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Root ideas are much more important in practical affairs than we usually realize, especially when they are so much taken for granted that they are hidden from our view.
The factual knowledge that is found in books is the key to reading comprehension.
The reading problem can be solved if our schools begin to follow alternative ideas that stress the importance of a gradual acquisition of broad, enabling knowledge.
One aim of this book is to help create a public demand for the kind of knowledge-oriented reading program that is needed. If that demand arises, then the rest can safely be left to the cunning of the market, for most of us in the United States desire the same democratic goal—to give all children an opportunity to succeed that depends mainly on their own talents and character and not on who their parents happen to be.
The finding that verbal comprehension consists of forming a situation model is a powerful and clarifying idea that is the fruit of a half-century of work in psycholinguistics.
The solution to the problem of determining these contents lies not just in cognitive science but in history. An ever-changing shared history determines what the enabling, shared knowledge is for any society.
We don't need to teach them the things that writers directly explain; we need to teach them what writers take for granted and do not explain.
Practice in speaking before an audience, even if the child is pretending at home or even if he speaks briefly as part of the discussion period in class, will help produce strong later gains in reading and writing proficiency, and also in the ability to communicate with strangers on an equal footing.
Reading aloud to very young children is one of the main agents of their vocabulary progress.
A creature from Mars who had learned the rules of Standard English and the words of a dictionary plus comprehension strategies still could not read the New York Times, or a computer instruction manual, or Gone With the Wind. The Martian would be in the same predicament as the English person reading about baseball. He would not have enough relevant background knowledge to form an accurate situation model.
The very nature of communicative competence, a skill that teachers, reporters, doctors, lawyers, book club members, and writers have already shown themselves to have, requires that it be widely shared within the speech community. These are successful communicators, and shared, taken-for-granted background knowledge is what makes successful communication possible.
Core Knowledge Sequence
Stories are indeed the best vehicles for teaching young children—an idea that was ancient when Plato reasserted it in Republic.
It takes several years of systematic, cumulative learning before schoolchildren can gain the general knowledge and conceptual fluency they need to be good readers. To those who might object that I am recommending more rather than less testing, I reply that content testing leads to engaging, productive, and interesting teaching, whereas drill-and-kill process testing does not.
Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence. In contradiction to the theory of social determinism, breadth of knowledge is a far greater factor in achievement than socioeconomic status. The positive correlation between achieved ability and socioeconomic status is only half the correlation between achieved ability and the possession of general information. That is to say, being "smart" is more dependent on possessing general knowledge than on family background per se.10
A lot is being written about the culture wars in the United States. Such conflict is inevitable in a big, diverse country. But some of the polarization has less to do with ideology than with the inherent suspicion and lack of solidarity among people who fail to share a common basis of knowledge—a commonality of discourse that alone enables shared allusion and mutual comprehension.
Roger Shattuck's recent piece in the New York Review of Books titled "The Shame of the Schools."13
This was a finding that Stevenson and Stigler emphasized in The Learning Gap, a superb comparative study of American and Asian schools.20
The combination of my scholarly specialties led me to realize that reading, writing, and all communication depend on hidden, taken-for-granted background knowledge that is not directly expressed in what is said or written.
The tacit, taken-for-granted knowledge needed for general reading and writing in a speech community is by definition traditional knowledge.
Scientists regard the formulation of theories about deep causal factors to be the motive of scientific progress—a view that has rightly replaced an earlier just-the-facts conception of scientific advance.
To supply students with this unspoken, taken-for-granted knowledge as efficiently as possible should be the goal of a good reading program.
Externally, therefore, the formalist goal is one that can be accepted. What good empirical theory has to offer is the complicating insight that the only way to achieve the goal of learning to learn is through something that the formalist ideologue disdains—a lot of diverse information.
Without greater theoretical sophistication, we are unlikely to achieve better practical results in education. With greater theoretical sophistication, educational research might begin to earn the prestige that it currently lacks but, given its potential importance, could some day justify. The place to begin is with reading.
