Pedagogy at the Expense of Content

There’s a lot being said about public education right now. American schools have been the setting for several crisis points in recent years, between pandemic disruptions to partisan battles over teaching and institutional policy relating to race, sexuality, and religion. But as the free fall in students’ reading levels and test scores shows few signs of stopping, one recent New York Times piece framed the much larger issue this way: “the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all.”

The author’s pointing to a difficulty any educator knows well: students have trouble reading whole books, these days, or completing intensive assignments, such that what they can learn in a classroom on any given day is severely diminished. Further, their attachment to the internet tends to simplify their views, in addition to isolating them from a historical or social context that might provide nuance to those views.

But in some ways, the current state of affairs is also the fruit of a long-running experiment. “One of the peculiarities of the American educational system,” the article notes, “compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like ‘inquiry-based learning,’ than on acquiring particular knowledge.” As the comment’s phrasing already begins to suggest, such an approach hasn’t always found exceptional results. American teachers are more often resistant to requiring students to memorize vocabulary, chronology, or narrative – even though, the author suggests, those things are “the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed.”

It’s possible, then, that something’s been lost, in what tends to be a pedagogy-centered, ultra-specialized training of teachers. Expertise has replaced knowledge; pedagogy has replaced content. And the impact on students of a stuttering educational system has become evident: “History has been pushed to the side within social studies because there’s too much reading and writing,” one teacher said. “That creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.”

It’s not all bad news, though. “Classical” schools have been finding a bit more encouraging results among their students, the author noting that some such students can be found reading and discussing essays by Marcus Aurelius or the relative impact of St. Anselm versus Thomas Aquinas. And while the classical model is not a “panacea” for all the problems of American public schools, it does perhaps offer a small reassurance: that young people are still hungry to know, to dialogue intelligently, to discover and remember and assess and analyze. Where wisdom is ready to be given, in other words, they seem still ready to receive it.