Knowledge matters: 'You can't think critically about nothing in particular'

“He switched to the googly and so rearranged the placing of the silly mid-off.” Few U.S. children could "find the main idea" of the sentence, writes David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. They don't know enough about cricket.

Knowledge is essential to reading comprehension, he writes in The 74. Schools would rather teach “critical thinking,” but "you can’t think critically about nothing in particular."

Modern education has devalued "the teaching of knowledge about the world, including geography, history, high-level science and math, foreign languages and the human condition through literature and the arts," Steiner writes.

In their vision of a well-educated student, now called "portrait of a graduate," many school districts and states barely mention knowledge, a review found. The most common goals, according to a study, are: “Analyze to understand, care for and contribute to society, collaborate across difference, communicate in all media and modalities, create to solve and share, and practice self-awareness and regulation.” They won't be doing any useful analysis or communication if they don't know anything, writes Steiner.

As schools retreat from teaching knowledge, grades inflate and graduation tests disappear, he writes. "Louisiana — the only state in which the vast majority of teachers have been using the same high-quality, content-rich curriculum for years — was also the only state to show NAEP gains in fourth and eighth grade right through the COVID years and continuing."

"Content is king," says Sean Dimond, former Louisiana state social studies director, in an interview with Barbara Davidson of the Knowledge Matters Campaign.

In his early days as a sixth-grade social studies teacher, the standards include "all of human history" from the Stone Age to the late Renaissance, Dimond recalls. Now, the state's curriculum "spirals, so students return again to similar topics at a deeper and deeper level."

For example, a Civil War lesson "combines expository, vocabulary-building text with a variety of primary sources, includes excerpts of presidential speeches, and culminates in a classwide debate about Lincoln’s heroism." If students know the facts, they can frame and defend arguments, says Dimond.

Fifteen states are pushing for schools to adopt HQIM (high-quality instructional materials) that, in theory, build knowledge, writes Steiner. However, many “approved” curricula "fail to build sequential knowledge.

Lauren S. Brown has advice for U.S. history teachers on using facts to fuel discussions about "big ideas."

It's impossible to "cover" everything, she writes. Students need "both a sense of the big picture — the broad sweep of U.S. history — and the chance to dig deeply into ideas and conflicts that resurface again and again, linking one era to the next and making connections to the present."