Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Natalie Wexler, author: The Knowledge Gap

... E.D. Hirsch's Why Knowledge Matters ...

... The current orthodoxy states that the acquisition of knowledge is virtually unimportant in a child’s education. What’s important is that a child learns “critical thinking” or “problem solving” or “reading comprehension skills.” So instead of teaching my students the scientific knowledge I’ve acquired over years of study, research and teaching...I’m supposed to teach them an amorphous and impossible to measure set of skills. Actually, I’m not even supposed to teach. I’m supposed to facilitate learning by teaching them skills that are “universal” and “not specific” to science. Seriously…I’m not supposed to teach.

But here’s what Professor Hirsh makes absolutely clear. There is no such thing as “reading comprehension skills” or “critical thinking skills” or non-domain specific “problem solving skills." If I gave a passage from an advanced mechanical engineering textbook to an average liberal arts major and told them to read and comprehend it, they would fail. Why? Because they lack the background knowledge needed to make sense of the material in the engineering text. But if I first taught them the needed vocabulary and scientific principles, they then could make sense of it. Because American schools don’t focus on knowledge, we aren’t giving our students the tools they need to comprehend much of what they read. Many are just like that liberal arts student trying to make sense of an engineering text....