It would therefore appear necessary that learning how to learn is a more important educational goal than learning mere facts and subject matter. But we have already alluded to the firm empirical finding that in order to understand a text, the child has to have prior knowledge about its domain. That would argue for the theory that teaching the child a lot of domains is itself a necessary element in learning to learn. This suggests a theoretical middle ground between formalism and antiformalism. The antiformalists are right to stress that general reading ability must necessarily be founded upon
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