Analysis of Alfie Kohn's "The Hard Evidence" and Argument of Critical Literacy vs. Cultural Pedagogy
             In his chapter "The Hard Evidence", Alfie Kohn vividly shows the stunning difference between two main types of education students can receive, backing up his assertion by drawing from a convincing and overabundant pool of previous research. He somewhat generalizes these two schools; the first referred to as "skill-based", "Direct Instruction", "Cultural Pedagogy", "Old School", and "traditional"; the second referred to as "Whole Language" (WL), "non-traditional", "Critical Literacy", "progressive", and even "open-ended". Just skimming "The Hard Evidence", one can quickly deduce Kohn's position and what he feels are "The Schools Our Children Deserve."
             Kohn does an excellent job first effectively picking apart E.D. Hirsch's basis of research in his book "The Schools We Need", where we can see Hirsch being an avid supporter of Cultural Pedagogy. Not only does Kohn take apart Hirsch's argument through his research, but he goes the extra mile to show how Hirsch fooled, at least to some extent, his audience using the age old idea that you can make statistics lie. Ninety-eight percent of people who brush their teeth don't get cancer. It just doesn't work that way, and Kohn shows us how Hirsch used four out of five sources that were over 25 years old, and NONE of them dealt with the subject of the book, elementary students. Instead, they were about college level students (Kohn 209).
             One stunning point is Kohn's closing paragraph of the chapter. "This appendix is primarily intended for those in the middle," states Kohn, "who haven't yet formed an opinion or whose opinions are susceptible of being changed by what the research...