Last week, Dan Willingham asked if we underestimate our youngest learners. It seems we do, given the research he reviewed showing that seven- and eight-year-olds can understand a concept as complicated as natural selection. Willingham clarifies that, “No one would claim that these children have a complete understanding of natural selection. But they got much farther along in their understanding than I think most would have guessed.” He also noted one way in which it might be easier to teach complex ideas to younger children than to older children: “The authors speculate that … explaining natural selection at a younger age may have worked out so well because they were not old enough to have developed naïve theories of species change; ideas that would become entrenched and potentially make it more difficult to understand natural selection properly.” And he ends with an important question: “whether we do students a disservice if we are too quick to dismiss content as ‘developmentally inappropriate.’”
Almost everything Willingham writes sticks with me, rolling around in the back of my mind. This piece on young children kept coming to mind as I read a couple of articles in the spring American Educator. Could it be that our tendency to underestimate our youngest learners sets us up for a lifetime of underestimation? I think so.
It was a short step from Willingham’s piece to Daisy Christodoulou’s Educator article. Adapted from her book, Seven Myths about Education (now out in paperback), it’s all about how little knowledge is systematically and coherently taught to students:
In 2007, I trained as a teacher and started teaching English in a secondary school in Southeast London that enrolls students between the ages of 11 and 18. One of the first things that struck me when I was teaching was that my pupils seemed to know so little. Even the bright and hard-working pupils seemed to me to have big gaps in their knowledge….
I was born in East London to a working-class family. My father’s parents were immigrants from Italy and Cyprus. My father said that when he was in school as a child in England, he very often felt as though he was on the outside of a conversation. He didn’t know what the conversations were about, and he couldn’t go home and ask his parents because they didn’t know either. He was very determined that I wouldn’t have that experience, and I didn’t want my pupils to have that experience. Middle-class children pick up a lot of knowledge from home, from books, from programs on the radio, and so forth. Working-class children and the children of immigrants don’t always get those advantages. A lot of the pupils I taught were just as bright and hard-working as the pupils at private schools, but they lacked crucial knowledge, and this deficit held them back in their studies….
Too often, people think that teaching knowledge is somehow right wing and elitist. But this isn’t the case. The kind of powerful knowledge that’s in the Core Knowledge curriculum in the United States doesn’t “belong” to any class or culture. The great breakthroughs of civilization were made by a whole range of people from different classes and cultures, and if they belong to anyone, they belong to humanity. Teaching these insights to children isn’t elitist—not teaching them is! …
When we commit facts to long-term memory, they actually become part of our thinking apparatus and have the ability to expand one of the biggest limitations of human cognition…. Long-term memory is capable of storing thousands of facts, and when we have memorized thousands of facts on a specific topic, these facts together form what is known as a “schema.” When we think about that topic, we use that schema. When we meet new facts about that topic, we assimilate them into that schema—and if we already have a lot of facts in that particular schema, it is much easier for us to learn new facts about that topic.
Critics of fact learning will often pull out a completely random fact and say something like, “Who needs to know the date of the Battle of Waterloo? Why does it matter?” Of course, using one fact like this on its own would be rather odd. But the aim of fact learning is not to learn just one fact—it is to learn several hundred, which taken together form a schema that helps you to understand the world. Thus, just learning the date of the Battle of Waterloo will be of limited use. But learning the dates of 150 historical events from 3000 BC to the present day, and learning a couple of key facts about why each event was important, will be of immense use, because it will form the fundamental chronological schema that is the basis of all historical understanding….
Factual knowledge is not in opposition to creativity, problem solving, and analysis. Factual knowledge is closely integrated with these important skills. It allows these skills to happen. In a sense, these important skills are the functions of large bodies of knowledge that have been securely committed to memory.
I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing a devastating double whammy. We start the early years with an unwarranted belief that sophisticated content is developmentally inappropriate. Then, we continue through elementary and secondary grades with the misconception that skills can be developed without extensive knowledge. The result is that we systematically underestimate what our children are capable of learning. Such underestimations seem to become self-fulfilling prophecies, with especially long-lasting, truly harmful consequences for our least-advantaged learners.
With Willingham and Christodoulou on my mind, I dove into the next article in the spring Educator: Jennifer Dubin on the three-week summer institute for K–12 teachers at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. These institutes—which require teachers to read 2,000 – 3,000 pages of texts like Prometheus Bound, Antigone, Hamlet, Crime and Punishment, and Beloved just to get ready to participate—are described by teachers as “divine” and “some sort of heaven.” In contrast, teachers often complain bitterly about typical professional development. Mind-numbing and time-wasting are descriptions I’ve heard frequently. It seems we’re underestimating our adult learners too.
At the Dallas Institute, teachers aren’t given tools for increasing students’ test scores. Teaching is hardly ever mentioned. Teachers are immersed in many of humanity’s most profound works and are trusted to apply these works to their professional lives in their own ways:
“Teachers work with human material, and the best way traditionally to gain access to human things is through the humanities, which are the foundation of a liberal arts education,” says Claudia Allums, who directs the Summer Institute. But a liberal arts education encompasses more than literature or philosophy or history courses, she says. It’s a particular spirit with which one approaches any discipline. “If a teacher has a broad, strong liberal arts education, then he or she is going to have a broad, strong foundation in human sensibilities. That’s the foundation we believe is important for any teacher’s wisdom.” … “The institute is where you recover what it means to be a teacher.”
It appears to be working. As the article states, “In a survey of participants from 2008 to 2013, nearly 70 percent said the program transformed the way they think about the teaching profession.”
It’s a sad state of affairs to see our education systems continually underestimating their learners, from preschoolers to experienced teachers. Perhaps the Dallas Institute—and teachers everywhere who know the joy of challenging studies—can end such fruitless practices by showing how high they, and their students, can reach.
Prometheus courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.