Education Nation(s): The State of Play

The best of intentions, untempered with robust evidence and adaptive planning, can and have led to maladaptive decisions and policies. Spheres of education in the ‘West’, i.e., the Anglo-American domain, aren’t exempted. For the past few decades, State Boards of Education in America have tried to weather the unwelcome intrusion of pseudo-scientific principles into their science classrooms by misguided fundamentalists, sometimes without much success.

Quite aside from that, the recent No Child Left Behind policy (2002), a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which was designed to ensure equal opportunities for students from all backgrounds, has been regarded as a failure for myriad reasons, not least because of its use of standardized test scores as the sole metric to judge school progress and administer funding. It remains to be seen if the new Common Core Standards initiated in 2010 will be able to fulfill its purposes without creating the same problems as its predecessor.

Important as these macro policies may be, however, there is a case to be made that the swing factor to making real improvements in student outcomes is to correct attractive but mistaken ideas of not only what is being taught, but how, at the micro-level. In other words, the focus should be on content, not structures. This is the case made by one Daisy Christodoulou, an educational researcher whose book, the Seven Myths of Education, caused a stir when it was published in 2014. It became one of the most talked about books in education in the past decade.

Across the political spectrum, structural reform (or form) is typically prioritized over content (or substance), possibly because of the former’s perceived comprehensiveness. While the Right campaigns for better teacher selection, i.e., for more hardworking and skilled educators; the Left pushes for more funding for all schools, regardless of socio-economic profile. Unfortunately, what is taught and how it is taught sometimes gets lost in the scuffle. Structural reforms — which include tackling weak teacher unions and bureaucratic state interventions, and which were pursued in conjunction with American charter schools — alone, don’t do much. The charter schools in question have not produced superior results to the public schools they were designed to take over. In the UK, which is somewhat like the US, one out of five students continues to leave school with poor literacy and numeracy skills.

Why should this be? Christodoulou argues that, for the past half-century, school achievement in the English-speaking world has been held back by several attractive but misguided ideas:

1. Facts prevent understanding
2. Teacher-led instruction is passive
3. The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4. You can always just look facts up
5. Schools should teach transferable skills
6. Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7. Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

The common denominator among these myths is the conviction that skills teaching should replace facts and knowledge, and that students, for the most part, learn best when they discover things for themselves. This ‘educational formalism,’ as Christodoulou understands it, where form is favored over substance, is the outgrowth of cultural postmodernism, i.e., the belief that truth and knowledge are somehow hegemonic, responsible for the widening socio-economic gaps between the historical ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ and should, therefore, be eliminated as far as possible from the educational agenda.

At this point, some readers might be wondering whether Christodoulou is just another right-wing ideologue who is constructing and demolishing straw-men to rouse birds-of-same-feather for some sectarian cause. Whichever side of the political spectrum she identifies with, however, is irrelevant (she is, in fact, a Lib Dem). If she can prove that these ideas have been championed as ‘best practices’ by the recognized authorities and have been set as the standard by which teachers and schools are judged, she can rest her case. Indeed, she does so, liberally, as we shall see.

Her own experience as a trainee English teacher resonates with the arguments in her book. She noticed that her mentor, who had fifteen years of teaching experience, would routinely treat new-fangled educational orthodoxies (which are really just rehashed ideas from years past) with aged skepticism. The tension between what she was taught and what her mentor knew would produce results was palpable. Christodoulou recalled the first lesson of her mentor she observed; it was a lesson on Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est for a year nine class (sixteen-year-olds) where her mentor did a teacher-led foray into the First World War and how Latin was used in public schools at the time of Owen’s writing. The students loved it, and Christodoulou herself judged it a great lesson. She knew, however, that, given the new Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education) sensibilities, i.e., that teacher-led instruction was bad, it would not have received a good inspection outcome.

Far from promoting equality of opportunity for students, Christodoulou argues that these myths are not only anti-intellectual but also anti-egalitarian. Disparaging facts and knowledge, in reality, lower overall school achievement, especially among the underprivileged, and widens the socio-economic gaps that these myths intended to close. There is good social-scientific evidence demonstrating that educational methods which allow students to discover things for themselves are inferior to more teacher-led instruction in achieving desired learning outcomes.

Consider the 1999 TIMSS studies of middle-school mathematics classrooms which recorded the number of teacher words for every student word. US classrooms recorded an average of eight teacher words for every student word, while the figure was thirteen for Japanese schools and sixteen for Hong Kong schools. A look at various global middle-school rankings for math (like PISA and TIMSS) consistently featuring Japan and Hong Kong leading the pack should be enough to show that, at the very least, teacher-led instruction isn’t detrimental to student learning.

In centuries past, it was the ultra-conservatives in the UK who wanted to restrict mass education for fear that disseminating knowledge would allow the ‘have-nots’ to overturn long-established socio-economic hierarchies. In so doing, they tacitly acknowledged that knowledge could empower. This same acknowledgment was what galvanized the liberal push to extend knowledge to the masses at no cost. Consider the fact that free education was one of the goals of the early Labour movement. It is ironic, therefore, that the modern Labour movement, in denigrating the power of knowledge and the most effective means of its transmission, has now adopted the opposite stance, i.e., that of the ultra-conservatives, regarding empowerment.

From Humble Beginnings

How did Christodoulou become the nationally known educational commentator who had the gall to criticise John Dewey’s writing style and to upbraid Charles Dickens for perpetuating the myth, through such characters as Thomas Gradgrind in his Hard Times, that teaching facts creates emotionally stunted adults?

Granddaughter to a Cypriot immigrant, she grew up in London’s East End, in a since-demolished council tower block. Her father worked as an electrician and her mother a therapist. Together, they also ran a stall at the Petticoat Lane market. She enrolled in a local state primary school but, with the Tories’ Assisted Places Scheme (1980), secured a scholarship to an independent school, City of London Girls. When asked about her intellectual formation there, she responds, with characteristic wit and rigor, that ‘we hear too much from people extrapolating from their own experiences instead of looking at the evidence.’

Christodoulou achieved straight As in her three A-levels and five As and five A*s at GCSEs. Passionate about football (West Ham), cricket, and debating, she took up each in some capacity at the University of Warwick where she read English. Case in point, she represented her University in their women’s football team and later used her experience to criticise how young footballers were being trained, pointing out that those new to the game shouldn’t play proper matches until they’ve become proficient at ball-control.

She also appeared on one of her favorite television programmes, the University Challenge, a general knowledge quiz competition, as captain of the Warwick team. Together they prevailed over Emmanuel College (Cambridge), East Anglia, Aberystwyth, UCL, and the reigning champion, Manchester, to clinch the 2006-2007 title. The then 22-year-old Christodoulou amazed the audience in the semi-finals when she answered more than half her team’s questions correctly.

Watch the three-part Grand Finals here:

After bagging a first at university, she opted for the challenging Teach First scheme. This scheme puts exceptional graduates into schools with children from the poorest backgrounds, following which they are awarded PGDEs and become Teach First ambassadors. Readers might be familiar with its American equivalent, Teach for America. Christodoulou chose this path because she, quote, ‘didn’t want to spend time in libraries.’ She commenced her teaching duties at an inner-city London comprehensive and soon encountered difficulties with her students that her teacher training hadn’t prepared her for. Consequently, she began to develop an interest in evidence-based teaching practice, and after three years with the programme, left to pursue an MA in literature. This afforded her the time to research cognitive science and other facets of educational theory that she wasn’t exposed to. To her surprise, she discovered that many of the practices assumed in her school were not supported by the breadth of research on teaching and learning.

In her own words: ‘I found a body of research that hadn’t got into teacher training at all and that views widely accepted in schools were directly opposed to what the research showed.’ She goes on:

I trained as a teacher, taught for three years, attended numerous in-service training days, wrote several essays about education and followed educational policy closely without ever even encountering any of the evidence about knowledge I speak of here, let alone actually hearing anyone advocate it. [Educational researcher] John Hattie’s description of the anger his trainees felt at hearing about the success of direct instruction [superior to inquiry, problem-based, and many other forms of instruction according to his and other researchers’ meta-analyses] applied to me too. For three years I struggled to improve my pupils’ education without ever knowing that I could be using hugely more effective methods. I would spend entire lessons quietly observing my pupils chatting away in groups about complete misconceptions and I would think that the problem in the lesson was that I had been too prescriptive.

After her MA, she returned to teaching for a year, and then moved to the curriculum centre at Pimlico Academy (secondary and sixth-form), before taking up the position of Research and Development manager at Ark Schools, a registered children’s charity committed to applying robust development principles and sound business disciplines to improve the life chances of children around the world.

In 2014, she put pen to paper and published her book – the subject of this post – criticising the idea that procedural knowledge, like skills, should be prioritized over declarative knowledge, like facts. The book, described by a Sunday Times reviewer as ‘a heat-seeking missile [aimed] at the heart of the educational establishment’, won acclaim from numerous commentators. E. D. Hirsch Jr., educational luminary, hailed the book as a ‘must-read for anyone in a position to influence our low-performing public-school system.’ Then education secretary Michael Gove also praised Christodoulou’s book. Elsewhere, it was lauded for its straightforward and accessible writing style, which, incidentally, I thoroughly appreciated.

In 2017, after becoming head of educational research at Ark, she published her second book, Making Good Progress, tackling the thorny issue of assessment for learning (more on this later). In that same year, she was named by Anthony Sheldon as one of the twenty most influential figures in British education. She is now Director of Education at No More Marking (NMM), an online resource dedicated to creating an effective comparative-judgment tool to assess school work (more on this later also).

The Myths of Education; Unabridged

Christodoulou’s overall thesis is that late 20th and 21st-century learning is wrong to dismiss knowledge in favor of skills. By contrast, she argues, with help from cognitive science and other evidence-based learning strategies, that one needs to have a robust knowledge base – of whatever one intends to become proficient at – committed to long-term memory before one can learn how to apply the required skills effectively. As an aside, her ideas should already be obvious to readers who are familiar with the science of learning.

In her book, Christodoulou begins each myth with its philosophical underpinnings followed by evidence of its inclusion in the Anglophone curricula. Having done so, she then dismantles the myth. For the sake of expediency, and the fact that readers who wish to know more should just read the book for themselves, we will only touch on the first two parts before moving on quickly to the dismantling. Let us begin with the first myth.

1. Facts Prevent Understanding

The idea that the ‘rote’ learning of facts hinders conceptual understanding and transferable skills germinate from the philosophies of Rousseau and Dewey, both of whom argued, in quite similar fashion, that experience and discovery helped students understand what they were learning better than facts. These sentiments were also echoed in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he argued, with post-colonial premises, that rather than treating students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, learners should instead be regarded as epistemic co-creators.

Likewise, publications from the National Curriculum (NC) and Ofsted about curricula omit words like ‘knowledge’ and ‘facts.’ A publication by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), called for a Deweyan curriculum in which ‘rote learning of facts must give way to nurturing […] essential transferable skills.’ The new NC, by extrapolating from Paul Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, forwarded the idea that learning facts somehow hindered conceptual understanding.

Let us look at Bloom’s revised taxonomy, sans the knowledge dimension:

Create

Evaluate

Analyse

Apply

Understand

Remember

As one can see, the taxonomy itself doesn’t necessarily imply any such hindrance among the levels: it merely distinguishes between factual knowledge and analysis/evaluation as different categories of cognition and ranks them accordingly. In fact, knowledge and skills aren’t antithetical to one another: the former is required for the latter.

Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire were wrong to see facts as the enemy of understanding. Their ideas have been disproven by cognitive science from the last half-century. The evidence is clear: the human mind can only store about four to seven chunks of data in working memory temporarily. It can, however, store thousands of data in its long-term memory almost indefinitely. And it is only when the relevant data is stored in long-term memory that it can be turned into skills and know-how.

Consider the English alphabet. Each letter is a symbol that represents a sound. The connection between symbols and sounds is arbitrary, yet these must be learned before anyone can understand or create meaning with them. Understanding and the application of skill; even creativity, in the English language, stacks on to basic memorization of facts. It is only when the alphabet is committed to long-term memory, along with their phonemic and grammatical relationships with one another, and a healthy dose of vocabulary, can students begin to use it and structure an increasingly complex mental apparatus around it.

Working memory can be thought of as a bottle-neck which easily chokes when the cognitive load is high, i.e., when people are trying to execute some skill and who haven’t yet committed the components of that skill to long-term memory. Shoehorning discrete bits of data into easily recalled chunks will, for instance, allow them to more easily summon and apply the required information. Christodoulou offers the example of trying to memorize these sixteen digits in under five seconds: 4871947503858604. This is almost impossible for most people (without preparation). By contrast, memorizing the same information load in a recognizable format, like ‘the cat is on the mat’ in under a second is possible for just about every native English speaker. This is because the letters are automatically chunked into meaningful information in the readers’ mind. This is also why master chess players can easily recall positions of chess pieces on a board from an actual game between two skilled players but don’t fare any better than the average person if the pieces are randomly placed.

As more facts are committed to long-term memory, they contribute to the tapestry of one’s thinking apparatus and expands one’s cognitive abilities. Complex cognition of the kind favored and prioritized by the educational establishment is no more than the sum of its many parts, i.e., facts stored in long-term memory. The chunks of meaning that one creates with those facts, also known as schema, are used to interpret and assimilate new facts, making it more effortless to understand, analyze and evaluate incoming ideas about the topic at hand.

Facts such as the dates of historical events, or times tables, taken piecemeal, are limited in value. However, when thousands of them are pulled together, and the connections are made, they not only allow for efficient mental computation and interpretation, they also allow for emergent properties such as creativity and problem-solving.

Creativity entails the formation of new and valuable things. Almost by definition, such ‘things’ require intimate knowledge of the soon-to-be old and obsolete. And this is exactly what fact-learning does. The literature from the science of learning (not the snake-oil version), which postdates the ideas of Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire, have spoken (see my Learning how to Learn post for more). While these older theorists weren’t clued-in on the research, Christodoulou argues that there is little excuse for modern bureaucrats and educationalists who continue to base policy on their now defunct ideas.

2. Teacher-Led Instruction Is Passive

The call for teachers to move from being the sage on the stage to the guide on the side has also been around for a long time. The usual suspects, Rousseau, Dewey, and Freire weigh in. Rousseau and Dewey encourage teaching methods that allow the students’ own inclinations and interests to direct the process. Consider this quote from Dewey:

I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.

Freire argues that education should be based on discussion, dialogue, and inquiry. These processes will result in the creation of new knowledge, ones that won’t perpetuate hegemonic epistemologies. This is otherwise also known as the co-construction of knowledge.

Such ideas feature in Ofsted publications as criticisms of lessons that they consider too teacher-led, i.e., too dependent on the students’ literacy skills; on practice and factual recall; on lengthy teacher explanations, and so on. By contrast, they laud lessons that involve exploration in learning, and on student-led problem-solving. The undergirding belief is that the more students discuss issues with minimal teacher involvement, the more they learn.

The passivity of teacher-led instruction and the implications listed above are myths because there needs to be some critical mass of proficiency before such learning methods become efficacious. It is simply not possible for students to design optimal – or even viable – learning experiences for themselves without external expertise, i.e., from that of a teacher. Christodoulou argues that the myth commits the fallacy of assuming, without justification, a confluence between aims and methods:

[Educationalists] argue, correctly, that the aim of schooling should be for pupils to be able to work, learn and solve problems independently. But they then assume, incorrectly, that the best method for achieving such independence is always to learn independently. This is not the case. Teacher instruction is vitally necessary to become an independent learner.

Anyone who’s been teaching (tertiary and lecturing not included) for a while will likely resonate with the above statement. Giving students free rein to collaborate and problem-solve will almost always result in the same experience Christodoulou encountered in her first school: lots of wasted time and the proliferation of counterproductive misconceptions.

The many things students, and students of life, must learn today are counterintuitive and cannot be mastered without help; they must be deliberately taught. Assuming that students can acquire historical flair, or that they can problem-solve like a scientist or medical professional by themselves is merely wishful thinking. Part of the reason why I suspect this is a prevalent assumption among people with expertise is because of the curse of knowledge. When people know something, or know how to do something, and have been doing it for a long time, it becomes hard for them to recall what it was like not to know it. People who become proficient in some skill, playing a musical instrument or picking up a foreign language, for example, are likely to underestimate how long it takes for those unfamiliar with the skill to pick it up and how much instruction and feedback they require. Likewise, by giving students a programming language, or a set of historical events, or some mathematical equations, and assuming that they will eventually problem-solve their way to proficiency is guaranteeing that the clear majority of them will not.

John Hattie’s well-known meta-analyses, which synthesizes hundreds of achievement measures in teaching, concludes that direct teacher instruction is the third most effective teacher factor (especially for disadvantaged students), behind feedback and quality instruction, both of which regularly feature in teacher-led lessons. The conclusion is clear, teacher-led instruction does not encourage passivity. When done well, it sustains engagement and motivation and produces superior outcomes. For those who respect evidence, and genuinely care about students, little else needs to be said.

3. The 21^st Century Fundamentally Changes Everything

The argument here is that because the world is becoming more volatile and uncertain, those who can survive and thrive in the global economy are those who learn only the most up-to-date and transferable skills. For that reason, facts and knowledge, which will necessarily become obsolete, should be removed from the curricula. The push for skills-based training, i.e., problem-solving, creative and critical thinking and interpersonal skills, and the rhetoric against learning procedures that will become obsolete in the future appear in the relevant publications. One fear seems to be that if students are taught static bodies of knowledge, they will be sidelined by their skills-educated peers, who, unburdened by knowledge, jet-set around the world, problem-solving their way to the bank.

Indeed, problem-solving, creative and critical thinking and interpersonal skills are vital to success in the job market, and more generally, in life. There is no controversy here. However, as Christodoulou wryly points out,

there is nothing uniquely twenty-first century about them. Mycenaean Greek craftsmen had to work with others, adapt and innovate. It is quite patronizing to suggest that no one before the year 2000 ever needed to think critically, solve problems, communicate, collaborate, create, innovate, or read.

Again, the disjunction is between aims and methods. Thinking that these skills are unique to the 21^st century is false but harmless enough. The harms come when educationalists propose maladaptive methods for achieving those aims, i.e., removing knowledge from the curriculum. For the reasons offered thus far, taking away knowledge acquisition will guarantee that students will not cultivate any 21^st century skills. Try being a successful management consultant without any knowledge of industries or consulting principles, like MECE; or try being a pathologist without knowing much about the human body. Google and WebMD aren’t going to be nearly enough.

Breakthroughs in any field, academic or otherwise, almost never supersede earlier gains in knowledge. Rather, they build on earlier discoveries and require expertise with them. Taking the example of science, while news outlets like to sensationalize new hypotheses and findings, they rarely ever overturn the fundamentals. Since the scientific revolution in the 16^th to 18^th centuries, much of these fundamentals have been established and are unlikely to be significantly revised. Let’s consider another field, mathematics. Since Greek mathematics, it can be argued that no significant corrections have occurred, only additions. All of Euclid’s theorems (3^rd century BCE) still apply today. Not only mathematical systems but also the alphabet, both of which date to about four to five thousand years ago, have not and will not be replaced by anything, at least in the foreseeable future.

Therefore, when, in fact, bodies of knowledge multiply beyond control, as they seem to be doing today, the safest bet is to return to the basics because they are least likely to change. Human achievement is essentially cumulative. Homo Sapiens from fifty thousand years past and today share the same brains. We aren’t any smarter than pre-historic Peoples. Yet we, for the most part, live in conditions far superior to those of our ancestors. If all the knowledge of the world, of science and technology, facilitated by language and mathematics, were to suddenly disappear from humanity’s collective consciousness, we would return to mud huts and stone tools in a generation. The awesome accumulation of knowledge facilitated by storage and teaching, and compounded with each new generation is what sustains humanity’s progress.

Getting to the frontiers of knowledge still requires a lot of work. That is why scientists who make breakthroughs are typically quite old or have specialized in their field for a long time. Likewise, we cannot expect our students to contribute to the heritage of humanity without learning salient facts about the world around them. Consider the public intellectual Steven Pinker’s list of the things all educated people at tertiary level should know for the society they live in to flourish: (23:43 – 25:36)

https://youtu.be/5eo3ZC1Sc2w?t=23m43s

Now it is true that industry-related knowledge and skills become outdated very quickly. The knowledge and skills that undergird them, however, do not. These are the things Christodoulou argues should continue to be taught in school. She offers the example of Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, who pointed out that learning how to use WordPerfect (a word processor) or BASIC (a programming language), cutting edge back in 1985, would have yielded zero dividends for him today. By contrast, U.S. history continues to help him appreciate, interpret, and contribute to important discussions in current affairs.

Coding languages will proliferate and change, as will other technical skills. These must be acquired on the fly. And it would indeed be good for students to gain the ability to learn things quickly. But the best methods for them to do so are to be familiar with facts that will not change, and which are the basis for other kinds of knowledge and skills. The conclusion is counter-intuitive but clear: the more novel something is, the less one should teach it in school, and vice versa, especially if the latter has stood the test of time because it forms the base on which new knowledge and skills stack, like language, mathematics, and other traditional subjects. In Christodoulou’s words: ‘nothing dates so fast as the cutting edge.’

4. You Can Always Just Look It Up

This claim, like the others, assumes a disjunction between declarative and procedural knowledge (refer to the book for evidence of its support in the relevant literature). But, as we have seen, the key to procedural knowledge and to other higher-order thinking skills is simply declarative knowledge committed to long-term memory. The more chunks and schemas in one’s mind, the more classes of problems one can solve. Thinkers cannot efficiently build on or process new information if they haven’t yet internalized some subset of them. In other words, you cannot look something up if you don’t already know a little about that ‘something’ in question.

For instance, you could be given all the Wikipedia entries for quantum mechanics and maybe even a physics lab, but if you’ve not been trained in the requisite physics and mathematics for a substantial amount of time, you won’t produce anything of merit at the cutting edge. You won’t even know if the articles you’re reading are accurate. A little closer to home, even just looking up dictionary definitions or thesauri effectively requires a lot of background knowledge. Each entry features another bunch of words a novice at the English language would not know.

Christodoulou provides some examples of students using thesauri to humorous effect:

Mrs. Morrow stimulated the soup. (That is, she stirred it up.)

Our family erodes a lot. (That is, they eat out.)

I and my parents correlate because without them I wouldn’t be here.

I was meticulous about falling off the cliff.

I relegated my pen pal’s letter to her house.

And, about looking things up,

I once asked a class of pupils to use the Internet to research the life of Charles Dickens and prepare a small presentation on it. One pupil managed to confuse the life of Dickens with that of one of his characters, Pip from Great Expectations. I am not quite sure how he managed this, but I suspect that at the heart of the error were the two problems I outlined previously: not enough pre-existing knowledge of Charles Dickens to be able to dismiss the wrong ideas and not enough knowledge of the vocabulary to be able to properly understand what the text was saying. He must have found a website that explained how Dickens based parts of Pip’s story on his own life, but then his weak understanding of the vocabulary being used meant he mistook Dickens for Pip.

Here she brings up the barrier of domain-specific knowledge that no amount of research know-how can overcome. She applies this logic to herself. If, for example, she was asked to find out ‘which pitchers intentionally walked Chipper Jones more than once in major league baseball (MLB)’, she would have trouble finding an answer, not because she couldn’t navigate a database or know how to Google something, but because she didn’t understand what any of the terms meant. A better way is simply to consult someone who knows a lot more about baseball or to learn a lot more about baseball oneself first.

An incredible amount of information is on the web. The sum-total of human achievement readily available to anyone with an internet connection and some money is truly a privilege people who live in the world today share. It doesn’t however automatically make us all experts any more than my access to YouTube makes me a religious scholar.

5. We Should Teach Transferable Skills

Skills like critical thinking across domains are valuable. Indeed, that should be one of the goals of teaching. Critical thinking, however, doesn’t occur in a vacuum, nor is it particularly transferable. The ability to transfer what one knows and can do to new situations hinges on how similar those situations are to the ones in which one possesses said knowledge and skills. Therefore, designing lessons around skills in the abstract is counterproductive.

Thinking critically about historical causation is in a completely different class with thinking critically about a chess game. Historical causation might stack with other skills in history, such as source criticism and reading comprehension, and which are dependent on historical knowledge. By contrast, chess abilities stack with critical thinking in other rule-bound games. Furthermore, such thinking is linked to domain-specific background knowledge and skills. It is only by acquiring the factual data-set, e.g., what moves can and have been made in chess, that students are able to think critically (and creatively) in that domain.

The reality is that individuals who can most successfully transfer their skills simply have a lot of knowledge in many domains. There is no skills-based shortcut to transferring them. The accumulation of knowledge committed to long-term memory is the best way for students to navigate the 21^st century. We’ll let Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon have the last word:

In every domain that has been explored, considerable knowledge has been found to be an essential prerequisite to expert skill. Our growing understanding of an expert’s knowledge and the kinds of processes an expert uses when solving problems enables us to begin to explore the learning processes needed to acquire suitable knowledge and problem-solving processes. The extent of the knowledge an expert must be able to call upon is demonstrably large, and everything we know about human learning processes suggests that even at their most efficient, those processes must be long exercised.

6. Projects And Activities Are The Best Way To Learn

This myth forwards the idea that, to ready students for the working world, they must, as far as possible, be introduced to real-world problems in the classroom. If educationalists expect students to think like doctors, lawyers, engineers, and policymakers, there must be more tasks that involve them doing so. Therefore, the push for the inclusion of projects and activities as summative assessments seems to be a straightforward way of achieving the desired results. This is especially important since some reports have shown that many students come to university unable to engage in independent learning.

Christodoulou points out that, for the above reasons, grammar, the building blocks of reading and writing, is now barely taught in school: of the thirty-four English lessons in the Ofsted reports (at the time of her writing), only one involves any mention of something related to grammar: onomatopoeia and alliteration. It is hoped that the reader, by now, should know what is coming by way of response: Students cannot be expected to think independently or creatively as do experts. In many professions, it takes thousands of hours to gain expertise. And because knowledge and skills should not be understood as separate things, experts possess a qualitative, and not merely a quantitative advantage over novices: they use heuristics and take shortcuts to solve complex problems in their field that no novice can.

A novice coder might have to return to the fundamentals and conduct an error analysis on each line of code every time they don’t act the way she expects them to (or just use a debugger). An expert coder would likely predict where the error is located, home in on the suspected lines of code, and correct them on the fly. What is hard and cognitively demanding at first becomes easier in the long run. There is no shortcut. Independent learning isn’t best facilitated by prior independent learning. The fundamentals must first be mastered, preferably in bite-sized chunks with an involved mentor. Novices simply don’t have the background knowledge to solve problems the way experts can and cannot be expected to do so on their own.

Likewise, Christodoulou argues that getting students to talk to themselves and conduct projects to solve problems will not turn them into experts. The disjunction between aims and methods holds strong: ‘forcing pupils to be independent is not the best way to make them independent learners.’ More intuitively: ‘copying experts does not make you an expert.’

Doing isn’t learning because real-world activities are often too complex for the component parts to be chunked and stored in long-term memory. Furthermore, the projects and activities supported by Ofsted do not take into account the many invisible operations experts perform effortlessly that enable their success.

Real-world problems cannot be shoehorned into neat categories. Independent learning should, therefore, be one of the aims of education. But for the reasons laid out here, it should not be its sole method, especially in the formative years.

7. Teaching Knowledge is Indoctrination

At this juncture, the reader, if she is familiar with the findings of cognitive science, might be wondering how anyone could find plausible or support the “myths” presented thus far. Decontextualized, these myths do indeed look suspiciously silly. Returned to the ideological frame that supports them, however, they begin to make much more sense. We’ve already referenced the frame, albeit briefly. Let us consider Christodoulou’s own words:

[The educational establishments’] hostility to formal fact-learning is not because they think facts are taught better in other ways. It is just a subset of their hostility to facts, and of their misconception of the role of facts in cognition.

The real reason that facts are denigrated is that they are seen as social constructions that legitimate inequality. The denigration of facts is the fruit of cultural postmodernism. As postmodern theorists were attacking the underlying hegemonic values in society, the ‘constitutive principles, codes, and especially the common-sense consciousness and practices underlying our lives,’ these later came to include the kinds of things taught in school.

If facts and knowledge are merely constructs that legitimate and preserve inequalities in society, then why should any curriculum that cares about equal opportunities privilege one set of facts over another? On this view, teaching knowledge is not a neutral activity, but one intimately associated with power, authority and class. There is not only a sociological but moral element to teaching facts and knowledge. This school of thought pioneered with critics at the Institute of Education in London and with an edited volume by Michael Young in 1971, titled Knowledge and Control.

In the UK, commentators have argued that the nation-wide curriculum is a traditional middle-class one, and that imposing it on everyone privileges the middle class. Likewise, an ATL report worried that 20^th-century education ‘copied the curriculum considered necessary for social elites’, and therefore cannot speak to the experience of working class, disadvantaged, and underprivileged children. Therefore, these educationalists were looking to devise a curriculum that did not perpetuate the interests of the privileged classes, one that was ‘democratic and egalitarian.’ Here are some quotes from said critics:

Education should be about giving pupils ‘the right to negotiate meanings, to interpret and reinterpret their own experiences and thus, crucially, to develop their own systems of values’ (Vic Kelly).

The government should ‘positively encourage schools to diverge from traditional approaches’ of organizing the curriculum, and to move towards ‘projects, interdisciplinary activities or other ways not based on discrete subjects’ (John White).

‘Why is knowledge acquisition what schools should be about? Some people would say they should also be about developing the imagination, wider sympathies with other people, a love of beauty, personal qualities like confidence’ (John White).

By way of response, Christodoulou first acknowledges that democracy and equality are very goods things to aspire to as educational goals. Everyone agrees with that. However, strong strains of philosophical postmodernism, the convictions (irony intended) that undergird cultural postmodernism, commit the fallacy of appeal to consequences: just because something leads to unwelcome consequences doesn’t mean that it is therefore untrue. To illustrate, that is akin to believing that because the theory of evolution leads to eugenics, evolution must, therefore, be false. On the flipside, believing that something is true because it has positive consequences is also fallacious, just like if I were to favor the notion of libertarian free will merely because it vindicates moral responsibility.

This fallacy seeps into cultural postmodernism’s quest to dismantle hegemonic knowledge. But not only is this quest based on a fundamental flaw of logic, it also produces the exact opposite result. As Christodoulou points out, the removal of knowledge in schools and the emphasis on personal experience will, in fact, exacerbate socio-economic inequalities. Democracy, the great macro facilitator of equality, is best served when citizens of all socio-economic brackets understand the objective features of the world beyond their personal experience and can make choices best suited to their collective flourishing. Gaps in knowledge between classes about world history, the sciences and the arts, even language, and numeracy, will only enforce standing inequalities. 

Education should, therefore, serve to equalize this difference by imparting robust knowledge. Students from privileged families will more likely come to the classroom with much more knowledge (and powerful networks) than those who don’t. In order for the latter to not be manipulated, taken advantage of or marginalized because of their relative ignorance, they must be brought up to speed with high-quality facts and knowledge. The strongest defense against bias, inequality, and hegemonic power is knowledge. How is this facilitated? By identifying and teaching knowledge that yields the greatest cognitive benefit. Beyond the fundamentals, this can include the kind of general knowledge that will allow students to understand current affairs, personal finance, and other topics of local and global concern. Some argue that a classic education facilitates this: 

But wait, there’s more. Part of the educationalists’ agenda includes removing canonical figures in disciplines like literature and replacing them with authors from more diverse backgrounds. They argue that the canonical authors and thinkers under the standard curricula (i.e., dead White men, usually) do not merit attention beyond the fact that they have been imposed arbitrarily by Western hegemonic power. But following this line of logic, what’s stopping someone from arguing that British teachers should not teach mathematics because they are rooted in the Hindu and Arabic numbering system? Isn’t that also privileging Asian and Middle-eastern hegemonies of the past?

Furthermore, consider the fact that countless people around the world, including such luminaries as Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Warsaw Ghetto survivor), have found profound solace in the works of dead White men. Each has lauded Shakespeare’s plays for its unique insights into the human condition that transcend time and space. Angelou even remarked that when she first read Shakespeare, such was the universality of his themes that she believed him to be a black woman. Christodoulou extends her argument further:

If we still, however, feel that the pre-eminence of the culture of dead white Western men is unmerited and merely a function of their economic and military power, then we still need to teach them. If we do not teach that knowledge, the outcome will not be that the wider culture realizes that the status of the dead white Western culture is unmerited. We will just ensure that our pupils have no knowledge of that culture, which will exclude them from the ability to contribute to debates about it, and from many other important debates as well.

In other words, the solution to bad or biased knowledge is not alternative knowledge, but bad knowledge taught as such (if it is indeed bad knowledge) and corrected accordingly. Shakespeare’s own education supports Christodoulou’s argument. Shakespeare’s creativity, in fact, derives from his well-documented 16^th century rote education, which required him to memorize grammatical rules and countless classical (Latin) figures of speech. We see today, from his plays, how profound creativity arises from and is enabled by rote learning.

The counter-productive fruits of cultural postmodernism as it impinges on education are revealed. The best of intentions, when untempered with good evidence, creates what ultra-conservative elites wished for centuries ago: the restriction of powerful knowledge to the masses such that they’d never be able to challenge the status quo.

8. Summing Up

Christodoulou’s ideas have met somewhat equal measures of praise and criticism. Some of her debates with educators and policy-makers who think differently help to address concerns and push back we might have. Before we get to that, here’s a short lecture she did at Downing College, Cambridge, (my alma mater) on the topic:

What the modern establishments think should be taught to promote critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity	What Christodoulou argues should be taught to promote said 21st-century skills instead
Teach these skills directly	Teach them indirectly, piecemeal Too much noise to chunk otherwise
Teach projects, not subjects	Retain subject focus Performing and learning usually don’t overlap
Embrace multi-tasking	Focus on “deep work” (Check out my post on this)
Teach pupils how to find knowledge	Teach pupils the knowledge required to find knowledge in the first place

Debates and Commentaries

To get a better sense of how her argument stacks up, consider watching some of her debates. She is a fine debater. Watch closely and you can almost see her champing at the bit to get her arguments in!

In the first video, she debates with Guy Claxton on Sir Ken Robinson’s now incredibly popular thesis (because of his TED Talk) that traditional education kills creativity:

Some important points of discussion and disagreement:

DC: A traditional education should involve knowledge-led instruction and be based on disciplined and deliberate practice.

GC: Creativity doesn’t need knowledge stored in long-term memory. This is only a small factor. Creativity is embedded in the critical-thinking and questioning process. Direct instruction is antithetical to the mental habits that foster creativity.

DC: Memorisation is not passive and uncritical, it is hugely active. Lack of domain knowledge will prevent anyone from thinking critically or creatively in that field. Teaching to the test comes about because of the false idea that skills are developed directly just by practicing the things that look like the final test. By contrast, there are many things that will help with the exams that look nothing like the exam. A traditional education will allow for the build-up of facts, knowledge, and skills, that will be effective beyond the exams.

This next debate is with Peter Hyman on whether Project-Based Learning (PBL) prepares children for the 21^st century:

PH: Students achieve superior results at younger ages with PBL.

DC: Projects don’t allow good feedback on how to improve. But if you are sure that your students have enough knowledge to tackle the project, then go ahead.

PH: Direct instruction is only important at the beginning. After gaining some proficiency, other methods of learning become available. Long-term memory is good. But knowledge learned in a formulaic way will ensure that it doesn’t enter long-term memory. PBL solves that problem: it is engaging.

DC: Research by John Hattie shows that PBL is being introduced too early in schools, and this is a real problem. Students are novices, and they need significant time with direct instruction before things like PBL should be introduced. We are subject to cognitive biases. PBL encourages the confusion of familiarity with understanding and causes us to skate over vital content because of the assumption that they’ve already been mastered.

PH: In PBL, students with different expertise, i.e., knowledge and skills, collaborate to make something new. In this way, knowledge and skills are segmented. The idea of interleaving in the science of learning, is exemplified in PBL.

This last debate is with Koen Timmers, Becky Francis, Andrew Smith Lewis and Sam Freedman on whether Google is making people stupid

DC: Attention and focus are vital for learning. Technologies built on degrading one’s attention cannot be making people smarter. Khan Academy, Duo Lingo and Coursera are effective because they use the science of learning to design their content.

KT: Google is neutral, it is just a tool.

SF: All the evidence shows that direct instruction is the best way to learn. Just ‘googling’ something won’t help much. There is a lot of misinformation on the web. Good prior knowledge is necessary to sift through the rubbish.

ASL: People around the world have been getting smarter, about three IQ points per decade. It coincides with the rise of the internet and technology.

Moving Forward

Coinciding with her move to NMM, Christodoulou has since published a new book on assessment for learning, titled Making Good Progress (2017), which extends her ideas and puts them into practice by tackling the thorny issue of assessment distorting the curricula. She argues that comparative judgment, in particular, the software and methods proposed by NMM, have the potential to solve this problem. They can also reduce teacher workload while improving marking accuracy.

According to the words of one reviewer:

How does one take on a whole generation of school assessment that has fallen down a rabbit hole? Daisy Christodoulou’s bravery and determination in doing just that deserve as much credit as her intellectual clarity. It takes courage to expose practices that have been well-intentioned and, where baselines were low, have secured improvement. For this book is no tactful tinkering with the problems; it is a devastating assault on the status quo and a call for a paradigm shift.

Looks to be an engaging read.

Here’s a short video on comparative judgment:

And here’s Christodoulou talking about reclaiming formative assessment:

Christodoulou’s ideas have given me much food for thought, and, if you have persisted this far, I hope it has done the same for you! Let us conclude with some of her words of wisdom. When asked about the problem of unengaging lessons in UK schools, she concurs, saying,

anybody can give lots of information, anybody can entertain. The difficult thing is to provide activities that advance understanding and sustain interest. Primary teachers are very good at that. I often wish I’d trained as a primary teacher.

Words of wisdom for budding educators indeed. If you happen to know any, share this with them!