Essentialism

Conservationist Thesis

Essentialism in America has been called the educational philosophy of the

conservative. Therefore, its educational theory emphasizes a conservationist thesis.

Philosophically, an essentialist can be a Realist or an Idealist, or a combination of

the two. In any case, all essentialists favor what has come to be called the
conservationist conception of the public school. In other words, they believe that
the school’s main purpose is to transfer to youth the accumulated knowledge and
traditions of the human race. The kind of knowledge they wish to pass on is
traditional knowledge. It is tried and tested knowledge that has stood the test of
time. This body of knowledge that needs to be passed on is often referred to as our
“cultural heritage.” It is not the “hip,” “with it” “far out” and “funky” knowledge
that is ripped out of today’s headlines. It is not even necessarily the “relevant”
knowledge that students seem to always want.

Essentialists reject as being of little or no value the knowledge reflected in such

course titles as:

“The Sociology of Hunger”

“Teenage Fiction”
“The Sociology of Alternative Lifestyles”
“The History of Feminism in America”
“Black History”
“The Monster Movies as an Art Form”
“Literature of the Occult”
“Thanatology”
“Survival”

Such popular “mini-courses” are commonplace in many of America’s secondary

schools. Essentialists think that such courses don’t deserve equal academic credit
with such subjects as Algebra or Ancient History. After all, is a question from any
such course ever likely to turn up on a standardized achievement test or the
Scholastic Aptitude Test? No, they say. Therefore, why encourage students to study
such “pap.”

If essentialists are against “funky knowledge, what are they in favor of? An
excellent description of the conservationist conception of the school was given by a
professor to a freshman class assembly at Rutgers University several years ago:

Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great
stone halls of, say, M.I.T., and their cut into stone are the names of the
master scientists. The chances are that few if any of you will leave your
names to be cut into those stones. Yet any one of you who managed to stay
awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about
 physics than did many of those great makers of the past. You know more
because they left you what they knew. The first course in any science is
essentially a history course. You have to begin by learning what the past
learned for you. Except as a man has entered the past of the race he has no
function in civilization.

And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so is it true of mankind’s

spiritual resources. [Here, you see, Professor Clardi turns from the Realist
subject matter of physics to the Idealist subject matter of literature.] Most
of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books,
the arts and the techniques of science, are man’s particular
accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your
human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer’s
mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and
experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great
book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not time to live
yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not time to travel in literal
time. A civilized human is, in essence, one that contains many such lives
and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly
proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some
pieces of the minds of Sophocles, of Aristotle, of Chaucer—and right down
the scale and down the ages to Yeats, Einstein, E.B. White, and Ogden Nash
—you are neither a developed human being nor a useful citizen of
democracy…..

I speak, I am sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts college and for the
faculties of the specialized schools as well, when I say that a university has
no real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in
touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your
human mind needs to include. The faculty, by its very existence, says
implicitly: “We have been aided by many people, and by many books, and
by the arts, in our attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of
human experience. We are here to make available to you, as best we can,
that experience.
(Van Cleve Morris)

Basic Education

Essentialists believe in education that stresses the fundamentals. Modern

essentialists favor going "back to the basics" of the traditional curriculum. These
basics would include the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic—hence English
and mathematics. The basics also include a fundamental knowledge of history,
science and foreign language. A curriculum anchored in these five disciplines has
been advocated for some time by a national group called the Council for Basic
Education. The council believes that every student, regardless of his abilities or
interests, should be taught these five subjects every year, particularly in the
secondary school.
Essentialists are opposed to what they see as the “permissiveness” and “anti-
intellectualism” of progressivism in our schools. Progressives are their ideological
enemies. Essentialists claim that progressives are premature in trying to teach
students to think and solve problems before they have first acquired a body of
reliable knowledge to think in terms of. In other words, essentialists feel that you
can’t think in terms of a vacuum. They believe that only “basic content” can give
students a sense of historical perspective and tradition.

There have been individual spokesmen advocating a return to the fundamentals too.
In 1957, when the USSR launched “sputnik,” the world’s first artificial satellite,
Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear submarine, advocated a return to
the “hard core of basic educational subjects.” The intent of this suggestion was to
help us catch up with the Russians in the realms of science and technology.
Rickover was no professional educator, but he attracted nationwide attention. He
advocated doing away with the “frills” in the curriculum. He wanted to emphasize
above all else: mathematics, the “hard sciences (physics and chemistry) and foreign
languages. Rickover also wanted to segregate the “gifted students from the other
students. For the most gifted, he wanted to set up 25 “elite “ public high schools

throughout the country. These schools would have emphasized science and math
and would have been open to all students through competitive examinations. The
federal government would have financed such schools. For this reason, many
people opposed such schools, feeling that education should be left to the states and
local governments.

In summary, then, the essence of essentialism is that all America children should
have to learn the fundamental arts of reading, writing, spelling, measurement, and
computation, and history in the elementary school. These would be the essentials
for all American students. Essentialists favor studying subjects as separate
disciplines—not as some hodge-podge called “language arts,” “social studies,” or
“humanities.” Essentialists believe that such combination subjects lack real
substance or integrity. On the other hand, if subjects are studied as separate
disciplines, students can understand the viewpoint, structure a method of each
discipline.

The essentialist further believes that the student should master the subject matter
of a given grade level before he is promoted to the next grade level. In other words,
he believes in retaining failing students in the same grade rather than giving them
“social promotions” to keep them with students of the same chronological age.

Finally, essentialists believe that students should master “the essentials” before
they are allowed to study other less essential material that is possibly more
interesting to them.

Ability Grouping

Essentialists think that we should educate every man’s child. They feel, however,
that when all types of pupils are thrown together, the gifted students are inevitably
cheated. They also feel that “weak” students are intimidated by the gifted that are
the “stars” of such classes.

Essentialists claim that in a class of all ability levels (heterogeneous), the teacher
aims the level of instruction at the mediocre and slow pupil. To counteract this,
many essentialists would like to have separate schools or separate academic tracks
for the gifted within a heterogeneous school. Barring this, essentialists would favor
homogeneous grouping within a single track (curriculum), in order to segregate the
gifted student. This means segregating students into ability sections. Typically, this
in done on the basis of achievement test scores, I.Q. (perhaps with a cutoff score of
e.g. 120 for gifted), grades and teacher recommendations. Historically, such ability
grouping has been done in English, Math, Science and languages. Generally, there
has been no ability grouping in physical education, art, and the social studies.
Ability grouping has long been popular with many teachers. Some parents,
however, get upset if their children are not assigned to the top ability groups of a
subject. As a practice, ability grouping has been on the decline in public schools
since racial desegregation has gotten under way. Under our law, racially identifiable
schools are not legal. The U.S. Department of Education contends that ability
grouping tends to lead to racially identifiable classes within a desegregated school,
hence such practices have on occasion been judged to be in conflict with federal
anti-discrimination guidelines. In some instances, federal funding to school systems
has been withheld as a result.

Essentialists strongly favor ability grouping, but admit that it has some problems.
Some people feel that students in the upper ability groups become intellectual
“snobs” and that this necessarily compromises an weakens the power of the school
to be a socializing agent, mixing together all types of students.

Seating Arrangements

Generally speaking, the essentialist teacher prefers desks that can be permanently
arranged in rows, perhaps even screwed down to the floor as old school desks were.
This says a lot about what the teacher wants the pupil to experience in the
classroom. It means that the students are supposed to sit still and listen to the
teacher tell them about the world. The classroom is thus arranged like an
auditorium. This arrangement discourages pupil interaction with one another.
Comments tend to be directed only from the teacher to the student. Essentialists
tend to think that student to student dialogue is a “pooling of ignorance.” After all,
they reason, what do students know?

As for a seating pattern, essentialist quite often prefer to seat students

alphabetically. They say that this is to help the teacher learn names and to
facilitate the checking of the class roll. Essentialists tend to favor seating charts. In
this way they can check to see if a “body” is occupying a designated cubic footage
in the classroom. Essentialists say that this conserves time for instruction. Their
critics contend that this practice treats students as “things”—not persons. The
critics say that rigid seating arrangements affect the social and emotional climate of
the classroom, thereby influencing how much is learned. Essentialists defend these
practices by saying that they do not wish to “coddle” students. They feel that
students need to be kept aware of why they are in class: to learn objective
knowledge.

Subject Matter

We have already listed the subjects that essentialists want emphasized. The
priority given to these subjects depend upon whether the essentialists’ root
philosophy is Idealism or Realism. The Idealist essentialist wants to emphasize the
subject matter of mind: literature, philosophy, religion, and intellectual history. The
Realist essentialist want to emphasize the subject matter of the physical world:
math and the sciences.

It’s important to note that all essentialists are oriented more in their outlook to their
subject matter than their students. For example, an essentialist might say, “I teach
algebra.” A progressive, on the other hand, would emphasize that he teaches
children or young people. This may sound like a trivial point, but an essentialist is
primarily oriented toward the knowledge he is purveying to the students in his
classroom. Therefore, essentialists tend to become upset about interruptions to the
class routine. Taking class time for intercom announcements, special assemblies,
pep rallies athletic events and trips, club periods and collecting money really
irritates the essentialist. He feels that it keeps him from “covering the material” he
intends to cover. The essentialist, more than any other educator, is concerned
about covering the book or the curriculum guide.

Preferred Teaching Methods and Materials

Generally all essentialists view the teacher as the most important, most
knowledgeable person in the classroom. Therefore, it’s no surprise that all
essentialists seem to show a common methodological preference for the lecture
method. Essentialists tend to use almost no class discussion or projects, etc. The
teacher generally “teaches by telling.” This is called the expository method.
Essentialists like the lecture method because it is adaptable to most all subjects
except the arts. It can be used to describe, define, explain, analyze, inquire,
provoke, arouse, and excite.

Generally speaking, the idealist type of essentialist relies on the lecture method
more than the realist type of essentialist. This is because the Idealist-essentialist
talks about the ideas he wants students to absorb. The lecture method is actually
dependent upon ideas and symbols.

The Realist-essentialist primary wants students to master facts and information.

Therefore, in addition to lecturing they use demonstrations and laboratory
exercises. (The content of math and science lends itself to this.) In both of these
methods, the student learns about the world through his senses. These two latter
methods are symbolic, formal types of learning that are generally removed from the
living experience of the learner. In other words, they come off as planned, generally
without a hitch. For example, the teacher dissects a frog or demonstrates Boyle’s
law of gasses with balloons and diaphragms. So, demonstrations and lab exercises
usually have a predictable end and reflect a pre-existent reality beyond the
classroom.

Realist-essentialists generally use a lot of recitation as a teaching method in

addition to the ones already mentioned. Recitation is basically when the student
“lectures back” to the teacher to show that he knows something. As a method,
recitation bears a close resemblance to a stimulus-response model of learning. The
pupil is the responding mechanism. Questions are the stimuli. Answers are the
responses. The Realist-essentialist thinks that a conditioning to certain answers for
given questions will result in learning.

As far as teaching materials are concerned, essentialists usually rely heavily upon
textbooks and the chalkboard. Idealist-essentialists in particular tend to teach out
of a textbook—covering it page by page in order. An example of this is the Idealist-
oriented college history course where the text is lectured about page by page, and
students have “mountains” of outside reading assignments. To the Idealist-
essentialist, this is justifiable because books are an avenue to the past. Books are
summations of articulate people thinking important thoughts. Books allow us to
incorporate the thoughts of great minds into our own minds.

Classroom Discipline

With respect to discipline, the essentialist sees two key questions: (1) how should
the student be controlled? (2) How should the student be taught to control himself?
The essentialist believes that a student is taught how to control himself by being
controlled by the teacher—repeatedly. In other words, self-discipline comes from
being disciplined. Essentialists believe that progressives are too soft and
sentimental toward the misbehaving student. Essentialists feel that children are like
little animals—they must be restrained. By constant restraint, students will
eventually learn to restrain themselves.

Essentialists believe in rules and penalties to restrain students. They feel that these
rules and penalties should come from an authority outside the life of the student,
e.g., the teacher, principal, the board of education, parents, and society at large.
Essentialist teachers think they should police student behavior. They see
themselves as standing “in loco parentis” (in place of the parents) and in place of
society at large. To the essentialist, it is the job of the student to conform to the
rules laid down by the teacher and the school. Essentialists believe that it is not
undemocratic to disregard the students’ opinions about the rules, because the
student’s opinions about the rules are not relevant. By analogy, the essentialist
would ask if the inmates should be allowed to participate in the running of a prison!

When the student breaks a rule, the essentialist teacher punishes him with a
penalty that was either announced beforehand or was arranged “on the spot” to fit
the “crime.” Reasoning is not generally resorted to by the essentialist in invoking
penalties. Frequently used penalties are, e.g.:

Verbal rebuke Denial of privileges

Isolation from others in class Trip to principal’s office
“Exile” in the hallway Corporal punishment
Keeping in after school Ridicule
Suspension (action that can only be taken by school administrators)
Expulsion (action that can only be taken by school administrators)

An important point to remember is that an essentialist generally doesn’t see

discipline as a learning experience for the student. Discipline is just a means of
control by the teacher to facilitate learning. This contrasts greatly with the
progressive view on discipline.

Testing and Evaluation

Generally the essentialist is concerned about the intellectual growth of students—

not their social, emotional, or physical development. This point of view is reflected
in the type of teacher-made paper and pencil achievement tests given for purposes
of evaluation. Realist-essentialists favor objective tests (true false, multiple choice,
completion, etc.) because they have right or wrong answers to determine if a
student knows his facts. Idealist-essentialists favor essay exams so they can see
how a student expresses his ideas on a certain topic, or how he analyzes a
complicated issue, or how he interprets a story.

As far as grading is concerned, essentialists of all types make a big deal about
“maintaining standards.” To an essentialist, standards are generally external,
teacher-imposed, rigid criteria of academic achievement. The essentialist does not
generally take into account individual and class differences in abilities when giving
out grades. Realist-essentialists sometimes like to “grade on the curve”—a practice
which guarantees a certain percentage of failures. This may be an attempt to
quantify everything and render into mathematical statistics the comparative
achievements of students. Progressive critics of this practice see it as a gross
misuse of the field of statistics and the tenets of educational psychology. This
practice presupposes a “normal distribution” of academic aptitude in each class of
students.

References

Philosophy and the American School by Van Cleve Morris

A History of Education (2nd ed.) by James Mulhern

Educational Ideologies by William F. O’Neill

Dialogue in the Philosophy of Education by Howard Ozman

Related Readings Required of Students

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