The Key K-12 Issue: Content or Methodology?
Put another way: What vs How
[Note: this is the third recent installment about our K-12 education system. The prior two are here and here. Many more are found in the Archives.]
In effectively reforming our deplorable K-12 education system, the issue of Content vs Methodology is an enormously important, fundamental matter. The pivotal question is: which of these is more important?
Before we get to discussing that, let’s define the terms:
1 - Content refers to what children are being taught in K-12. Curriculum is a more technical term for this. Broadly, Content has a formal component (the syllabus, course objectives, and exams) that works alongside the informal component (the skills, attitudes, and behaviors students develop) that shape the educational experience.
2 - Methodology refers to how students are being taught in K-12. Pedagogy is a more nerdy word, but I’m trying to keep things simpler. When one investigates this aspect more thoroughly, there are a surprising number of methodologies to try to educate students — this article lists fifty!!!
Where Do We Stand Now?
Although there are many K-12 issues, Content and Methodology are at the foundation, so from a 30,000-foot view, how good a job are we doing on each?
There are at least three challenges in even a broad assessment of Content and Methodology as: 1) any valuation is subjective, 2) valuations change from State to State, district to district, grade to grade, subject to subject, and teacher to teacher, plus 3) it’s hard to translate these matters into a number.
That said, my overview of the US K-12 educational assessment of these is:
Content: We are doing a 50%± job.
Methodology: We are doing a 75%± job.
After a hundred plus years of being in the K-12 education business, 50 States spending something like a total of a trillion dollars, millions of teachers contributing their time and effort, plus Legislators, parents, citizens, etc, throwing in their 2¢, we should now be 90%+ in both areas!
If we look at recent K-12 education reform efforts, I’d say that 10% are about Content improvement, 30% are directed at Methodology advancements, and 60%± are focused on something else (school choice, safety, DOEd, etc.).
—>IMHO, this is a major reason why K-12 progress is glacially slow, as substantial time, effort, and dollars are being directed to secondary matters.
Determining Priorities —
Clearly, Content and Methodology are both essential if we want a quality outcome. But, is there a hierarchical order of importance between them?
In other words, would we be better off improving Methodology to 90% (while making only minor Content improvements), OR improving Content to 90% (while making only minor Methodology improvements)?
The first way to look at this is: which of the two is in more need of improvement? Unequivocally, the answer is Content (50% vs 75%).
A second way to answer this is, which of these two undesirable options would you prefer your child to have in their K-12 school, (or no preference):
1 - A superior teacher with poor subject content, or
2 - A poor teacher communicating superior subject content?
Let’s be more real-world… There is overwhelming evidence that the US K-12 school systems have been largely taken over by Left-wing activists.
This ranges from their control of teacher certification colleges to their control of Content in most subjects (from History to Science). Here is a sample, recent piece of evidence (out of hundreds) relating to that.
A third idea is to make the choice more stark (and realistic). Which of these two undesirable options would you prefer your child have in their K-12 school (or do you have no preference):
1 - Superior teachers conveying Marxist ideology in History, undermining Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method in Science, etc., or
2 - Poor teachers communicating balanced American History, advocating Critical Thinking and the traditional Scientific Method in Science, etc.?
IMHO, the choice is not even close! The first is blatant indoctrination of Left-wing ideology, unscientific nonsense, etc. Why would anyone want their child to have a superior teacher propagandizing them very effectively?
The other extreme is to have an ineffective teacher communicating superior subject materials. In this case, your child has a fighting chance to succeed, as no one is continually forcing harmful and inaccurate material into their head.
Why Does This Matter?
As we have made clear in prior posts (besides it being obvious), in the deplorable US K-12 education system, there are a slew of problems.
The sensible way to make meaningful headway on these is to prioritize what we are most important to address first, etc. Yes, we can work on more than one matter at a time, but without being very clear as to our priorities, the effort will very likely fail. The proof of this is that we continue to go downhill.
The evidence says that the Content part (the curricula) needs to be fixed first. This is even more urgent as what children are being force-fed in US K-12 public schools today is horrifically damaging to them — and America.
Prioritizing an effort to come up with ways to teach garbage more effectively (e.g., via AI) is not only child abuse, but societally suicidal.
(Please read this prior commentary about the K-12 issues we are facing.)
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A few sample references —
Rethinking teaching and teachers: Bringing content back into conversation
Teachers’ Training in Teaching Content vs Methodology
Skill Subjects vs. Content Subjects
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Since the 1920s, regressive (for that's what they really are) educators such as John Dewey and John Heard Kilpatrick demeaned subject content in favor life skills, project learning, and socialist indocgrination. (Dewey was a socialist who was enamoured of the Soviet experiment). It was the start of a century-long dumbing down of American education that infects K-12 education today. You can read this sorry history in Diane Ravitch's Book "Left Back: A Century of. Battles Over School Reform." They also dumbed down reading with whole language and other non-phonics-based approaches to reading ninstruction, such that we now have 43 million people in the United States who are functionally illiterate and 130 million who read at a 6th grade level or below. They also dumbed down math, with the New Math, the New New Math and other approaches that abandoned memorization of basic math facts (like memorizing the multiplecation tables). It wasn't until 2000 that the National Reading Panel finally proclaimed phonics as the superior form of teaching reading. But there have been holdouts still wedded to their failed methods, chiefly Lucy Calkins, who did much damage to millions of schoolchildren. In my town of Guilford. CT, the superintendent, Paul Freeman, proudly introduced a "phonics initative in 2021, i.e. 21 years after the National Reading Panel's proclamation. So much for the vaue of an EdD.
This reminds me of something Arne Duncan, Obama's Secretary of Education for eight years, wrote in his book "How Schools Work." It's one of the dumbest things I have ever read by a so-called educator, and why we are deep trouble:
"We don't need rote knowledge anymore: we have the Internet and Wikipedia for that. What we need are kids who can learn anything and continue to be able learn anything for the rest of their lives. We need kids who can think and not just recall. We need kids who are comfortable solving problems in a group, working together, supporting and challenging each other and bringing out the best thinking in everyone. That's what education reform is after: figuring out ways to better equip our children with skills and habits that will make them successful for the rest of their
lives."
I can only imagine the results coming from a group of equally empty-headed kids all working together. It's like the blind leading the blind. Duncan obviously never rubbed elbows with cognitive scientists who understand that a pre-existing knowledge base is essential for critical thinking. Of course, it's simple common sense, even if you're not a cognitive scientist.
Bruce Deitrick Price describes critical thinking as a two-step process. "First, students learn a lot about a topic, whether in history, science or art; then theylearn to arrange the information in new ways, to set one fact against another, to discover original insights about this knowledge.
Not anymore. Today's educators don't bother with the first part. They jump dorectly to step two. In this scenario, students who know nothing are expected to talk intelligently about it. Imagine the depth." This is the aproach taken by something called "Portrait of a Graduate," that the excuse for a superintendent introduced in the Guilford, CT Public Schools. The central component of POG is critical thinking. The problem is that it's a program designed for seniors in high school who have already spent 12 years (K-11) absorbing very little knowledge of substantive upon which to think critically. In essence, it's a pathetic attempt to fool parents into thinking their ldarlings are going to become critical thinkers after the schools have wasted 12 years of their lives without inculcating knowledge.
One final note. After Hirsch's book "Cultural Literacy" became a bestseller, he offered to teach a course in the Education School at UVa. Hirsch was a professor of English literature. The first three times he offered the course, only about ten students signed up--this after it had become a national bestseller. Finally, a student in his third class came up to him after class and said: Do you want to know why not many kids are taking your class? The professors at the education school told us not to." Such is the animus about learning substantive information (FACTS], that they typically demean as "rote memorizatinn" or "mere facts," just as Duncan wrote. This is a relic from the days of John Dewey and William Heard KIlpatrick at Columbia Teacher's College who destroyed teacher education beginning in the 1920s because it coincided a growing national demand for education professors to fill slots at normal schools around the counrty. That educational cancer metasticized across the country, and is still with us today.
If you want to know more, I highly recommend Hirsch's books "Cultural Literacy" and the Knowledge Deficit," Natalie Wexler's "The Knowledge Gap, and cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham's "Why Don't Students LIke School." And , of course, Diane Ravitch's "Left Back."
The Key K-12 Issue: Purpose.