Why Don't Students Like School? More importantly, why doesn't Daniel Willingham like 21stcentury learning, and why must he fight those who seek to make education more meaningful, more productive, and more authentically engaging for our students?
Much attention is being directed to Virginia Professor Daniel Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School?, most of it to his claim that there is no quality evidence supporting the theory and widespread practice of teaching to students different learning styles or "modalities." But Willingham's book deserves broader consideration: again and again this well intentioned cognitive scientist makes claims that seem intentionally provocative but poorly established, designed more to undermine reform than to advance student learning. Upon close reading, his arguments against teaching for imagination, against connecting learning to "relevancy," and against teaching students to think as scientists utterly fail to convince.Willingham's Chapter 2 (Factual knowledge must precede skill) makes a sustained argument that Einstein was wrong when he said "imagination is more important than knowledge." Students, he explains, need facts to think well, to have something to think about, to better inform their thinking, and to better learn new facts in the future. I agree with all of these points.
But, surely students will learn more content knowledge when they are acting upon the knowledge, and when then they are approaching that knowledge with an inquiry analysis, and when they seek to use the knowledge they are learning in practical, applied ways. In doing so, they learn the knowledge better, and are better informed to learn new and additional knowledge, which itself will be best be learned by inquiry and application.
Willingham tacks back and forth in this chapter, often contradicting himself, and at times we agree exactly, as here: "the cognitive processes that are most esteemed- logical thinking, problem solving,