Diane Ravitch takes to the op-ed page of the Boston Globe to urge Bay Staters not to be seduced by 21st century skills hucksterism. Her singular contribution to education is historical memory in a field where it’s famously lacking. Whether it’s the “Project Method” of the early 20th century, the “Activity Movement’ of the 20s and 30s, the “Life Adjustment Movement’’ of the 1950s, or “Outcome-Based Education’’ in the 1980s, Ravitch reminds us that we’ve seen this movie before.
None of these initiatives survived. They did have impact, however: They inserted into American education a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.
“For over a century we have numbed the brains of teachers with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills,” Ravitch concludes. ”We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries. But we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”
My neck hurts. Must have injured it nodding vigorously in agreement.
I wonder if some of the focus on “skills” is directly linked to the focus on preparing students for “the workplace” (even if there might be a stop at college in between).
School focus on content much more directly in subjects — math and science, particularly — where there are jobs that clearly require that content. But in the humanities and history, the connection between content and job readiness is less obvious. Many employers want literate, generally knowledgeable employees who can write readable English sentences — but its harder to track that back to a curriculum — than it is for employers who want employees who can do surveying or analyze chemical samples.
Those terrible Venn diagrams are the ones ruining education!
Seriously, all of those devices mentioned *require* at least a modicum of knowledge to utilize, as they are intended to help analyze the different parts of the whole. One doesn’t teach graphic organizers without content to organize. Data-based decision-making emphasizes informed decisions to help students learn better, not any particular skill set over knowledge. Measures of accountability would actually do the opposite as that asserted above, and would demand that content remain rigorous as the critical thinking necessary to learn it.
What does “skill-centered, knowledge-free” education even mean? What a silly way to try and debate the opposition. Excuse me while I draw a mind map of nothing in particular.
Chris, the point is not if knowledge is needed to complete a Venn diagram. It is. It’s a question of carts and horses. If your goal is to teach, for example, comparing and contrasting as a critical thinking skill, you might have children compare and contrast apples and oranges, desert and tundra, or baseball and football. The content becomes a delivery mechanism for the skill and is fungible since what matters is the skill. This is exactly what happens when classrooms are oriented toward skills.
If the content drives the instruction, however, you might assign the compare and contrast exercise as an organic part of your unit on colonization, and ask students to compare English and Spanish settlements in the New World.
This is not an arbitrary difference. A commitment to a sequenced core curriculum has lots of benefits in terms of reading comprehension, building background knowledge, critical thinking skills, etc. But put the cart before the horse and you have incoherence and superficiality.
I don’t see how any lesson related to the underpinnings of a Venn diagram will do the dastardly things that have been asserted here. Where does it say that skills are added at the price of removing content? How will learning how to use a Venn diagram supplant the consideration of content understanding, particularly if a basic understanding of using Venn diagrams (and to be specific, these kinds of skills *without* the relevant content are not really being taught as critical thinking skills at all) can help students pick up and analyze content more effectively?
Great explanation, Robert.
My first principal decided at one point that she wanted some regularity in the school. I remember her crisp, deliberate voice over the loudspeaker: “Today is Tuesday, and that means that every child will complete a graphic organizer!”