Hirsch And John Dewey's Approaches To Purriculum And Pedagogy

E.D. Hirsch and John Dewey present two defined approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. In this essay, I will critically compare these two educational approaches by examining the strengths and weaknesses of Dewey’s applied learning curriculum and Hirsh’s core knowledge curriculum. I will also evaluate Hirsh’s more traditional, teacher-centred pedagogy in relation to Dewey’s more hands on approach to education. It will be shown that Dewey’s ideas are more educationally and socially valuable because they aim to enable collaboration, communal inquiry and coordination of interests. I will begin by explaining and critically evaluating Hirsch’s ideas, before explaining and defending Dewey’s alternative ideas.

Particular attention is needed on literacy and culture as a means to address the knowledge crisis presented in America according to E.D. Hirsch.

He contends that naturalism, which means the belief that education is a natural progression that ought to be associated with natural, real life approaches and settings has contributed to the vagueness of the curriculum (Buras, 1999). As a result, naturalism had led to pedagogies that are process-oriented and child-centred through out the school system. Hirsch believes that such pedagogy is an insecure way of learning and is therefore responsible for the curriculum’s indistinct state (Buras, 1999). He also believed that post modernism and constructivism as well as multiculturalism were all factors that contributed towards this knowledge crisis (Lecture notes). For Hirsch, Learning involves the use of what he would call core content which encompasses relevant background knowledge, intellectual capital, traditional subject matter, book knowledge, shared national culture, vocabulary, and sol...

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...ition and standardised testing.

Despite their differences E.D. Hirsch and John Dewey’s ideas on curriculum and pedagogy continue to be reflected on and both have contributed largely towards our educational curriculum in this present day. While both views carried strengths and weaknesses, I believe that Dewey’s applied learning approach would prove to be more beneficial in the long term. Being tailored towards the students’ needs and learning, this creates intrinsic motivation – the need to know. Moreover, Dewey’s research now has major influence on Modern education in that collaborative learning; authentic learning tasks and inquiry-based learning are all incorporated in our classrooms today. Although, Hirsch’s presented us with many valid ideas in his core curriculum, I believe that a more combined approach with Dewey’s would be a lot more significantly valuable.