One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.
Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.
Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.
These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.
Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.