Every so often (actually, very often) I hear someone say, “Why can’t we have both content and skills? Why are people wasting their time arguing for one or another?”
This is a reasonable argument, and like many reasonable arguments, it must be adjusted for an unreasonable world. Will Fitzhugh warns us of our eroding reason: in a recent piece he proclaims that the “evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction” have taken over schools just as kudzu has taken over farms in the southeastern part of the U.S. If allowed to spread further, Fitzhugh argues, “literary kudzu” will “choke off … attention to the reading of complete books and the writing of serious academic papers by the students in our schools.”
In a comment on the Core Knowledge blog, Carl Rosin objects roundly (and reasonably) to Fitzhugh’s premise: “I am dismayed by Mr. Fitzhugh’s thesis, which I believe disparages process—which even the most knowledgeable writers must learn—because of a logical fallacy: that process necessarily replaces content.”
Rosin would be right, if the schools, policymakers, and education schools were as reasonable as he. But again, we are dealing with an unreasonable world. Process does replace content when it is accorded the highest place on the scale of values. To put process at the top, to subordinate literature and history to skills, is a gory sacrifice and boring practice. But such philosophy runs rude and ragged like Auden’s rascals.
Many state standards don’t mention a single work of literature, even in passing. Well, those are standards, one might say; the curricula should make up for the omission. But in many cases they don’t. Officials and even teachers will argue that “you don’t teach the subject, you teach the student,” and that you choose the content to match the desired skills, which should take precedence. They believe a teacher—or student—should select books that best match the student’s learning needs.
The very emphasis on skills, paradoxically, is one reason why students don’t master the skills—there’s no good content in which to ground them. “Compare and contrast” is of little value until you have something good to compare and contrast. In the second chapter of her new book, Diane Ravitch puts it succinctly: “Students should certainly think about what they read, but they should read something worth thinking about.”
Granted, some schools “infuse” the curriculum with content. That’s better than nothing—but they still assume that skills, strategies, and processes come first and that the content is a filler, vehicle, or whatever the term might be.
How can one justify putting the skills and processes on top? It would be as though someone learned the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello in order to practice bowing techniques. Certainly a student needs to learn bowing techniques; certainly a student becomes better at bowing by spending many hours on the Suites. Still, one learns bowing in order to play the Suites, and not vice versa. If there were no music worth learning for its own sake, there would be no reason to play an instrument at all. The bowing, no matter how well practiced, would not sound beautiful. But scales sound beautiful, someone might object. Yes, but that is because we can hear melodies in them. There is something beyond them.
Like any analogy, this has caveats, but something similar is true for literature. On its own, the language of strategies is dull and hollow. Not only do we need knowledge in order to build our comprehension, as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Dan Willingham, and others have demonstrated, but we need to learn things that stay with us all our lives, things that we return to many years later, things that grip and puzzle and delight us. Of course processes, skills, and strategies come into play, vigorously, but they can’t hold a frayed matchstick to literature. Which would I rather remember, ten years down the road: terms like “making a text-to-self connection,” “monitoring for comprehension,” “using context clues,” and so forth, or the ending of James Merrill’s “Lost in Translation,” quoted below?
But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.
I’ll teach the processes, but I will not talk process-talk. I will make sure my students leave with heaps of language like the language above—language we rummage for and hold up to the light, language that lifts our lives.
Diana Senechal has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale; her translations of the poetry of Tomas Venclova have appeared in two books. A former (and possibly future) NYC public school teacher, she is currently writing a book on the loss of solitude in schools and culture.
Excellent article Diana.
Given the recent criticisms (Literary Study in Arkansas) of America’s Choice’s reading program as being ” strategy-based” instead of “book-based, theme-based, literature-based” and that it “holds the better students back”, is this emphasis on skills over content about to get much worse?
As America’s Choice reps are dominating the rewrite process of both the English and math Common Core standards, are we about to nationalize process over content?
Comment by Student of History — May 17, 2010 @ 11:38 am
In order to assure that I do right by my granddaughters, I researched 21st Century skills: reading critically, writing persuasively, thinking and reasoning logically, solving complex problems, working in a team, and all the rest. This is so absurd as to be laughable. Every skill listed is a skill of every century. Even adapting to new technologies is anything but new.
I can teach all of these in a presentation of “Longitude” by Dana Sobel, to pick merely one of a multitude of examples that rush to mind.
Why are we discussing this seriously when it deserves derision?
Comment by Homeschooling Granny — May 17, 2010 @ 11:59 am
Correction: Dava Sobel
Comment by Homeschooling Granny — May 17, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
Absolutely right. The issue is not the validity of that widely distributed instructional planning tool, Bloom’s Taxonomy, but rather in our perversion/misreading of it.
Though taxonomies exist to organize systems into related, progressive orders, the educational institution seems to have made the grave mistake of assigning relative values to the steps laid out by the order. By virtue of nothing more than their positions in Bloom’s system, taxonomic units like application, analysis, and evaluation were deemed “higher-order thinking skills” and thus more worthy of full-time pursuit than “lower-order” (read: inferior, for simpletons, etc.) units like knowledge and comprehension.
To compound the problems wrapped up in such a faulty line of thinking, it was accepted across education for students of all levels. Not wanting to waste their students’ time with those silly things at the bottom of the Taxonomy, teachers at even the earliest grades often seek to structure higher-order-stimulating activities first–despite their students’ obvious dearth of knowledge-base.
I have to wonder if the Taxonomy would have been read and deployed so ineffectively if it had been introduced at a different time. With its release in 1956, as student-centered and academically unfriendly educational theories were gaining steam, it’s somewhat easy to see how the misreading and value associations could have occurred. For though deeming “analysis” inherently superior to “knowledge” is as nonsensical as judging “phylum” as inherently superior to “species” in the biological taxonomy, it would make a lot of sense to people looking for ways to legitimize their fledgling, as-yet-unsupported ideas about education.
Comment by Eric Kalenze — May 17, 2010 @ 12:43 pm
Eric makes a powerful argument, and Diana is correct about the sickening lack of reason endangering the ed world these days. I still call for more delicacy in our rhetoric, however.
Diana opens, “Every so often (actually, very often) I hear someone say, ‘Why can’t we have both content and skills? Why are people wasting their time arguing for one or another?’” Those two sentences (that her “someone” says) are very different, and only one of them corresponds with the position I espouse, in the discussion to which Diana alludes. I ask the former question all the time. The latter I dispute.
My concern is not that “people waste their time arguing for one or another.” Given the fact that I read the CoreKnowledge blog more than once a week, and CoreKnowledge unabashedly promotes one over the other, it goes against logic to suggest that I consider it a waste of time. I myself argue for content very often at my school, especially when I argue with what I consider a pro-skills bias at the curriculum supervisory level.
What I dislike is when people waste their time arguing AGAINST VALUING one or the other, which I consider neither a trivial difference nor mere semantics. Diana has written, and I agree with her, that attention to both content and skills need to be part of a functional curriculum. I also agree that favoring process over content is foolhardy, and have written that promoting process WITHOUT content is idiotic. But one can deride (to use the word of a previous commenter) process-only without deriding the process itself. When I hear a homeschool teacher appearing not to discriminate between these options in her comment, above, I know that this debate and distinction are important. Homeschooling Granny knows that process is important — that she “can” teach it with any number of valid texts — that it is in fact so obvious that she laughs at it being considered a strategy. Well, it’s not obvious to everyone, and it is worth promoting…as long as it does not displace content from the position of primacy.
Will Fitzhugh’s article that started this exchange didn’t seem to discriminate between process-only and process itself, splashing the latter with paint from the brush it should have reserved for the former. TC Professor Perin’s article (against which Fitzhugh inveighs) perhaps could have been clearer in promoting process without appearing to disparage content, but I didn’t read her as disparaging content, although well-meaning people who fear the metastasis of process-only curricula and teaching clearly did.
So I return to what Diana and I seem to share, which I aver is much stronger than what we don’t share: that content, theme, knowledge are the sine qua non of any healthy curriculum, and that any skilled teacher must attend to process as part of the delivery of that curriculum. To underemphasize content/theme/knowledge is to provide insufficient nutrition; to ignore process is to risk digesting the meal inefficiently. I hope nobody wants our students to choose between starvation and indigestion.
Comment by Carl Rosin — May 17, 2010 @ 8:07 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Russ Goerend. Russ Goerend said: Reading: Why Does It Have to Be Either/Or? It Doesn’t, But…. « The Core Knowledge Blog http://bit.ly/9CWND6 #skills #content [...]
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Carl, I am not as well read as you on these issues. I do follow the debates on education quite closely for a ‘lay’ person. It is labeling processing as ’21st Century skills’ that I find absurd. The name suggests that these are something new and that idea is laughable if one thinks a bit about history. Reading some exams from the turn of the 20th century, one can clearly see that teaching processing is not new. Pick a better name.
Comment by Homeschooling Granny — May 18, 2010 @ 6:07 am
Consider the source/advocates for twenty-first century skills and judge from there.
Problem solving and critical thinking? How are these “skills” possible if the student does not first possess a rich and thorough background of information which THEN would allow them to think critically and/or solve a problem on most anything.
Would a student really be capable of thinking critically about the effects of Manifest Destiny if they were first not well versed on at least the first hundred years (and before) of history of this country? That, of course, is rhetorical.
Comment by Paul Hoss — May 18, 2010 @ 7:33 am
I am enjoying these comments. Carl, thank you for making the distinction between the two questions. They are indeed different. I appreciate your call for “more delicacy in our rhetoric,” and I agree with you about our common ground.
I don’t think it’s possible that Will Fitzhugh disparages all process. After all, he is editor and founder of the Concord Review. To write an essay of the caliber found there, you have to engage in a good deal of planning, research, organizing, and revision, all of which count as process. But you also need a substantial topic (which you can only find through studying history) and adequate background knowledge. (And it helps if you have read first-rate historical writing.)
In high school, I fell in love with history. When I read Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System, I understood what a historian’s work entailed or could entail. I was fascinated by both the process and the historical details; they went together. I would never have had this understanding if we had sat around in groups making “mind maps” about the meaning of history.
Eric makes an excellent point. The infatuation with the upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (and the belief that they are somehow “superior” to knowledge) actually prevents us from bringing students to higher levels. It is absurd, first of all, to declare one form of thinking superior to another; and it is nonsensical to pursue “higher-order thinking” in a void.
Some will say I’m erecting a strawman, that no one really does that. But yes, they do. The current craze for “essential questions” is symptomatic of that. In many cases, the “essential question” guiding a unit is so vague (e.g., “How do economy and culture interact?”) that it is not only unanswerable but impossible to dig into. Yet if you venture to make the question just a little more specific, someone will tell you that your question isn’t “big” enough.
Comment by Diana Senechal — May 18, 2010 @ 9:15 am
Diana-
The 2008 report on the desired role of the feds in education, “Democracy at Risk”, makes it quite clear that many national figures are in fact pushing a largely content free, process oriented new curriculum.
That report even belittled the so-called “transmission curriculum” as “counterproductive” to learning today.
Paul-
Have you seen the recent CISCO report “Equipping Every Learner for the 21st Century”? It’s quite an epiphany on how 21st Century Skills, the push for Technology, 21st Century Pedagogy like problem-based learning, and Adapted System Reform like Michael Barber’s work all come together.
It’s a model that benefits many adult financial interests in the name of “student achievement”. It’s definitely a reminder that in education, bad ideas that force more services can be more lucrative than effective instruction with textbooks.
Comment by Student of History — May 18, 2010 @ 9:49 am
@ Diana (#9): 1. I am enjoying these comments too — very much so. I thank you for engaging in the conversation. 2. As much as I know that Will Fitzhugh MUST know and believe in process, I just reviewed his article and still find him seeming to disparage it fully when he refers to what teachers should care about. I think students really do need to be taught what Mr. Fitzhugh obviously knows so well, even as I reiterate that I share his and your repulsion at any system that prioritizes process above content (let alone one that elevates process and evacuates content).
@ Homeschooling Granny (#7): You are absolutely correct: the label “21st Century Skills” is asinine (I highly recommend Diane Ravitch’s essay on “19th Century Skills”: http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2009/07/06/the-partnership-for-19th-century-skills/, by the way), as I argued a few years ago when I had to take a course that self-congratulatingly disparaged all previous centuries and pedagogies. A stupidly grandiose label doesn’t defuse the value of the skills themselves, however, even while it should be called out for proposing itself as a panacea. Yes, “they” should pick a better name…and stop making excessive claims.
Comment by Carl Rosin — May 18, 2010 @ 7:21 pm
[...] Submitted by Ian Hecht on May 19, 2010 – 3:16 pmNo Comment This article (http://blog.coreknowledge.org/2010/05/17/why-does-it-have-to-be-eitheror-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-but%E2%8...) gets across far more elegantly what I was trying to say in my previous post… that process, [...]
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[...] Education kudzu – An emphasis on skill development to the detriment of content acquisition leads to a generation of students who have no appreciation for content. [...]
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