The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist by Cameron Hilditch

The ‘General Skills’ Your Kids Are Learning Don’t Exist by Cameron Hilditch 

The only way to fix American education is to replace the retrograde and falsified vision of human nature that first fired the cylinders of the progressive imagination in the 19th and early 20th century. Undoubtedly, progressive ideas and impulses have much to recommend themselves and have made many historic contributions to America’s national life, but in the case of education, the progressive legacy is thoroughly ignominious and scientifically out of date. Already, there are promising rearguard actions being fought against Differentiated Instruction and its shortcomings. The Core Knowledge Curriculum and the content-intensive grammar stage of Classical Christian Education are good examples of better approaches. In the long run, however, the tide of educational decline in America won’t turn until we abandon our doomed attempt to make skills the locus of unity in our schools. We can’t afford any longer to shirk the question that has been answered by adults in every civilization before us: What are the things that our children must know in order to rise to the full height of their humanity?

We have been lured by the siren song of teaching "skills." Content is king.