Pamela Snow, a professor at La Trobe University in Australia, is a real scholar with real answers for everyone worried about declining standards in our schools. Unfortunately, she is rare.

Unfortunately, she has to deal with the worst kind of sophists. Their efforts seem mainly concerned with pretending to offer serious thinking, even as what they accomplish is perennial delay in finding smart theories and methods.

So much of K-12 is concerned with fighting through an endless tide of rubbish. Too many professors of education never seem to exhaust their supply of irrelevant preachments.

Think back to the 1990s. Sight-words were attacked in California, where grades and assessments were falling. Whole Word and then Whole Language had lost support; Balanced Literacy was said to be the ideal replacement. The trick here was that Balanced Literacy included components from previous fads. So the schools had to make sense of unholy amalgams of contradictory methods. Search YouTube and you’ll find teachers advocating weird hybrids much like the ones they reject. Literacy in US continued to decline.

Recently, Professor Snow analyzed the current impasses. Up-to-date professors tend not to talk about reading, but about comprehension. One of the things said to block comprehension is that children have no background knowledge, which has been deliberately ignored, as demanded by a theory that says children should not be burdened by memorizing trivia. So now they must learn background knowledge in order to assist comprehension?! The thrust is that you shouldn't do anything that threatens the ignorance of ignorant students, according to many elaborate sophistries. Professor Snow comments on some of these intricacies in what promises to be my favorite analysis this year:

————————————————————

(INDENTED text is from Pamela Snow’s blog Welcome to SPOCK: The Society for the Prevention of Children’s Knowledge):

OPPOSITION TO THE TEACHING OF KNOWLEDGE

It would probably surprise (and dismay) most parents and other tax-payers to know that there are education academics around the world who get up in the morning to rail against the teaching of knowledge to children at school. Some refer to the privileging of knowledge-teaching as the “learnification” of schools. I am not making this up.

The general argument goes something like this:

Knowledge-rich curricula are overly prescriptive, culturally narrow, and politically conservative, meaning that certain “knowledges” and learners are privileged/prioritised while others are neglected. It is not possible to agree on what knowledge should be included and what should be excluded, so curricula should be inclusive, dialogic, and socially transformative, where “knowledge” is not simply delivered but contested, contextualised, and co-created. There is a premium placed on so-called “21st century skills” such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity and these are priorities for classroom time, via activities that favor “engagement” over evidence of actual learning. We can’t agree on what knowledge to privilege so we should by-pass it altogether.

Some academics are actually sounding an alarm about the “intrusion” of terms like “evidence-based” and “knowledge-rich” into education debates and policies, Others argue for a greater emphasis on play and on building relationships and wellbeing at school….

Much of the opposition to explicit teaching of knowledge comes from education academics (rather than teachers themselves) and is veiled in the language of academic freedom, teacher autonomy and a vague need to “re-imagine” schools and schooling. Unfortunately, this is often a fig-leaf for “we don’t like the evidence on the impact of explicit teaching on student academic and wellbeing outcomes.” In the quest for improved educational outcomes for all students, academic freedom has a mere cameo role at the margins, and must yield to evidence, in the way this is managed in respected disciplines such as medicine, psychology, engineering, nursing, and aviation. These are all professions that have accountability contracts with the communities they serve, and practitioners are required to answer (often quite publicly) for poor decisions and adverse outcomes….

OPPOSITION TO THE TEACHING OF TIER 2 VOCABULARY FROM MINORITY GROUPS

In this 2024 paper, British educational linguist Dr Ian Cushing takes aim at the consideration of vocabulary in terms of “tiers”, as described by Isabel Beck and her colleagues in the US (e.g., in the well-regarded and widely-used text Bringing Words to Life). Cushing applies a postmodernist critical lens to argue against the teaching of higher-order (Tier 2) vocabulary to children from Black minority backgrounds, on the basis that to do so is to impose “colonial histories of raciolinguistic ideologies” (p. 972) and class-based power dynamics on the language of such children. He claims (p. 976) that:

It is a very specific type of child that Beck and her colleagues have in mind when arguing for the targeted instruction of tier two vocabulary: Black children from low-income communities. Reproducing the same raciolinguistic ideologies as articulated in the writings of white European colonisers and anti-Black deficit thinkers as I described above, Beck et al claim that such children are unlikely to experience ‘language rich’ envi¬ronments at home or with peers, unlikely to use language in ‘reflective, playful, or novel ways’, and unlikely to encounter ‘extensive and sophisticated vocabulary’ (Beck et al. 1987, 156)….

It is notable too that Cushing seems happy to overlook the educational needs of minority children and the possibility that to succeed in an English-speaking education system, mastery of Tier 2 vocabulary might be as useful to them as it would be to other children (right across the socio-economic spectrum), whose comprehension of increasingly complex texts will be compromised without receptive and expressive vocabularies that go beyond everyday Tier 1 common words learned in the context of home and community interactions, regardless of text exposure. Vocabulary contributes to mental models of knowledge held in longterm memory. As Kintsch observed in 1998 (p. 127) “Comprehension begins with the identification of individual words and their meanings; without this, no higher-level integration is possible.” Kintsch was in no way suggesting that reading comprehension ends with word knowledge, a point taken up by E.D. Hirsch, in 2005, in his paper with a built-in self-explanatory title: Reading comprehension requires knowledge of words and the world....

QED: Professor Snow is endlessly wise and patient; little is settled; K-12 schools remain forever stalled; literacy becomes more rare.

————————————————————

Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K-12 and The Education Enigma. Both books explain why our education establishment seems to embrace the least efficient approaches to elementary education. See Lit4u.com for info about Price’s books.

https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2025/11/welcome-to-spock-society-for-prevention.html