At first, content knowledge is secondary or incidental to the process. Essentially, students must spend their time “learning to read” before “reading to learn”.
Wexler claims that cognitive psychology has discovered the opposite is true. Knowledge is the basic building block upon which education rests. She points out that a sentence like “Clarke clinically cut and drove 10 fours” is meaningless to even the best readers unless they have a familiarity with the sport of cricket. For her, the best way to boost reading comprehension (and educational outcomes) is not to focus on discrete skills but to teach students, as early as possible, history, science, and other content through a systematic progression that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them. She consistently challenges the orthodoxy that “education should be a natural, pleasurable process and that learning facts or memorizing them is inherently boring and soul-destroying.” She believes that the direct teaching of subject content in schools is a matter of fundamental justice, pointing out that students with less educated parents are unlikely to have opportunities to acquire a broad base of knowledge outside of the classroom. Furthermore, she rejects the current practice of encouraging teachers to be the “guide on the side” claiming it undermines content knowledge and devalues the expertise of teachers. However, she recognizes that mandating the teaching of particular content in a pluralistic, multicultural society is fraught with political danger. Who decides what knowledge is vital and which is trivial? It is not an easy question to answer and she does a much better job of pointing out the problem than proposing a solution. The book is a short, enjoyable read. Interspersing the history of educational reform and pedagogical theory with first-person accounts of modern classrooms keeps the writing light but consistently challenging and thought provoking. Whether you ultimately find her argument persuasive or not, by the end of the book you will have re-evaluated your own teaching practice in a much more critical light.
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