No Textbooks, Times Tables or Spelling Tests: Things My 6th Grader Didn’t Learn

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My daughter recently completed sixth grade at our local public school. She had a wonderful experience with warm teachers and a positive school culture. Judging by her state test scores, she’s well on track academically.

And yet, I’m left with a nagging sense of gaps in her education thus far. I’m far from the first parent to note differences like this, but I compiled a list of things her school did differently than what I experienced as a child of the 1990s:

• Teachers didn’t use textbooks, assign homework or expect kids to study at home for tests;
  
• Teachers didn’t teach kids to sound out words;
  
• There were no spelling tests;
  
• Students didn’t practice handwriting of any kind, cursive or otherwise;
  
• Teachers didn’t drill times tables to build speed and accuracy; and
  
• Students didn’t learn the 50 states and their capitals, let alone world geography.

Now, there are lots of caveats to this list. Like many school systems around the country, our district is adopting a new reading curriculum that will emphasize phonics in the early grades. It’s also possible that some of these topics will be covered in later grades, or that they would have been covered already but for COVID-related interruptions.

It’s also true that my daughter has learned other things. She has a deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics than I had at her age. She participated in debates, did more public speaking and learned to conduct research with high-quality sources. On top of all that, her school is warmer and safer and more inclusive than the ones I attended.

But I’m concerned that my list is symbolic of the broader American education experience, one that has reduced instructional time devoted to science and social studies and emphasized isolated skills such as critical thinking or reading comprehension over teaching students a coherent body of knowledge and facts. These choices have negative effects on students. For example, kids have an easier time learning to read when they are explicitly taught to decode letters and sounds; taking notes by hand improves memory and recall; and students do better on advanced math problems when they don’t have to spend their mental energy on simple multiplication tasks.

More fundamentally, a deep knowledge base about the world is the best way to prepare children to succeed in an ever-evolving marketplace.

This experiment is now playing out in real time. My kids are part of the “just Google it” generation, but the AI-powered Google search engine is telling users to put glue on pizza, that a snake is a mammal and that President James Madison graduated from the University of Wisconsin. These silly examples are the result of so-called artificial intelligence hallucinations, but AI-powered tutors also make mistakes in geometry and lower-level mathematics.

It may be tempting to think of the question of knowledge versus skills as merely a matter of balance. Surely kids need some of both. But the challenge is that knowledge or skills acquired in one context do not always transfer to others. As psychologist Dan Willingham has noted, there’s a long history of people believing that one magic skill — such as learning Latin, chess, computer programming or classical music — will somehow unlock other areas of learning. None has. Instead, kids need a steady diet of content in a given field before they will be able to go beyond shallow learning.

In other words, schools need to teach students facts, figures, dates and other specifics before they can expect kids to think critically about those areas.

As British author and assessment expert Daisy Christodoulou put it, “If a school wants to future-proof its curriculum, the best strategy is to teach the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy to a high standard.”

Unfortunately, achievement scores in math, reading, civics and history all peaked about a decade ago and have been in decline since then, and the lowest-performing students have suffered the biggest decreases. This decline matters, because boosting early student achievement is linked to a host of longer-term outcomes. Just this year, a study found that eighth-graders in Missouri who scored as proficient in English, math or science were roughly twice as likely to earn a postsecondary degree and three times as likely to earn a four-year degree as students ranking at the basic performance level.

In other words, more children, and especially the lowest-performing ones, would benefit if schools focused more heavily on teaching content knowledge and boosting achievement.

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