ABSTRACT
E. D. Hirsch, in his argument for his Core Knowledge series (at least one progenitor for the ongoing standards movement in contemporary America) makes the point that “historians date the present era of American education from the publication in 1918 of the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education” (1996, p. 48). And while Hirsch is making an argument for the value of national standards upon which we might better socialize newer generations of Americans into a (his) version of the citizen, we wish to attend more closely, to take seriously (Nord, 2002), the notion of cardinal principles and the concept of standards in American education, seeking to connect standardization as a program of learning, to long-standing notions about, as noted in prior chapters, testing and student possibility rooted firmly in religiousparticularly Judeo-Christian-assumptions. In the process we examine the language used to frame standards, making the point again and differently that a given document need not reference religious texts explicitly to be guided by undergirding theological histories. We are exploring, in the vein of Asad (2003), “what makes a discourse and an action ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ ” (p. 8), asserting here that there is much to suggest that the standards movement is religious if not in branch then certainly in root. We close by addressing a recent call to consider the resacralization of society and research (Wexler, 2013), particularly education research. In keeping with the larger project of this book, and thinking especially here about the implications of engaging education itself as a writerly text, we work to provide readers with tools for the sake of reading religion back into the standards movement and its many manifestations in current education practice and policy.
