Kieron is just finishing Day 18. I wrote some notes in my notebook and thought I would transfer them here. I thought I would try to keep track of what is going on and what issues I'm thinking about.
The main issue from a teacher's point of view is "accountability". How do I know he is really trying to read and understand. How do I know he is succeeding. What is the best way to promote real understanding and motivation to learn. This is where teachers put in objectives and then demonstrations of mastery. It is artificial in some ways as far as the student is concerned because the student could be learning whether anyone is testing or planning, or not. But given a taught curriculum, it's important for the teacher in order to know how to proceed. .... what to assume, what to go over again. And this has some value for the student.
It does not seem essential for the student to understand everything, or understand exactly the way the teacher wants him to. The nature of knowledge is that it is independent of the teacher -- it is something objective. When the student assimilates it, he is said to know. But of course knowledge is not just ability to recite facts. Those are "doctrine" in a way -- opinion or belief.
I think a lot of what we build, say in history or science as taught nowadays, is something like "experience". If you read enough times in different places that Egypt is the home of the pyramids, you get a sort of "experience" based on repeated memories from different sources. You may not have touched those pyramids yourself, or seen them built; still, you could say you "know".
Hirsch's theory is that this kind of knowledge is a building block for deeper literacy. Knowing the terminology, even on a mere familiarity level, allows you to focus on what is being said.
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