what is the question?

From a response to Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work, which Ken discussed awhile back, one of the most pointed and useful statements of the constructivist take on content vs skills I've seen.

Useful as Exhibit A, I mean.

[M]y argument is that the concerns [with instructional effectiveness] of Kirschner et al.... are misplaced and that the most pressing concern facing educators and challenge to educational reformers is not in fact how to teach students but rather what to teach them. In other words, whether or not they have a correct answer, Kirschner et al. do not address the most pressing question.

WHAT DO WE WANT CHILDREN TO LEARN?

[snip]

Traditional answers to the question of what schools should teach children have become increasingly hard to justify. Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, [ed.: basic?] it has become next to impossible to predict what kinds of knowledge people will need to thrive in the mid-21st century. Like knowledge acquisition, another traditional goal—education for citizenship—is far from straightforward to characterize or implement. Examples across the world illustrate the dangers of ideological teaching that narrows students’ perspectives to the point of accepting only their own “right” way of understanding human affairs. [ed.: good point! let's forget the character ed & spend the time saved teaching the liberal arts]

A resolution has been in the direction of undertaking to teach not simply knowledge itself but the skills of knowledge acquisition—skills that will equip a new generation to learn what they need to know to adapt flexibly to continually changing and unpredictable circumstances (Anderson, Greeno, Reder, & Simon, 2000; Bereiter, 2002; Botstein, 1997; Kuhn, 2005; Noddings, 2006; Olson, 2003).

[snip]

After examining possible alternatives, I make the case that the only defensible answer to the question of what we want schools to accomplish is that they should teach students to use their minds well, in school and beyond (Kuhn, 2005). The two broad sets of skills I identify as best serving this purpose are the skills of inquiry and the skills of argument. [ed.: also remembering stuff] These skills are education for life, not simply for more school (Anderson et al., 2000). They are essential preparation to equip a new generation to address the problems of the day. [ed.: unless it turns out you have to remember stuff to address the problems of the day]

We have only a brief window of opportunity in children’s lives to gain (or lose) their trust that the things we ask them to do in school are worth doing. [ed.: like remembering stuff; remembering stuff is worth doing] Activities centered on inquiry and argument enable students to appreciate the power and utility of these skills as they practice them. [ed.: they're pulling your leg] They learn for themselves what they are good for, without having to be told, and become committed to them as tools for lifelong thinking and learning. [ed.: snort]

[snip]

Meanwhile, science educators have moved increasingly to the view that the most important thing children have to learn about science is to recognize science as a way of knowing the world, one that distinguishes it from other kinds of knowing and serves as a powerful tool for understanding (see Lehrer & Schauble, 2006, for review). [ed.: I guess you can pretty much accomplish that in a semester or two...]

[snip]

As for the claim that engaging in problem-solving produces cognitive overload, isn’t problem-solving, often unstructured, exactly what students need to become equipped to do? [ed.: you have to remember stuff to solve unstructured problems] Surely a steady diet of “worked examples” cannot possibly prepare today’s students for what they will face in the 21st-century world.

source:
Is Direct Instruction an Answer to the Right Question?
Deanna Kuhn
Teachers College
Columbia University

number one: Apparently these people have never met a middle-school aged child in person.

number two: The words parents, taxpayers, broader public, mathematicians, scientists, etc. do not appear in this article. That's too bad, because parents, taxpayers, the broader public, mathematicians, and scientists, etc. may have thoughts about what to teach America's children, possibly involving the importance of remembering stuff.

number three: The future, as imagined by constructivists, reminds me a bit of the old Future, the 1960s Future of Disneyland, G.E., and the Weekly Reader: spiffy, new, generic. In Professor Kuhn's 21st century, people will not have jobs or professions that require them to remember stuff. Jobs will be obsolete, and citizens will devote their lives to inquiring into and arguing about the issues of the day.

So I guess everyone will have a blog.


Center for Cognitive Technology
Education for Thinking Project