5 Myths About “Traditional” Knowledge-Centered Education

Building richer mental maps of knowledge that stands the test of time— why’s it getting a bad rap?

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In the traditional vs. progressive education debate, who wants to defend the musty old method, just lecturing and testing about old facts that’ll be forgotten? Who’d be opposed to engaging activities building creativity and preparing learners for the future?

I say, someone who actually understands what “traditional” education is. Let’s clear up some misconceptions that give it a bad rap:

1. It calls for memorizing isolated facts.

Truth: It calls for building long-term memory of a rich, coherent web of facts. You can’t connect the dots if you don’t know what the dots are.

It’s one thing to know the British defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 because that’s what the textbook says. It’s quite another to know how it would make sense that the defeat would be around 1590, knowing that the Virginia colony was founded in the early 1600s¹. “Understanding” doesn’t require less memory than “memorizing” — it involves more memory of the right knowledge.

Sure, we’re prone to forgetting. But even if we can’t consciously retrieve it, a piece of knowledge still shapes our thinking.

Say we’re asked, What’s the “ideal gas” law? This fact, once recalled so easily on chemistry exams, might be rusty after years of not using it.

Say we’re asked instead, If the temperature of a gas goes up, all else equal, what happens to the pressure? Now our practice with the gas laws comes in handy. In our mental map of “how gases work,” we know there is a relationship between temperature and pressure, and more specifically (especially with related knowledge of heat as “molecules in motion”), that it’s a positive relationship.

That’s the goal of knowledge-centered education — fuller mental maps. If anything were to create a disjointed memory of isolated facts, it’s the “just Google it when you need it” approach.

2. It’s "teacher-centered," with lecturing the whole time and no interaction.

Truth: Explicit instruction can be highly interactive. It often needs to be: before moving forward, we need to know learners get what they were just taught! To do this, effective instructors ask plenty of questions to gauge understanding².

One practice in college courses is explaining a new concept, posing a multiple-choice question the class should now be able to answer, letting them respond on “clicker” devices, and reviewing the correct answer. This is a great example of explicit instruction — and it’s consistently found to improve student outcomes, both in learning and class enjoyment³.

(And even when lessons aren’t interactive, is that so wrong? “YouTube University” consists entirely of non-interactive watching and listening. That doesn’t stop schooling critics from claiming it’s the future of learning.)

3. It doesn’t involve hands-on activities or projects.

Truth: Well, if we value knowledge, some of these “activities” rightfully have no place. For example, if students bake biscuits as part of a fourth-grade unit on the Underground Railroad, they’ll be thinking more about measuring and mixing than what they should learn about this part of history.⁴ Similar problems arise with a “draw what happened in the novel” or “make a model of a concentration camp” assignment. It’s too much noise, not enough signal.

But surely we agree performing certain activities is key to mastering certain subjects. Students of science should understand how experiments work and how to perform common lab techniques. A sophisticated understanding of “literature” involves not just knowing what happens in a classic novel, but being able to write analytically about it; the same is true of history. And courses that teach art and design skills would be incomplete without the chance to showcase a creative product.

Here’s the difference: in knowledge-centered education, the component skills are broken down, fully explained, modeled, and practiced before learners are expected to apply them. (Procedural knowledge is still a form of knowledge!) In activity-centered education, the very performance of the activity is how they’re meant to learn the subject.

The knowledge-centered view, in other words, is that learners benefit more from these activities when they know what they’re doing and aren’t left to figure it out for themselves.

4. It prepares learners for the past, not the future.

Truth: I’ve heard people older than me wish they knew how to punctuate a sentence properly, perform basic mathematical operations in their head, and understand references to scientific concepts and historical events that everyone else seems to get. Man, I wish I paid attention back in school!

The value of this knowledge isn’t going obsolete anytime soon. Whatever the workforce of the future demands, being a skilled English speaker will still pay off. Whatever one uses math for in life, the rules of math aren’t going to change. Whatever happens in the world next, our world truly has been shaped by moments in history. Whatever frontier science explores next, it’s constrained by understood laws and principles of its field, enabled by previous discoveries that shattered old paradigms.

The goal of knowledge-centered education isn’t to create all-purpose trained employees. It’s to make learners better thinkers, more informed members of society, now that their thinking is informed by powerful knowledge of the world.

Knowledge that’s “powerful” is often the knowledge that’s stood the test of time.

5. It’s less supported by research.

Truth: Some studies find that an activity-centered (i.e. less explicitly guided) approach “improves" learning outcomes compared to a control group. The typical mistake, though, is only comparing them to no intervention, the business-as-usual teaching approach.

Of course, learners get more engaged when they know they’re doing something new and different. If that’s the real reason for learning gains, though, this effect would vanish if activity-centered instruction became the new business-as-usual approach.

So the higher quality studies compare different interventions to each other. The other intervention serves as an “active control” to account for the placebo effect.

One study that did this with low-achieving students in math, for example, found that both interventions — explicit instruction and small group-based “constructivist” learning — outperformed the control group, which was taught with the regular curriculum. But that’s not the whole story. The explicitly instructed group improved more than the constructivist group.⁵

This effect pans out on a larger scale, too. Project Follow Through was the largest randomized controlled experiment in American education; over 700,000 students in 170 disadvantaged communities were placed into nine cohorts of different educational philosophies, ranging from Montessori-esque discovery learning to Engelmann’s strict teacher-led “Direct Instruction.” One approach led to the best learning outcomes, by far, on all measures: Direct Instruction.⁶

And it makes sense, considering how information is processed in the brain. Long-term memory is practically unlimited, but there’s precious tight space for yet-to-be-learned content in working memory. It’s hard to solve problems with too little in long-term memory that could help you, as activity-based approaches aim to do, because then you’ll have to juggle different things in your working memory that you don’t yet understand, surely a fast track to cognitive overload! So for information to help future problem-solving, it needs to be securely introduced into long-term memory. To get it in long-term memory, we need methods that cut the noise and deliver the signal.⁷

Different forms of evidence — small-scale experiments, large-scale data, and established cognitive theory — point to the same answer. Building up learners’ long-term memory through explicit instruction is the effective way. Less guided approaches can’t be trusted to create any lasting change.

Traditionalists say, If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. When it comes to education, that’s not necessarily right. Thing such as interleaved practice and interactive ed-tech were not part of the “traditional” classroom that worked fine, but there’s no need to shun them on principle. Surely there will always be room for evidence-based improvement, something we’ll be glad we made the new norm.

It’s something quite different to claim that education is so broken that the whole thing must be overhauled. The explicit passing-down of knowledge has been the model of schools throughout the history of civilization, the main model all over the globe today. To claim it was all wrong calls for a seriously strong argument. So does the claim that it was only for the world of yesterday, that the 21st century needs something else — what is this “something else”?

This heavy burden of evidence is one that progressive education proponents have yet to meet. I’ve laid out mine.

Footnotes

1. Ambrose, Susan et al (2010). How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.
2. Rosenshine, Barak (2012). “Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know.” The American Educator.
3. Caldwell, Jane (2017). “Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips.” CBE — Life Sciences Education, 6(1).
4. Willingham, Daniel (2009). Why Don’t Students Like School?
5. Ashman, Greg (2021). “In Plain Sight.” Filling the Pail.
6. Coombs, Marian (1998). “Honest follow-through needed on this project.” The Washington Times.
7. Kirschner, Paul et al (2006). “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.” The Educational Psychologist, 41(2), pg. 75–86.