When can we talk?

The conversation about knowledge that we need to have

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Early on Thursday morning, I interviewed Judith Hochman for my podcast (You can hear the recording here). Hochman is famous for founding The Writing Revolution, a set of principles teachers can employ to help young people learn content through writing. We talked at some length about the fact that Hochman’s writing strategies are not an end in themselves but a means to an end — learning knowledge about the world.

Passing on knowledge to young people has never been more urgent and important. Over on Twitter, Stan Blakey pointed me to an article by Dan Gardner on Substack about how people repeatedly make the mistake of explaining the rise of Hitler and the Nazis as a response to hyperinflation, whereas if anything, Hitler’s ascent coincided with a period of deflation. Gardner associates such misconceptions with contemporary approaches to history teaching that eschew chronology and the facts of history in favour of parachuting students straight in to the middle of a period and challenging the narrative — a narrative they largely do not know. I would add that these challenges are mostly anachronistic, requiring students to level all the biases and dogmas of the 21st century at a time when these concepts would have been entirely alien.

It seems paradoxical that teachers would disdain knowledge — like a chef disdaining food — but it has a long history, rooted in the educational progressivism of the late nineteenth century. However, for much of the time since then, disdain for knowledge has been a philosophical stance. Children still went to school and learned their dates and names. As Gardner points out, in contemporary culture, the anti-knowledge philosophy has made the transition to practice. Why?