Elementary Education Has Been Going Terribly Wrong For A While, But Maybe Not How You Think

My friend asked for my opinion about this article, so here it is.

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I think this article is trying to say, "It looks like there is research supporting the idea of a knowledge-based rather than a skills-based curriculum." That's an interesting and complicated question.

What the article ends up mostly saying is, "American schools are horrible and it's mostly the teachers' fault. Shame on them for using Google and Pinterest." Giant. Eyeroll.

There's also a little bit of doom, gloom, Everything Is Awful - no real focus on solutions, no real questioning why France moved away from a knowledge-based curriculum. I mean, presumably there was a reason! Wouldn't that be more interesting to talk about than a few anecdotal experiences where a kid did a unit on hearts and "talked about plasma the whole year" or this other kind of curriculum became the silver bullet that fixed little "Matt"'s entire perspective on learning and education? 'Nuther. Giant. Eyeroll.

It's just another example of the myopic nature of reporting. This reporter gets this idea from somewhere, tries to research it, but doesn't really seem to do due diligence in fact-checking, makes assumptions about the way things are from the way things really seem to be. This wouldn't be so annoying if I hadn't been on the other side of this, as an actual teacher. Teachers coming out of the "mill" a decade ago were taught explicitly, even at BYU - which is one of the MOST conservative schools in the country, that the NCLB act was a piece of garbage, that good, effective pedagogy has stronger correlates to relationships and communicative learning strategies than any kind of formal assessment, that assessments are really poor measures of "progress", that the best way to learn reading is to learn to love reading, etc. My prof told us, "The only thing good about the No Child Left Behind Act is its name."

Everybody loves to complain, complain, complain about NCLB, Common Core, "the good ol' days when people learned things the 'right' way", etc. It is not very interesting to me to read these kinds of sob stories about how horrible the world is.

I agree with the teacher about my country turning much more from knowledge to skills based curricula. I can see that by comparing my own experience with that of my children. But it's... It's not so simple.

I had units on Greece, Volcanoes, Ancient Egypt etc. as an 8 year old kid in 3rd grade (which I actually remember; I LOVED learning about hieroglyphics! It was - and is - fascinating to me). My kids have units on Greece, Volcanoes, Ancient Egypt, etc. But they also bring home this stupid reading chart.

I hate the reading chart.

They are supposed to track their minutes of reading, getting some quota (which I don't remember). My kids are going to read because they are in a house surrounded with books, with parents who too often get sucked into their projects on their computers, and who really, really care about ideas, knowledge, and learning. I'm not worried about my kids reading enough. If I worry about anything, it's that I worry about them enjoying it enough.

But I don't worry about that very much because I know that they do.

I think the thing the author fails to connect is the correlation between interest and learning. It's not about the curriculum being designed in x or y way - at least, not directly. It's about the curriculum's ability to tap into a child's interest. It is conceivable that there are weirdos who get really excited about, oh, say, explicitly learning the rules of diagramming sentences [raises hand]. But yeah, most people are more likely to be interested in knowledge that they can more easily apply to their own life.

I can easily believe and accept that reading comprehension is more based on one's interest/personal connection/background knowledge of a topic than raw ability. I see this in my Reading Comprehension practice sections for the GRE. I don't do as well at answering the questions when it's a topic I don't care about, or know anything about. Flies in petrie dishes, certain proteins affecting x change in cancer cells, motion detectors on cameras, Swedish Feminist playwrights: all real topics of essays, all really boring to me, I didn't do as well on these sections. 19th century classicists couldn't accept the idea that Greek statues were not originally white, but actually painted! Picasso's blue period was kinda weird! This Play Wasn't Actually Racist - the Critics Were! Those are way more interesting to me. I did better when I was interested. I was more interested when I had some kind of personal connection to a topic.

Any TESOL teacher could tell you that there's a difference between knowing content and being able to express that you know it; that's kind of like, the entire point of TESOL. The best TESOL class I took was about Assessment. I will never forget thinking about how unfair it is to penalize an L1 Spanish speaker for their inability to understand the English on a Science test. We aren't assessing his Science knowledge here, but his English. Which do we care about, really?

As for the idea of using the idea that 95% of grade school teachers use Google and 89% use Pinterest as an insult? That's kind of like insulting the idea of using a library. Google and Pinterest are repositories. What's wrong with scouring the internet for ideas? I guess the thing she was trying (but failing) to say was that it's a bad idea to get worksheet after worksheet from the Internet, without any kind of thought as to how it fits in the broader curriculum.

The idea of focusing learning in at least semi-cohesive content-based "units" is the bread and butter of the world language classroom. I've read papers about how this relates to SLA. One of them bore a title like this, "Learning Grammar Explicitly is Boring." Well, no sh***, Sherlock. Doesn't take a genius to notice that.

So, what, is the solution for the teachers to ALSO be the experts on curriculum design, along with daycare provider, babysitter, values-instiller, technologists, lunch duty specialists, and possibly eventually weapons carriers (!!)? I don't like this conclusion. It is not fair, especially because if this lady cared to dig a bit deeper, she'd find that many teachers actually are experts in curriculum design, but the facts are that the battle in school is usually political. The real problem is not so much there, but here.

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So what do you think?