]</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino"><i>The Concord Review</i> [1987]</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">National Writing Board [1998]</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">TCR Institute [2002]</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">978-443-0022; 800-331-5007</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino; COLOR: rgb(21,15,133)"><span style="COLOR: rgb(56,99,187); TEXT-DECORATION: underline"><a href="http://www.tcr.org/" target="_blank">www.tcr.org</a></span><span style="COLOR: rgb(0,0,0)">; <a href="mailto:fitzhugh@tcr.org"><span style="TEXT-DECORATION: underline">fitzhugh@tcr.org</span></a></span></div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino">Varsity Academics®</div>
<div style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 14px Palatino"><a href="http://www.tcr.org/blog" target="_blank">www.tcr.org/blog</a></div>
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