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9 Mastering the Curriculum Many Americans from the mid-1950s will remember a song by Sam Cooke entitled “Wonderful World.” Like other popular classics of the time, it is about a high school kid trying to get a girl. He’s not big on book-learning, he confesses to her; but if the two of them can make it together in love, school problems and everything else will take care of themselves. “Don’t know much about history,” it begins, Don’t know much biology. Don’t know much about a science book. Don’t know much about the French I took. An ensuing verse continues the “Don’t know much about _____” theme, rhyming on various educational subjects—geography and trigonometry; “al-ge-bra” and “what a slide rule-is-for.” What the singer does know, of course, is that he loves a girl and that if she were to love him as well, it would be a wonderful world. Further, he pledges, if trying to be an “A” student will help, that too can become proof of his devotion. The times abounded in songs about teenagers in love. What distinguishes “Wonderful World” is the concrete memorability of the curricular metaphor. Beyond such popular analogues as Chuck Berry’s “School Days” and the Coasters’ “Charlie Brown,” it is the quintessential song about the American teenager as high school kid, detailing the elements of common educational experience for those aspiring to middle-class hap- Mastering the Curriculum / 151 piness and success during the era. The standard class schedule is largely there: history, biology, French, trigonometry, algebra. So are some basic stage properties: a science book and—in a reference that now seems touchingly quaint—a slide rule. English seems to be taken for granted, although the clever rhyming and argument suggest a precocious adolescent mastery. Although humorously expressed, there is also the basic idea of social aspiration, on some level an acceptance of the role played by public education in undergirding the good life in America. For an average American teenager, the curriculum, the song seems to say, is part of life, and part of life is mastering the curriculum. The adolescent is enshrined as American teenager, and the American high school is a model for inculcation of the values of postwar culture. It is an image of cultural connection that has never really quite left us. In movies one traces a short but illustrative pedigree back through High School Musical I and II to Mean Girls, Napoleon Dynamite, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, American Pie, Clueless, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. On TV, a bare listing of the most recent progeny of the form would include Degrassi, Hannah Montana, Josh and Drake, and Beverly Hills 90210. Chasing Zoe becomes subsumed in the real-life teen pregnancy of its star,Jamie Lynne Spears—with the scandal eclipsed by daily headlines about the egregious self-destructiveness of her sister, Britney, once the reigning queen of adolescent sexuality. In film and on TV the newest iterations become notes toward a High School Confidential for the twenty-first century. Meanwhile the Hollywood genre reaches back through Hairspray, Grease, and American Graffiti to Blackboard Jungle and Rebel without a Cause, and on the small screen to Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter. Mastering the curriculum in the sense of teenage and/or young-adult preparation for citizenship and socioeconomic participation actually goes back at least through John Dewey to the McGuffey Readers and beyond. The current regimen of teacher accountability, statutory graduation exams , and measurement of learning outcomes similarly comes trailing a long history of post–World War II anxieties and admonitions: endless arguments over curriculum, classroom goals and objectives, teacher training standards, and student competencies. In a dismal continuity flowing back from the 1990s through the 1970s, tag phrases like “cultural literacy” 152 / Chapter 9 and “the closing of the American mind” become post-1960s laments over the loss of some golden age of postwar educational efficacy and integrity . Meanwhile, such artifacts as the course schedule outlined in “Wonderful World”must increasingly be seen as not unlike the gatherings from a Babylonian or Egyptian tomb—or stage properties in a bad replay of Happy Days. We have come a long way to No Child Left Behind; and before that, Reagan-era crisis rhetoric over illiteracy, innumeracy, lack of shared knowledge, lack of shared skills and essential linguistic, literary, historical,mathematical,and scientific competencies.“Facts and skills are...

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