The anti-knowledge league prefers 'engagement' to learning

Education professors in the Society for the Prevention of Children’s Knowledge are making the case for ignorance and fighting against “learnification," writes Pamela Snow, an Australian professor specializing in literacy. SPoCK has sworn to defeat what they call “GERM” (Global Education Reform Movement), which is pushing for knowledge-rich curricula, evidence-based instruction and school accountability.

Anti-reformers see "knowledge-rich curricula as "overly prescriptive, culturally narrow, and politically conservative," writes Snow. After all, some knowledge is considered more important than other knowledge. It is -- horrors! -- privileged.

Evidence shows that explicitly teaching knowledge improves educational outcomes for students, writes Snow. But GERM-phobic academics oppose it anyhow, using "the language of academic freedom, teacher autonomy and a vague need to 're-imagine' schools and schooling."

SPoCK believes classroom time should be spent on “21^st century skills” such as "communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity . . . via activities that favour 'engagement' over evidence of actual learning."

Teaching vocabulary to children from low-income, black families is racist and colonialist, argues a British linguist.

Actually, all children should be taught vocabulary to understand complex texts, writes Snow. As E.D. Hirsch wrote: Reading comprehension requires knowledge of words and the world.

Thirty percent of Australian students are not proficient readers, she notes. The numbers are worse for minority and disadvantaged students. Yet the crisis for SPoCK is the campaign to do something about that.

"If we’re not careful, the next reading war is not going to be about how we teach decoding (the jury has returned a verdict on that one), but rather whether we teach complex vocabulary and background knowledge to all students," writes Snow.

Vocabulary and knowledge learning are entwined, writes Natalie Wexler, whose visit to Australia inspired Snow's mini-rant. Australian "educators and policymakers have begun to recognize that cognitive science also tells us that certain instructional methods work best to enable kids to absorb and retain new content — namely, explicit, interactive teaching," she writes.

"There’s relatively good evidence for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read," writes Hechinger's Jill Barshay, focusing on U.S. schools. Yet, according to a new study, "hardly any of these evidence-based practices have filtered into the classroom."