Knowledge Really Is Power

In our on-going desire to bring educational and thought provoking information to parents of school aged children, as well as the community at large, the North Bay Educational Foundation (NBEF) will share news, articles, case studies and announcements on this blog. Our hope is to stimulate conversation about improving education in the North Bay community and to provide a forum to openly examine educational alternatives for our children.

A recent article published by the Core Knowledge Foundation presents the case for the power of knowledge and how knowledge (not merely the accumulation of facts) is the pathway for all children, and in particular disadvantaged children, to position themselves for taking advantage of life’s opportunities.

Tom Birmingham, former president of the Massachusetts Senate and coauthor of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, notes, “As education theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. has demonstrated, achievement gaps are really knowledge gaps. Poor kids tend to have access to less background knowledge outside school than privileged kids. Unless poor kids are exposed to the same academically rich content in school that more affluent kids can get at home, we consign these students to second-class citizenship”.

The article further notes, “As education scholar E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has warned for the past quarter-century, many poor children remain functionally illiterate not because teachers are incompetent but because those teachers have been “compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum” that dismisses the accumulation of knowledge as “mere facts.” More, a knowledge-based curriculum provides the most promising long-term strategy for preparing all children, poor and middle-class alike, for success in college or, for those who don’t attend college, in the twenty-first century workplace.”

Instead of creating and delivering a content rich curriculum, many (if not most) school districts seem to be focused on skills development – ostensibly to prepare children for the “21st Century.” They put the emphasis on teaching kids how to gather information rather than on providing the background knowledge to enable children to evaluate and understand the information they locate (much of which is now on the internet).

A case in point is a study completed at the University of Connecticut where a group of seventh grade students concluded that a nonsensical animal called the "Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" must be real based on the appearance of credibility of the website that described it.

Read more about how “Knowledge Really is Power” and consider how this may affect our children’s education.