What Your Second Grader Needs to Know (1991)

I used to think we needed a checklist to validate educational progress. Although this did convey the level of understanding, it very quickly turned me off from the Core Knowledge approach to education. The first impression matches what we see in most modern textbooks. The fonts are big, the topics arbitrary, and the treatment simplistic. With text like this for children and their mentoring parents (how many !'s does one need?), it's no wonder our educational establishment is in trouble. Get your breadth children. Cover all topics enough to have a working understanding. But don't get it from here. ( )

I didn't read this cover-to-cover, but flipped throught it to get an idea of how closely my son's knowledge matched up with what the author feels he should have known, by this age. (The answer; pretty good. We'd read several of the fiction selections already, and he was on track as regards math. Way ahead in some other areas, although his knowledge of American history is a bit lacking by the author's standards, but that's because I've focused more on world history when we were homeschooling).

This appears to be a good book, one which could be used as a guideline for a curriculum, perhaps even an entire curriculum, with some supplemental materials. ( )

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