Not so grand a strategy: A National at Risk emphasized the importance of learning so-called "higher-order skills" in the early grades. But even chess grand masters need to learn the basics first - Feature

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

A Nation at Risk was mainly concerned with the high-school years. It wasn't until the report's last pages that it finally alluded to education in the early grades:

The curriculum in the crucial eight grades leading to the high-school years should be specifically designed to provide a sound base for study in those and later years in such areas as English language development and writing, computational and problem-solving skills, science, social studies, foreign language, and the arts. These years should foster an enthusiasm for learning and the development of the individual's gifts and talents.

Throughout Risk, the authors expressed the concern that higher skills like comprehension and problem solving were being neglected in favor of mere basic skills such as number facts, phonics, and spelling. The path to education improvement was seen to lie not in the substance of what was taught in the first eight grades, but in the higher order proficiencies that were systematically inculcated, This emphasis on early-language and "problem-solving" skills rather than on early content was a fundamental mistake.

It was natural for the writers of Risk to seek reform where the most obvious declines had appeared. But it seems probable that the watering down of high school was less a cause of its lower scores than a consequence of a gradual decline of learning in the early grades. Risk's attitude toward the early grades reminds me of the comment many years ago of a repairman who came to fix a leak in our washing machine. He asked my wife where the leak was, and she replied, "At the bottom." He looked at her knowingly and said, "Yeah, that's what they all say." The authors of Risk saw declines at the high-school level, so they focused attention there when the problems began elsewhere.

Research has shown that a student's reading competence in 1st grade predicts his achievement in 11th grade. Fortunately, reformers and legislators have recently begun to emphasize early literacy--a promising advance in thinking and policy. But this welcome new emphasis on the early grades may not yield the hoped-for improvements in equity and overall achievement if, while correcting for an earlier neglect, we persist in ignoring the content taught in students' formative years.

Consider the fact that some high-performing education systems, such as that of Japan, do not stress formal higher-order skills--such as "learning how to learn," or focusing on problem-solving skills--in early schooling. They pay much closer attention to the sequence and coherence of the content a child receives in the early grades. Nonetheless, the scores of their 8th graders on the so-called higher-order skills connected with reading and reckoning, such as comprehension and problem solving, are not only higher than ours, but are also more equitably distributed among social classes.

Moreover, these results have been achieved within the context of nationalized, bureaucratic, non-market education systems. This is not intended as a dismissal of current efforts to introduce more competition into American schooling. It's possible that nations like Japan would elicit even better results by experimenting with market-based reforms. But it does suggest that, at least in these nations, organizational schemes have been less critical to student outcomes than the ideas that have governed teaching and learning.

Higher-Order Skills

The writers of Risk believed that the goal of the early grades is to gain proficiency in the skills of reading, writing, thinking, and arithmetic in order to "provide a sound base" for high-school study. They assumed that any sensible content that develops the necessary foundational skills would do.

I have elsewhere called this concept--of skill building through arbitrary content--"educational formalism," the notion that the chief aim of early education is the attainment of formal skills. For the past 20 years our elementary schools have tried to follow the advice of the experts who contributed to Risk. They have taught such higher-order skills as "critical thinking," "problem solving," and "looking for the main idea." Yet these turned out to be the very skills on which our students continued to decline compared with students in Asian and European countries--countries that placed less emphasis on formal comprehension skills and more emphasis on coherent year-to-year subject matter.

Cognitive psychology has long since reached a level of sophistication that enables it to explain why it is highly ineffective to teach higher-order skills as formal structures. This finding is the most plausible explanation for the historical paradox that national systems that stress content more than skills nonetheless inculcate these higher-order skills more effectively than systems that try to teach higher-order skills as such. To teach content is to teach higher-order skills; to teach higher skills explicitly is to pursue a phantom.

Literate adults already possess the higher reading skills that Risk thought could be taught divorced from content. We can think critically about the words we read. But it is unlikely that we gained these proficiencies by being taught them explicitly as formal skills. Few of us learned to find the main idea by being taught to look for it (a favorite with the formalistic approach to comprehension skill). Few of us learned critical-thinking skills by taking formal lessons in critical thinking. How then did we gain these complex skills, and what is their nature?