Education Needs a Return to Truth and Knowledge

Long before the COVID-induced decline in academic standards, many of America’s public schools fundamentally lost sight of what it means to have standards.

Modern educators need to fight against subjective, relativistic teaching methods, according to the first chapter of C.S. Lewis' essay "The Abolition of Man." wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Commentary

The public education bureaucracy survives today because most Americans, especially the worst served, have little choice but to support it. For many, there are no alternatives. The vast majority of young people, therefore, are consigned to what is, in fact, a public school monopoly, and a failing one at that.

Few observers of the educational scene would deny that America’s public schools are failing, but even fewer are inclined to attribute the crisis to fallacious assumptions about education itself. Long before the COVID-19-induced decline in academic standards, many of America’s public schools fundamentally lost sight of what it means to have standards. These schools chose to set aside the tried and true approach to curriculum and instruction (the “classical” approach, as it’s known today) in favor of an increasingly popular and incredibly harmful learning theory called “constructivism.”

If there is a single point of context that explains America’s academic decline and the growing popularity of classical education, it’s the increasing popularity of this theory and the havoc it has caused in classrooms everywhere.

Based on the theories of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and Lev Vygotsky, constructivism claims that the world is what you make it. As the name suggests, constructivists do not believe truth exists “out there,” independently of yourself. Truth is, instead, “temporary, developmental, socially and culturally mediated, and thus, non-objective.”

Truth, therefore, is something you construct yourself by interacting with the world from your own point of view. New knowledge is passed through the lens of your own experience, and it takes shape around your existing ideas, which are themselves formed by your prior experiences, your background, and other details particular to you. Man becomes the measure of all things, and we interpret the world from the safety of our own sofas and smartphones, never truly being challenged to seek something bigger or more challenging.

In recent years, constructivism has made major inroads into K–12 education. For years, the term appeared only in academic journals, but now, it regularly appears in mainstream educational articles and curricula. Schools of education incorporate it into their programs, and teachers have built it into their lesson planning and classroom procedures. The American Educational Research Association even made constructivism the theme of its 2023 conference. It was the basis for Columbia’s now-defunct Teachers College Reading and Writing Project headed by Lucy Calkins, a wildly popular effort to teach reading as a latent ability in the souls of children rather than an academic skill requiring explicit instruction. (The brilliant “Sold a Story” podcast chronicles the spectacular failure of this approach and the dire consequences for students’ reading, even today.)

Contrast the constructivist approach with Frederick Douglass’s grand and inspiring definition of education. “Education means emancipation,” Douglass said in an 1894 speech to the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth. “It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free.”

For Douglass, we rise to true human freedom by transcending our particular circumstances and enlarging our souls in pursuit of the truth. Douglass’s own story is a magnificent testament to his strength of soul and the power of education. “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” he wrote in his autobiography, recalling that the chains of his enslavement were both figurative and literal. Once he had begun to receive an education, he could imagine freedom, but without the image of freedom to guide him, his captivity would have remained permanent.

Without a willingness to look beyond the self, the serious study of language, literature, science, mathematics, history, the arts, and foreign languages—or what we call a “liberal education”—becomes impossible. Taken from the Latin word meaning freedom, a liberal education is the kind that Douglass had, the kind that made him emancipated not only in body but also in mind.

Without the understanding that the truth is fixed—complex and nuanced, but still permanent and knowable through study—the pursuit of knowledge lacks purpose and direction. We may seek to travel with Gulliver or chart a course to the moon, but if the knowledge we pursue is doomed to be filtered through our own small experience, we won’t really travel anywhere at all. These days, an increasing number of teachers deemphasize objective truth in favor of subjective and personal belief, and the structured classroom in which an educated adult leads students through a coherent curriculum is giving way to classrooms in which it’s the students who decide what, when, and how they learn.

To no one’s surprise, many choose not to learn at all: 28 percent of students nationwide are now chronically absent from school. Academic grades and graduation rates have never been higher, yet ACT scores are at their lowest since 1991. That downturn is confirmed by the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results for 2022, which show our nation’s fourth graders scoring lower in math and reading than they have since 1990. COVID-19 clearly worsened this academic decline, but the NAEP report shows that scores have been going down for a while. And as learning has declined, so have the standards.

With the self at the forefront and knowledge in the background, teachers resort to teaching general skills—such as “critical thinking” or “problem-solving”—that can be applied to any subject rather than the content of the subjects themselves. There’s nothing wrong with promoting skills, but studies have shown that critical thinking and problem-solving do not exist in a vacuum. We need to apply a skill to something in order to really acquire it.

The famous Duncker radiation experiment showed that even when people are carefully shown how to solve a problem in one domain, they will tend to be baffled by that same structural problem when it is set in another domain. And the teaching of reading skills—decoding, encoding, fluency, and comprehension—is always more successful when students have rich and meaningful content to work with. Foundational knowledge in a specific domain is necessary to progress with a particular problem.

The good news is that the turn toward knowledge-based curricula in public schools is picking up steam, especially in classical schools. All of us can—and should—play a role in supporting a return to an approach to teaching and learning that really works. Parents can ask schools whether they use a knowledge-based curriculum, hire teachers with deep content knowledge, and employ teacher-led instruction. Faculty supervisors can base classroom observations and leadership roles on academic rigor.  Administrators can support teachers with a solid curriculum (that isn’t changed year after year) and professional development in tried and true teaching methods that make classrooms productive and happy places for both teachers and students. Louisiana has tried this very thing in recent years.

America’s students have had a lousy decade. The dominance of constructivist learning theories has contributed to America’s academic decline. The path forward is straight: a return to truth and knowledge. And that return can only happen by reintroducing America’s public school students to tried-and-true curriculum and instruction.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.