Spring-Loaded for Failure

Since you may not have heard the term spring-loaded I will explain. It simply means that a person or group acts as if attached physically by a spring to a belief or set of beliefs. This becomes apparent when faced with facts contrary to those beliefs they move toward the realist position. As soon as the pressure to face facts wanes, the spring acts on them to return them to the same strong allegiance to the old beliefs. One tactic that is common in these situations is that they “rename and relabel” the old beliefs as new and improved and foist them again on whoever will listen. What does this have to do with education, you may ask? A lot!
So let’s define some terms

• The old belief—that all educators need to teach students is a process for addressing any area of concern. Educators since the turn of the twentieth century have been taught that the pedagogy or process part of the equation is much more important than subject knowledge. And their actions have resulted in content starved teachers trying to teach students in a world where the process methods have no value without the knowledge context that is missing, especially for poor and minority kids who are not exposed to rich knowledge environments by their family and community lives.

• The new incarnation of the old belief, but remember it is “new and improved.” You may have heard of the latest fad in education; 21st Century Skills. The skills being pushed include critical thinking, analytical and technology skills, in addition to soft skills of creativity, collaboration and communication.

Now some comments from a meeting in Washington, DC last week. One article in Education Week about the meeting was titled “Backers of ‘21st Century Skills’ Take Flak.” Another article from the Core Knowledge Foundation supports the same theme. I will include some of the comments from the meeting as reported by both articles.

The underlying argument for the 21st Century Skills approach is that students need a new approach to education in the age of improved information access and global competition. For example, President Obama called for “a new vision for a 21st Century education system” in December when introducing his nominee for U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan. The idea is gaining traction and 10 states have already agreed to implement the strategy. In Massachusetts, loud protests greeted the unveiling of an initiative to adopt 21st Century Skills last November. The complaints include “the movement would water down the state’s standards and assessment system—widely considered to be among the best in the nation.”

Historians point out that the debate is much older and the new name “21st Century Skills” glosses over calls for skills instruction that go back more than a century. Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University said “The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues across the 20th century.”

Daniel Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia said that cognitive science doesn’t support the notion that critical-thinking and analytical skills can be taught outside of specific content. He argued that content itself is what allows individuals to recognize problems and to determine which critical-thinking skills to apply to solve them.

E.D. Hirsch, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and founder of Core Knowledge asserted that students become proficient critical thinkers only by gleaning a broad body of knowledge in multiple content domains. Further he commented that “the P21 idea (the name used by the leading proponent of the 21st century skills movement) is that once you acquire [these skills], they are all-purpose muscles. That error is fundamental, and it is fatal.”

There were more comments but hopefully you realize that this is not something new and improved at all but the educators worshiping their process god at the exclusion of seeing the need to teach students content. Don’t for a minute assume that the educators will move willingly to a balanced approach. If they haven’t in the last century do you think it is reasonable to assume that they will change now? They have developed the ability to ignore flak and stay the course. Yet, we must expect and demand that they do change because the current attitude is harming kids especially those poor and minority (Gap) kids who don’t have the knowledge acquiring support system that the more fortunate kids do.

Please remember the quote from Robert Kennedy in an earlier blog calling the gap situation that harms poor and minority kids a “stain on our national honor.” Since he said it over a third of a century ago it appears we can’t be bothered to put in the hard work to fix the problem, especially if it involves going against the education pseudo experts. Who cares about a stain on our national honor?