Instead of Focusing on What Students Don’t Know, What Do They Know?
Another piece of evidence that students have not learned (or have forgotten) their science, math, and social studies made a recent splash in the media. This year it is civics. Two decades ago it was history.Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn published in 1988 What Do Our 17 year-olds Know in History and Literature. Their answer: not much.
This focus on how little each generation of students (and adults) know about academic subjects has become a popular ritual–dating back to 1943–that symbolizes–no surprise here–how inadequate U.S. schools are in transmitting to the next generation knowledge, skills, and values held to be essential in a democracy.
Perhaps a better question to ask is not what do students forget or haven’t learned in school but what do students know. Stanford University’s Sam Wineburg and University of Maryland’s Chauncey Monte-
