This pernicious, yet enduring, educational method is hurting the children of the poor the most.
This pernicious, yet enduring, educational method is hurting the children of the poor the most.
T aking their lead from the spirit of the age, the progressive education reformers of the 19th century made enemies of artificiality, conformity, and external standards. Against these values they championed spontaneity, individualism, and subjectivism. The educational philosophy that metastasized out of these impulses and that has dominated American schools from the middle of the last century to the present day is called Differentiated Instruction (DI).
Advocates of Differentiated Instruction (who make up more or less the entirety of the progressive education establishment) believe that early education should be as individualized as possible, and should be tailored to the unique interests, abilities, and “learning styles” of each child. As Antonio Gramsci noted, they tend to think of “the child’s brain as a ball of string that the teacher should help to unwind.” For instance, a school operating according to Differentiated Instruction wouldn’t have set novels that every student in a given English class is supposed to read and respond to. Instead, they would let each student read what suited him. If a precocious young girl in the sixth grade wants to try her hand at George Eliot, very well. If the boy next to her wants to leaf through the Guinness Book of World Records, or a comic book, that’s equally valid. Likewise, if the boy in question has a greater proclivity for the visual than the written arts, DI advocates might allow him to draw a visual response to his text instead of writing an essay. The principle was stated most clearly by John Dewey, the St. Paul of the progressive education movement, in his “Pedagogic Creed” of 1897. “Education . . . must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits,” according to this creed. “It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations.”
One obvious question inevitably arises: How on earth are the kids assessed under this regime? If they are all engaging with their own content in their own way, how do examiners formulate any criteria by which to examine them? Dewey was already cognizant of this problem back in 1910. His solution, which has been implemented in all of America’s public schools, was to replace the assessment of knowledge with the assessment of general skills. The ascertainment of these skills, rather than the acquisition of a distinct and defined body of knowledge, was to become the principle of unity in American education, as Dewey outlined in the preface to his book How We Think:
Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to end in distraction, some clue of unity, some principle that makes for simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific.
“Attitude of mind.” “Habit of thought.” These are the things with which the modern American public school concerns itself. The actual content that children learn is a second-order concern, especially in the humanities. In his book, Why Knowledge Matters, E. D. Hirsch cites Texas reading standards for informational texts as an example of the replacement of knowledge with “skills:”
Grade 3: “(A) identify the details or facts that support the main idea.”
Grade 4: “(A) summarize the main idea and supporting details in text in ways that maintain meaning.”
Grade 5: “(A) summarize the main ideas and supporting details in a text in ways that maintain meaning and logical order.”
Grade 6: “(A) summarize the main ideas and supporting details in text, demonstrating an understanding that a summary does not include opinions.”
Grade 7: “(A) evaluate a summary of the original text for accuracy of the main ideas, supporting details, and overall meaning.”
Grade 8: “(A) summarize the main ideas, supporting details, and relationships among ideas in text succinctly in ways that maintain meaning and logical order.”
You will notice that none of these standards have anything to do with specific content. The “main idea” that the third-grader is supposed to identify is left unspecified. Differentiated Instruction mandates that this be so. To impose a single, uniform body of knowledge on every child would be to stifle, stunt, and suffocate the expressive individualism of each unique child’s spontaneous self-unfolding.
There are many good reasons for American parents and teachers to come together — with torches and pitchforks if necessary — and chase Differentiated Instruction out of the nation’s schools once and for all. First and foremost, every single one of its guiding assumptions has been proven by researchers to have been wrong from the start. As much as it may shock Americans who have passed through the country’s public-education system to learn this, there is a settled academic consensus in the field of developmental psychology that “general skills” do not, in fact, exist.
To take an example from the Texas standards listed above, it’s common for language-arts classes in the United States to test for a “skill” such as “finding the main idea.” It’s thought that if kids repeat the exercise of “finding the main idea” in enough passages, eventually they will have mastered the skill to such a degree that the specific passage or idea in question is irrelevant. By consigning the particular content of the passage to irrelevancy, this method of testing protects Differentiated Instruction.
But it also disguises what’s actually going on when kids take these tests. We now know that domain-specific knowledge, not general skills, actually determines how well children do on tests of this kind. For example, if a third-grader is presented with a paragraph describing animals on a farm, her ability to “find the main idea” will hinge entirely on her knowledge of what the particular words mean, not on her proficiency in some “general skill.” If her parents happen to have read her stories set on a farm, she will have the vocabulary to know what the words “tractor,” “pig,” “cow,” and “corn” mean. If she is unfamiliar with these words, no number of repetitive exercises will improve her score. The science on this is, as they say, “settled.” The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance says,
Research clearly rejects the classical views on human cognition in which general abilities such as learning, reasoning, problem solving, and concept formation correspond to capacities and abilities that can be studied independently of the content domains.
In other words, the lines that you, as a parent, are fed by the principals and teachers at your kids’ school about how little John and Jane are learning “transferable skills,” “problem solving,” and “not what to think but how to think” are all bovine excrement. As researchers Diana J. Arya, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, and P. David Pearson wrote in the International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, “we know that the skill of reading comprehension in any given case depends more on relevant knowledge than on formal strategies.” Likewise, the theory of “different learning styles” or “multiple intelligences” that underpins Differentiated Instruction in the first place is entirely unsupported by evidence. The content of what your child learns will determine his or her academic success at the K–12 level. All talk of “general skills” is nothing more than pseudo-scientific moonshine.
The upshot of this is that needless and damaging afflictions are being suffered by the nation’s children, especially the children of the poor.
Children from affluent backgrounds are exposed at home to a much broader vocabulary, both in terms of language and in terms of ideas and wider cultural knowledge, than are children from poverty-stricken backgrounds. So children from privileged backgrounds come into the classroom with a huge advantage over their less affluent peers. If we had an education system in which the same body of knowledge was taught to an entire class and year group, as is the case for young children in France, this imbalance would be offset. Every child in the class would be given access to the same body of knowledge on which to be tested. The children of the rich would grasp the content quicker, but by the end of the academic year, the knowledge base would be evened out among the cohort. (These are not hypothetical speculations. Hirsch lays out in Why Knowledge Matters that this is precisely what has been shown to happen in France.)
But Differentiated Instruction robs less affluent children of this shared knowledge base. By encouraging them to “do their own thing,” it sequesters them in their own ignorance and social disadvantage. Meanwhile, rich children excel off the back of knowledge that they have brought into the classroom from their home environment. Our useless and cruel skills-testing regime then rubs salt in the wound of this inequality by giving poor children the impression that they’re bad learners in the classroom or worse, stupid, when, in fact, they’re victims of a failed theory.
Furthermore, Differentiated Instruction also has a pernicious effect on the way in which curricular materials are chosen by teachers and administrators. Since skills-based standards take precedence when it comes to qualifying what material can be taught, it’s easy for school authorities to smuggle in whatever content they want to teach. For instance, the Pulitzer Center website lists a whole host of Common Core standards that qualify their 1619 Project curriculum to be taught in schools. All of the standards are content-free, as you’d expect: “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it,” “determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development,” and so on. Since the official line is that skills matter more than content, schools can use virtually any content at all as raw material for bequeathing these nonexistent skills. But a class being taught the 1619 Project under the official guise of learning skills is, in fact, learning no skills at all and is instead being subjected to undiluted catechetical indoctrination.
We ended up here because the early progressive education movement had an incorrect theory of human nature. They took the view that that human nature was essentially benign and altruistic when left to its own devices. Correlatively, culture and civilization were the real sources of evil in human affairs. As a result, the theory went, children needed simply to be allowed to blossom spontaneously into the flower of their inborn natural genius.
But organizing into a community and imparting a fixed body of important knowledge to children is a much more natural human tendency than the tendency toward spontaneous and antisocial individualistic naturalism. The research on this, too, is clear. Patricia M. Greenfield wrote in a 2003 article for the Annual Review of Psychology,
Recent advances within developmental psychology have ascertained that the universal pathways of mental development inherently owe as much to culture as to nature. The idea of letting the child develop on his or her own is decidedly unnatural for human beings.
In spite of the academic consensus that has built up over the past few decades, Differentiated Instruction remains enthroned in American schools. The verbal scores of the country’s 17-year-olds have remained low since NAEP started recording them in 1971, and by which time Dewey & Co.’s vision of a nationwide progressive education system had already been foisted upon the American republic. George W. Bush’s No Child Left behind initiative and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program both failed because they didn’t lift the weed of this system — and of the theory that underwrites it — out at the root.
The only way to fix American education is to replace the retrograde and falsified vision of human nature that first fired the cylinders of the progressive imagination in the 19th and early 20th century. Undoubtedly, progressive ideas and impulses have much to recommend themselves and have made many historic contributions to America’s national life, but in the case of education, the progressive legacy is thoroughly ignominious and scientifically out of date. Already, there are promising rearguard actions being fought against Differentiated Instruction and its shortcomings. The Core Knowledge Curriculum and the content-intensive grammar stage of Classical Christian Education are good examples of better approaches. In the long run, however, the tide of educational decline in America won’t turn until we abandon our doomed attempt to make skills the locus of unity in our schools. We can’t afford any longer to shirk the question that has been answered by adults in every civilization before us: What are the things that our children must know in order to rise to the full height of their humanity?