Sunday, March 13, 2011

Content is King

The Core Knowledge Blog has a great post on educational reformers called Ed Reformers for Illiteracy. These reformers ignore content and curriculum at our students' peril:
If you are opposed teaching a common body of shared knowledge to all children, you are opposed to teaching children to read. You are in favor of illiteracy, either by choice or indifference. You favor damaging our most vulnerable children by denying them the most critical thing: the functional knowledge they need to succeed.
They also point out that critical thinking is not a skill that can be learned outside of content knowledge. For example, someone who has domain specific knowledge of chemistry will not be able to apply critical thinking skills to history without the domain specific knowledge that field requires. Teaching content = Teaching reading!

1 comment:

Social Studies Lesson Plans said...

Exactly! That's why we believe our lesson plans (which many schools use in place of text books) are helping so many more kids with literacy because we make it fun to read.