Does Arguing for "Knowledge" Make You a Republican?

The left has long had an antipathy to the word, but by rejecting it they may be undermining their own goals.

Some on the left assume that if you advocate for building students’ academic knowledge, you must be a conservative. But equalizing access to that kind of knowledge is essential to creating the fairer society that political progressives seek.

Last week I was startled to see a tweet about me from someone I communicate with regularly. It said that I am “a Democrat who has donated to a number of Dem causes/candidates,” but that the tweeter had had conversations about me with “a number of educators” who assumed that I was a Republican. Why? Because, in the tweeter’s words, I “write about knowledge all the time and praise Core Knowledge.”

I don’t believe I’ve ever discussed my political affiliation with the tweeter, and I certainly haven’t told her about my political contributions. That means she must have investigated me online. It’s public information, so there’s nothing illegal about that. But I was surprised that she hadn’t mentioned any of this to me before putting it on Twitter.

I don’t try to hide the fact that I’m a Democrat, but I don’t lead with it either—especially when I’m talking about education. That’s partly because I feel the education issues I write about shouldn’t be political, and partly because I’m also aware that politics will inevitably affect how some people react to what I say. I don’t want Republicans to dismiss my message because of my political affiliation. Whether a parent or teacher voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden—or someone else—I believe their kids and students deserve access to a good education. So I try to keep my political views to myself, at least in the public arena.

I’ve met and heard from hundreds of educators who don’t seem to care about my politics—they’re just responding enthusiastically to what I’m saying. But apparently what I’m saying has led some others to conclude I’m a political conservative. So maybe it’s just as well I was “outed” as a Democrat, although I doubt the revelation will have much effect on those who came to that conclusion.

Core Knowledge and “Eurocentrism”

There is in fact a long history of educators associating “knowledge” with political conservatism. As the tweet suggested, in recent times that has something to do with a curriculum known as “Core Knowledge.” There are actually several curricula that have been created by the Core Knowledge Foundation—history and geography, science, math—but the one most people think of, because it’s the most widely used, is an elementary literacy curriculum called Core Knowledge Language Arts, or CKLA.

I do “praise” CKLA, but it’s just one of half a dozen curricula identified by the Knowledge Matters Campaign as doing a good job of building knowledge. When I get into details, I talk mostly about CKLA because it’s the one I know best. That’s because when I was doing the research for my book six years ago, it was the only knowledge-building curriculum that was available.

Some left-of-center teachers denounce CKLA as Eurocentric. I haven’t read every unit myself, so I can’t definitively say how true that is—and in any event, it’s a matter of opinion. But based on my observation of a second-grade class through an entire school year, it doesn’t strike me that way. Yes, the kids were learning about Ancient Greece, but they were also learning about Ancient China, Ancient India, Harriet Tubman, and various figures in the civil rights movement. Encountering Andrew Jackson as a hero during the War of 1812 and finding out that he was also the perpetrator of the Trail of Tears—a sad chapter in American history that was described in detail—they learned that historical figures can be complex.

Of course, not everyone thinks CKLA is Eurocentric. I recently got an email from an educator in Nebraska saying that a conservative school board there is suspicious of CKLA because they think it includes “critical race theory.” I’m quite sure that’s not true.

But let’s stick with the critique from the left. Some attacks seem to be based on versions of Core Knowledge materials dating from over 10 years ago. The curriculum has been updated to make it more inclusive, both in the downloadable version that is available for free from the Core Knowledge Foundation and the paid version available from Amplify Education. The Foundation is soon releasing a series of biographies about individuals featured in its various curricula, including such titles as James Lafayette: A Black Hero of the American Revolution and Toypurina: Woman Warrior.

For some on the left, the fact that the Core Knowledge Foundation was founded by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is enough to render its curricula suspect. His 1987 book Cultural Literacy argued that beginning in the earliest grades, all students should have access to the academic knowledge that children of the elite pick up more or less naturally. Based on empirical evidence, Hirsch concluded that most of that knowledge—though not all—had to do with Western culture.

Hirsch has advocated focusing the elementary curriculum primarily on that body of knowledge not because he considers it inherently superior but because he sees it as necessary to help level the playing field. But many educators have assumed he’s a Republican, even though he once described himself as “practically a socialist.”

A “Master Narrative Curriculum”?

A recent article in Ed Week reflected the prevailing view. The topic was a recent study finding that the Core Knowledge Sequence, which is similar to CKLA, led to significant gains in reading comprehension, especially for students from lower-income families. Although cultural responsiveness had nothing to do with the study, one section of the article was headed “How culturally responsive is the idea of ‘core’ knowledge?”

“In kindergarten,” the author wrote, describing the Sequence, “students read fairytales from around the world, learn about the seven continents and oceans, and study Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the 4^th of July.” Choosing those particular topics, which also appear in CKLA, could lead some to see the curriculum as having a conservative agenda. Other kindergarten units not listed in the article include The Five Senses, Plants, Farms, Seasons and Weather, Native Americans, and Taking Care of the Earth. (And the kindergartners don’t “read” about any of these topics themselves; they listen to the teacher reading aloud.)

The article went on to quote a left-leaning teacher who declared, “CKLA is unequivocally a master narrative curriculum,” citing as evidence that the kindergarten materials “ask students to learn a song about Columbus to the tune of ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It.’” That implies the song celebrates Columbus as an unequivocally positive figure.

But the teacher’s guide says the curriculum uses “child-friendly tunes” to teach content. “These songs are not intended to in any way diminish the seriousness of the topics being taught,” the guide says. Four sets of lyrics are suggested for the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” including one about gold and spice in Asia; one about the names of Columbus’s ships; one about the fact that he mistakenly thought he had found the Indies; and one about Ferdinand and Isabella, the Spanish rulers who financed the expedition.

The curriculum includes references to Columbus’s “greediness,” to the fact that he and his men “treated the natives badly,” and to his brief imprisonment by Ferdinand and Isabella for these misdeeds. There’s certainly a lot more that could be said about Columbus’s flaws, but the content in CKLA seems to me to be at an appropriate level of detail for kindergartners.

Still, I believe reasonable people can disagree about questions like this, and I’m not trying to convince everyone to adopt CKLA. No single curriculum will be right for every school in a country as diverse as ours, and there are five other good knowledge-building choices available.

If You Tweak a Curriculum, Do It in a Way That Makes Sense

It’s also possible to tweak a curriculum like CKLA to make it fit better with local values—but that shouldn’t be done in a way that makes it harder for kids to learn. For example, last year Denver—a politically progressive district—adopted CKLA but decided to omit certain units and instead add books that represented “a wider variety of voices.” Fair enough, but the district omitted the kindergarten units on “Columbus and the Pilgrims” and “Colonial Towns and Townspeople” along with the unit on the American Revolution in first grade. At the same time, they kept the second-grade unit on the War of 1812.

The second-graders I observed for my book were fascinated by the War of 1812, but they’d been getting CKLA since kindergarten and were drawing heavily on what they’d learned about prior American history. If children who don’t have that background knowledge are presented with the same material, they’re likely to find it far more difficult to understand.

But, as the tweet suggested, it’s not just CKLA that some on the left see as “Republican.” It’s “knowledge” itself. To some extent that’s because they assume that “knowledge” refers to mainstream Western history and culture.

“Cultural Responsiveness” Isn’t Enough

Many educators strongly believe that a curriculum needs to be “culturally responsive,” which generally means that it should enable Black and brown children to see themselves reflected in the content. For some, it also means the curriculum should center their experience. Part of the argument is that non-white children will then be more motivated to learn and will achieve at higher levels, narrowing gaps in academic outcomes.

I agree that all children should see themselves in the curriculum in some way, but I don’t see that as a substitute for building their academic knowledge. Plenty of white kids who presumably do see themselves in the curriculum still aren’t academically successful.

While it’s crucial to immerse students in rich content to build their knowledge, there’s no single list of topics that all curricula need to cover. The ultimate goal is for students to acquire the critical mass of academic vocabulary and familiarity with complex syntax that will enable them to read and learn from texts on topics they haven’t actually studied. The only way to acquire that general vocabulary and familiarity is through knowledge of many specific topics—the knowledge won’t stick without meaningful context. And the topics should be presented in a logical sequence, so that students have the background knowledge to understand whatever they’re expected to learn next. But there are lots of topics that could be used to do that, and the choices will always be arbitrary to some extent.

So a curriculum could build knowledge through topics that center the experience and contributions of Black and brown communities. Students could, for example, learn the meaning of a word like dynasty by studying dynasties on any continent, including Africa and South America.

At the same time—as E.D. Hirsch pointed out—we live in a predominantly Western culture. It’s gotten more diverse since 1987, but books and articles are still full of allusions to that culture. If you don’t know what Stonehenge was—or who Columbus was, or a whole host of things—you’re going to be at a disadvantage compared to students who do. And the students who get those allusions are likely to come from more highly educated families that are also, in our society, more likely to be white and wealthy.

As Baltimore City Schools chief Sonja Santelises has pointed out, limiting Black and brown students to a curriculum that centers their own experience at the cost of educating them about mainstream history and culture can have the unintended effect of perpetuating inequality. “Children from economically under-resourced communities,” she told me in 2021, “need to have and feel the power of being able to tap into the collective knowledge base that drives academic success in this country as well as the knowledge of how they themselves and their communities contribute to that larger narrative.”

Is Transmitting Knowledge an Inherently Conservative Concept?

Perhaps the most radical leftist position is that the very idea of passing on knowledge to a younger generation is inherently conservative and patriarchal. The dean of a school of education once told me that he disliked the notion of “transmitting” knowledge, because it “suggests there’s a canon.” He preferred the idea of teachers and students “co-constructing” knowledge.

That position is not unusual among the faculty at schools of education, who have—in what might be called an act of “knowledge transmission”—passed it on to vast numbers of teachers. It sounds nice, but what it ultimately leads to is a rejection of any kind of prescribed curriculum—either on the theory that teachers need the freedom to choose what their particular students learn, or, in its most radical incarnation, that individual students themselves need the freedom to choose what they learn.

That may sound appealing, but you can’t choose to learn about a topic if you don’t know it exists, and unfortunately many students are unaware of a lot of topics they need to learn about in order to do well academically and in life. And, as I mentioned, it’s important for students to learn about those topics in a logical sequence—something that neither a student nor an individual teacher is likely to be able to engineer without a set curriculum.

If we want all students to succeed, we need to give them access to academic knowledge—including knowledge of mainstream Western culture—in a way that enables them to understand and retain information they’ll be held accountable for later on. I don’t see why there’s anything “Republican” about arguing for that.