Check this out, from The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff/592765/.
It is, to summarize, an explanation of why the current, Common-Core inspired approach to reading has tendency to worsen the very achievement gaps that our ‘every student succeeds’ philosophy was meant close. Simply put, the article argues that achievement gaps are widening and scores are declining because schools don’t teach anything. They don’t teach any actual things, that is. Today’s schools focus instead on amorphous concepts and skills like ‘comprehension’, drawing inferences, and, my personal favorite, critical thinking. Can anyone tell me how critical thinking differs from regular, old, uncritical thinking? I didn’t think so.
When I say actual things, I mean facts. Information. Dates, definitions, events, and processes that are relevant to various academic subjects. Today’s schools have deliberately deemphasized the teaching of information, like the date of the battle of Gettysburg, or the capital of Kansas, or who developed the polio vaccine, or how a bill becomes a law. Such actual things are mentioned in passing, or even ignored entirely, because teaching them would (as he standard explanation goes) rely too much on memorization, recitation, and listening to a teacher speak, and so would not be sufficiently rigorous and engaging. If students’ reading skills are strong enough, the thinking goes, then they don’ need a teacher to teach them any actual things because they can acquire all the information they need from all of the wonderfully rigorous reading that they are going to do. Just as soon as they get their skills in drawing inferences and critical thinking up to par, they will easily become informed on all manner of things, without ever having to memorize anything or listen to a lecture!
The article does such an excellent job of explaining this approach and its results that I don’t feel the need to recap any further. Seriously, go read the whole thing. It’s the first piece of educational journalism I’ve seen since I started teaching that isn’t hogwash. Instead, I want to talk about the why. Why did we stop teaching actual things? Why are we so focused on skills that we can barely even define, much less convey to children? Despite my extremely mild moment of snark earlier, I don’t think it’s really because of the Common Core. Common Core standards are less restrictive than most people seem to realize and do not actual mandate any particular teaching methodology. They’re really just goals, and they do not, on their face, prescribe any particular route towards reaching those goals. So, why can’t we teach any things? I have two ideas.
First, if we are going to teach real things, we are going to have to make some decisions about which things to teach. Are we going to teach the date of Gettysburg, or the date that Captain Cook reached the coast of Australia? Are we going to teach the capital of Kansas, or the latitude and longitude of the pyramids of Giza? Should students first learn about the achievements of Jonas Salk, or of Daniel Hale Williams? Should we begin a semester of history with the Magna Carta, or the codes of Hammurabi? We could teach any of these things. We could teach every thing. We cannot, however, teach all of the things. No one knows all of the things that are worth knowing or that are helpful to know, so we must, if we are going to teach real things, make choices. Choices imply judgement, and that is what we fear most. If we begin a social studies unit on geography by having students memorize the principal rivers and mountain ranges of the continental US, then we fear that we might thereby imply that the principal rivers and mountains of southeast Asia are less important and less worthy of our students’ attention. We don’t want that; we are afraid that such an implication might come off as ethnocentric or make our southeast Asian students feel ostracized, so instead we teach none of those things. Instead, we invite our students to think critically about why different countries on a map are in different colors, and tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter if they can’t find their hometown on that map. If we begin a unit on American literature with A Scarlet Letter, then we cannot also begin that unit with The Secret Life of Oscar Wao. That might be a judgement. That might imply that we think Hawthorne is better than Diaz, and we don’t want that. We don’t want to think, or even seem to think, that some writers and books are better than others, and so we don’t teach writers and books. Instead, we give students texts with no context and ask them to ‘draw inferences’ from them, without ever addressing the question of whether or not they are worth reading.
If we try to teach actual things, then we will have to choose which things are most important. Those choices would necessarily imply values. Teaching specific things would also mean teaching that those things are important and necessary—and the other, omitted things are less important and necessary. Because modern schools are allergic to values, we find ourselves unable to teach things.
My other theory is similar but not identical. The extreme focus on skills, to the detriment of things, also embodies a peculiar philosophy of thinking that infests our contemporary schools. It’s difficult to describe. I think it is best expressed as a belief that all intellectual activity is analogous to a simple mathematical formula. Today’s teachers and administrators talk a lot about demonstrating their thinking as ‘replicable steps’ and giving students checklists and charts to guide them, step by step, through complex intellectual processes like analyzing metaphors or explaining how an author’s background might affect his arguments. Perhaps an example would help; this year, I was ordered to use a new curriculum that was even more ‘skills based’ than other curriculums used at my school. One of the lessons in this highly-regimented curriculum was supposed to be about understanding symbolism in fiction. The heart of the lesson was showing students a set of ‘replicable steps’ for understanding symbolism in fiction (theoretically, any fiction). This set of steps began with ‘identify a symbol’ and ‘think about what that symbol might represent’. The idea was that this set of steps could be the functional equivalent of the formula for finding the area of a triangle. If you know the formula for the area of a triangle and you can do basic arithmetic, then you can find the area of any triangle, with any measurements. Big numbers! Small numbers! You can figure out any and all triangles. So, this innovative curriculum relied on the assumption that, once you know the steps for understanding symbols, you can understand any and all symbols. Common symbols in obscure books! Obscure symbols in popular books! Doesn’t matter, because they will all yield themselves to the same set of replicable steps. This is the approach modern schools advocate for everything. There are replicable steps for understanding a fictional character’s motives and formulas for identifying an author’s bias in primary sources. Every act of cognition or recognition can, according to today’s teachers, be expressed as a neat and efficacious formula.
This is garbage. The moment I read this lesson mentioned above, I had a flashback to a pleasant afternoon on my college lawn where I prepared for my 19th-century literature class by reading Bleak House. I came across a passage where he narrator describes a ray of sunlight casting a bend-sinister across Lady Dedlock’s portrait, and I got it. Lady Dedlock was Esther’s mother. All the threads seemed to come together in my hand and I galloped towards the end, with increased alertness to details that might bear on my realization and greatly enhanced sympathy for Lady Dedlock. I was able to interpret that symbol not by using a series of replicable steps, but by knowing the meaning of a band-sinister. Had I not known that, I would not have recognized it as a symbol at all. I certainly would not have been able to apply any sort of formula to it. The formula method for thinking doesn’t work, so what’s the deal? Why are educators so invested in it?
I believe that it is because, if all thinking is a formula, then anyone can do it. You can drum the formula for the area of a triangle into any skull, however thick, if you keep at it long enough. Give anyone a calculator and they can apply that formula. If all thinking is formulaic, then all thoughts are accessible to anyone. If all ideas and understandings come from proper application of the right replicable steps, then intelligence and insight don’t really exist. There would be no such thing as bright people with good ideas and dull people with vapid ideas; only people who knew the formula and people who didn’t. If all thinking is formulaic then an intellectually egalitarian utopia is, theoretically, achievable.
So, when teacher bang on about skills and avoid information and facts, they are doing two things. They are studiously avoiding value judgements and hiding from the idea that some people might not ever understand some ideas.
Aye Carranza! 