Math needs a phonics-style reckoning
I think it’s less understood that this specific fiasco in early literacy was downstream of the education theory world’s broader turn against explicit instruction.
This has always struck me as a bit odd because “teaching things to people” is of course a human endeavor that exists outside the context of “being a K-12 teacher.” And it seems to me that outside of school, explicit instruction is the dominant instructional method.
I once took a knife skills class, and they just show you how to chop an onion. You trim the stem. You cut in half from end to end. You peel the skin. You make vertical slices that leave the root intact, then horizontal slices, and then another set of vertical slices across the third dimension. Here’s a neat graphic from “The Art of Manliness.” There are also many videos demonstrating this method.
There is a specific, correct way to do this, and part of learning to cook is being told how to do it.
A person with excellent spatial reasoning could probably figure this out from first principles given an onion and a knife. But the normal way to learn to chop is to be explicitly shown. Chopping a bell pepper is a little different, but you can be shown that, too. You don’t just give people knives and tell them to experience the joy of chopping. Because even though some people really love cooking and find it to be an amazing avenue for self-expression, it’s also useful to know how to chop vegetables, and the best way to get from zero to vaguely competent is to be taught the proper way to do it and then given the opportunity to practice.
Education school theorists, for reasons that are disputed, seem to dislike this idea.
From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile” to Paulo Freire’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a long tradition in the field mashes up romanticism with left-wing politics and sentimentality about the point of school to suggest that there’s some other, secretly better way of teaching things to beginners than just literally teaching them.
But while there’s certainly more to life than explicitly instructing novices in the basics, across a huge range of domains, that really is the foundation of knowledge. You need to master sounding words out before you can analyze literature, and it’s extremely helpful to have your times tables and other basic math facts memorized so that your brain can think about more elevated mathematical questions without constantly tripping over the calculations.
The association between fuzzy educational practices and left-wing politics strikes me as rather contingent.
The Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, for example, all ran school systems that would read as strikingly “right-wing” by American standards (of course, these regimes weren’t exactly defunding the police, either). Antonio Gramsci also apparently had traditionalist ideas about elementary education.
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Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, both use mathematics programs that do not work for most students. It should be scandalous.
“Learn the rules, then break them,” is obvious advice, yet both ignore it!
Explicit instruction schools outperform productive struggle ones.
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This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.
21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math
How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis
Singapore Math
Discovery Math
Math Forum 2007
