Dive Brief:
- Teachers often have to make touch choices on what to cover, inevitably leaving some material out — but a focus on skills, not content, can ensure students are getting value out of lessons.
- After speaking with a historian, teacher David Cutler concludes that the value of teaching facts is not in the facts themselves, but in their relevance to students' lives and ability to get to them to think critically about important topics.
- Others agreed that the ability to understand how to ask good questions and use data appropriately should be key takeaways for students, even given the constraints of mandated curriculum.
Dive Insight:
The strong focus on 21st century skills in recent years has led to an even larger shift away from teaching rote facts and memorization in favor of developing soft skills like communication, collaboration and critical thinking, which are more difficult to quantify. However, the path away from rigorous academic learning, and toward movements like the whole child, invariably put less attention on exactly what students come out of school knowing and more on developing competencies and lifestyle skills that will help them survive after graduation.
The "decline in general knowledge," as David M. Shribman, the executive editor of the Post-Gazette put it in a rebuke of the Nation’s Report Card — which found shocking gaps of knowledge in history and geography among students — is nothing new: It's been debated for generations. But, as Shribman put it, in a democracy, students should at least know "the basics of history and politics" if they are to make meaningful contributions.