[3] A widespread bias I see in education is viewing every subject as a technical one with a straightforward dependency tree. Take my subject: English. The delusion held by seemingly all district-level curriculum czars is that, if Johnny’s reading scores are deficient, there must be one or two very specific dependencies he lacks. They will often look to a single wrong answer on a diagnostic test and say, “Ah! There it is. ‘Deducing the meaning of a word from context.’ Teacher, give them lessons on that until they master it.”
Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Johnny, like most humans, intuitively understands how to derive meaning from context. But in this case, he didn’t understand the context, because it’s one of the millions of things he’s naive about. He’s young and hasn’t read very many books. If we want to get reductive, I will concede the hypothetical possibility of making a shaggy graph of the millions of micro-dependencies that underpin an individual’s reading skill. But maybe we should just try to find Johnny some books he might like.
[3] A widespread bias I see in education is viewing every subject as a technical one with a straightforward dependency tree. Take my subject: English. The delusion held by seemingly all district-level curriculum czars is that, if Johnny’s reading scores are deficient, there must be one or two very specific dependencies he lacks. They will often look to a single wrong answer on a diagnostic test and say, “Ah! There it is. ‘Deducing the meaning of a word from context.’ Teacher, give them lessons on that until they master it.”
Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Johnny, like most humans, intuitively understands how to derive meaning from context. But in this case, he didn’t understand the context, because it’s one of the millions of things he’s naive about. He’s young and hasn’t read very many books. If we want to get reductive, I will concede the hypothetical possibility of making a shaggy graph of the millions of micro-dependencies that underpin an individual’s reading skill. But maybe we should just try to find Johnny some books he might like.