Nor is she inclined to defend standardized student testing. The British teacher-turned-author is difficult to label and discredit because of the soundness of her thinking and her impeccable research. Attention is paid to school structures over classroom practice.” “There is general academic underachievement despite a multiplicity of reform efforts and relatively generous funding. Teaching these insights to children isn’t elitist-not teaching them is!”Ĭhristodoulou is particularly critical of British and American school systems for educating students who “lack knowledge of important fundamentals.” The education establishment, according to her, downplays the importance of knowledge. The great breakthroughs of civilization were made by a whole range of people from different classes and cultures, and if they belong to anyone, they belong to humanity. The kind of powerful knowledge that’s in the Core Knowledge † curriculum in the United States doesn’t “belong” to any class or culture. “Too often, people think that teaching knowledge is somehow right wing and elitist,” Christodoulou wrote in the AFT magazine, American Educator. Much of the book exposes the ideological bias that informs far too much of what passes for educational discourse. Her book not only identifies, but documents, why these beliefs fly in the face of social-science research and the latest discoveries in cognitive psychology. Projects and activities are the best way to learn
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The 21st century fundamentally changes everythingĦ. Worse, ideas that had absolutely no evidence backing them up had been presented to me as unquestionable axioms.”Īwakened to that realization, Christodoulou proceeded to identify what she terms “Seven Myths About Education”:ģ. I felt as though I had been misled.” She then added: “I had been working furiously for 3 years, teaching hundreds of lessons, and much information that would have made my life a whole lot easier and would have helped my pupils immeasurably had just never been introduced to me. “Much of what teachers are taught about education is wrong… I was not just shocked, I was angry.
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Then Daisy Christodoulou began to connect all the dots. But it was also extremely frustrating, because I just couldn’t believe that all this vitally important evidence about how pupils learn hadn’t been taught to me when I was training to be a teacher.” “It was a great relief to read Hirsch and Willingham,” she now recalls, “and to realize that the intuitions I’d had about the importance of knowledge were backed up by solid evidence. Little in her British teacher’s college training prepared her for this discovery and, only when she began to look wider afield, did she discover the research and writings of two American authorities, E.D. She stumbled upon Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book, The Age of American Unreason, which reached similar conclusions about the appalling level of students’ understanding about the core principles and foundations of the American democratic system. Her research only confirmed that her experiences weren’t atypical. Widely regarded as “Britain’s brightest student” before entering teaching, Daisy set out to find out why students’ content knowledge had slipped so dramatically in state schools.
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Plenty thought Africa was a country,” she says. “Many of the pupils I taught could not place London, their home city, on a map of Britain. In one class of 15 and 16-year-olds, she discovered children who “were barely literate and numerate” grappling with books written for eight and nine-year-olds. When Daisy Christodoulou started teaching in September 2007 in a South East London secondary school she was immediately struck by how little her students actually knew. Daisy Christopoulou’s workshop presentation found a new North American audience, including a few Canadians like John Mighton, Robert Craigen, and me. In the wake of the ResearchED New York conference, that’s likely to change.
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Since its re-publication in March of 2014, the book has dominated educational discourse everywhere but here in Canada and much of the United States. Few books on the state of Education have created as much of a stir as Daisy Christodoulou’s 2014 treatise, Seven Myths About Education.When It first appeared in July of 2013 as a short, persuasive e-book, British and American educators hailed it as a potential “game-changer” from a British schoolteacher willing to present the accumulating research evidence that challenges the prevailing “progressive education” orthodoxy.