K-12 Teachers Go Through the University Ideology Pipeline

A few years ago, I read E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, a transformative appeal for steering American K-12 education toward deeper academic content and, more fundamentally, toward the primacy of knowledge. The book was a key reason I decided to attend Stanford University’s graduate program in education policy and leadership and reenter the world of education.

While I didn’t expect to be met with the champions of Hirsch’s ideas at Stanford, I could hardly anticipate the indifference that one of the self-professed top education schools in the world would show toward teaching education in a formal sense—that is, what students in K-12 schools ought to learn and how to teach it. Stanford is not alone, as universities have become notorious for under-preparing America’s teachers for the classroom.