Egyptian Democracy
Noman Gomaa, leader of Egypt's oldest and largest opposition party 'Wafd' criticized Mubarak and his Finance Minister on state television. An unprecidented step in freedom in politics there. Democratization appears to be progressing, but Mubarak is missing a chance to be a historic figure in Egypt. Mubarak is 77 years old. He should cloak himself in the mantle of Washington and Gorbachov and be the kind of guy who steps down in the interests of democracy. Keen observers would find him wanting in such a role, given his record, but in Egypt such a step would seccure Mubarak's place as the man who made the transition to democracy peaceful by stepping down. History (Egyptian history at least) would cover him with a glow of the great men. Instead, Mubarak risks his legacy as being nothing more than more autocracy, sham electoralism, or a humiliating loss. Certainly at 77 he can retire.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Pop-Up Irony
What is it about pop-up ads selling pop-up blocking software? Sure they demonstrate the need for the product, but in the way that keying your car demonstrates the need for a paint job. OK, not quite. But certainly they do sacrifice some good will by the tactic. The combination of Microsoft Anti-Spyware and the Google toolbar have kept me pretty clean, but when I'm out and about, I am distressed by the way the machines I see are all eaten up by spyware and adware.
What is it about pop-up ads selling pop-up blocking software? Sure they demonstrate the need for the product, but in the way that keying your car demonstrates the need for a paint job. OK, not quite. But certainly they do sacrifice some good will by the tactic. The combination of Microsoft Anti-Spyware and the Google toolbar have kept me pretty clean, but when I'm out and about, I am distressed by the way the machines I see are all eaten up by spyware and adware.
Attempting to Raise the Dead?
There is a new blog devoted to waking the NEA. Every David needs to select some polished stones to take down the Goliath.
Ecraser l'infame
There is a new blog devoted to waking the NEA. Every David needs to select some polished stones to take down the Goliath.
Ecraser l'infame
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Goldmine
Use this Educational Jargon Generator to leverage technology-enhanced interfaces in your work. So armed you can visualize compelling articulation and cultivate "meaning-centered" schemas.
Use this Educational Jargon Generator to leverage technology-enhanced interfaces in your work. So armed you can visualize compelling articulation and cultivate "meaning-centered" schemas.
Hitchens on Sheehan
Check out the recent post, and the earlier one. There is also a related piece on what the Left wants.
Check out the recent post, and the earlier one. There is also a related piece on what the Left wants.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Why is Social Studies struggling?
I happened across this post at Number 2 Pencil linking to a post by Polski3 on problems with history education. Issues noted include
• NCLB’s emphasis on reading and math
• History teachers are not typically history majors
• Textbooks are dry as brick, and just a heavyPolski3 adds the following
• Intentional neglect of history
• Political correctness
• Parents who’d rather entertain than educate their children
I think the issue most worth pursuing is that too many history teachers are teaching without a history background. The rest are either red herrings or are actually useful to history. Do we suppose that illiterate or innumerate students will comprehend history? History is the study of authentic documents. If I hand out a speech by Henry VIII to Parliament, can the students make sense of it? Only if they are competent readers. If I throw a pair of data sets on the wall of women’s participation in the workforce, can students recognize what we’re doing (rate of change, percentage calculations, math reasoning) in order to interpret the data? Let them emphasize reading and math in the early grades; I want students who have those skills in my class. Second, too much of history and social studies is abstract and is difficult for concrete learners to grasp. There is a limit to how effective teaching about different times and places can be without introducing all kinds of mental errors that would require unlearning. What can be done is to have some of these reading materials young children are expected to read and master include a heavy dose of biography (Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, &c) historical adventure (Lewis and Clark, Johnny Tremain, Kit Carson, &c) and exiting events (Kittyhawk, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor) which will have a natural appeal to children. But this isn’t teaching history so much as it is making history part of the fabric of reading and learning. The social studies taught in most of Missouri in elementary school are foundational civics and economics. They learn the three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), the division of federal, state, and local government (federalism), and so forth.
Textbooks as they exist now should be treated as reference books to be consulted for elaboration on key terms and events, not to be read for content. Readings should be more intensive than any textbook would be anyway. Teachers should select readings (primary and secondary) based on what they want to emphasize and encourage students to consult textbooks to look up people, dates, and places when they missed something in their notes. This would be much easier for teachers with BA’s in history (or better, MA’s), but I get ahead of myself.
Political correctness is a problem, but not for history itself. History is still being taught; it’s just not the content, emphasis, or understanding that many people think should be taught. This is part of the social reconstuctionist agenda. But there is a difference between arguing that history is being taught poorly and being taught with somebody else’s political slant. Again, this just isn’t a problem where the teacher selects their own documents and materials. I knew a civics/sociology teacher who used the text as a device to argue against. He had the class perform a close reading of the textbook during class and evaluated its bias, sources, and politics covering the material in the text. Good teachers can make use of poor materials.
Parents generally regard the school as the people who should do the education, leaving them to do the entertainment. If I could change something about parents, I’d encourage parents to communicate to their children that its essential to acquire skills, to encourage a love of learning, a curiosity, and an interest in the world around them. Taking kids to museums, historic sites, and the like are great, but its also great if kids build a robot, give up television for telescopes, take up sculpture, play jazz clarinet, or write poetry. Any intellectually engaged student will learn more, will have learning skills, and is easier to teach. Spending family time on my subject would just be gravy.
That leaves us with teachers who teach history, but don’t have history degrees. This is the cause I take to be the primary source of weak history learning. So let’s consider it in greater detail. The best available dataset is the School and Staffing Survey from 1999-2000 from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. (some revisions here)The NCES calculate the statistics several different ways. They survey out of area teachers by the following criteria: main assignment field, classes taught, and students taught. They consider subjects and sub-fields. They break teachers down by those with majors, those who just minored, and those who are merely certified, and they run combinations of these as well.
At the middle grades, 52% of teachers who teach social studies have a major in one of the social studies. That’s higher than any other academic field, exceeded only by art, music, and physical education. The other fields show majors in the mid-40’s, except math, where the figure is 33%. If we look at the number of courses taught in the social studies in the middle grades, 40% of them are taught by people with majors, which is only somewhat higher than other fields (such as 32% in English). If we look at specific history classes, the number of classes taught by history majors is only 22%. These numbers look better if we look at the number of students. 49% of students in the middle grades learn their social studies from a teacher with a degree in the social studies. 29% of students in the middle grades have history majors teaching them in distinctly history classes.
There are several issues here. First, which is more meaningful the percent of social studies teachers with degrees in one of the social studies, or the percent of history teachers who are teaching history? Is it OK for a certified geography major to teach whatever your 7th grade curriculum is? Is the work at a level of generality (a course that is multi-disciplinary, so that the American colonies unit looks at the geography, economics, politics, culture, and history of the colonies, not just the history) that any one of these majors is just as good over the course of the year as any other major? Second is the level of content difficult enough that an allied field is out of its depth teaching across disciplinary boundaries? Should we take as the more meaningful figure the fact that 49% of social studies students are taught by certified teachers with a major as discussed, or should we look to the 29% of history students? How many classes are that specifically historical? In my observation, middle school is pretty multi-disciplinary with strong doses of geography and political science a part of the curriculum. As such my own sense is that the content difficulty is light enough that a political science major can handle the history and geography, and frankly an anthropology major (especially one with a grounding in archaeology) can handle the whole thing as well. I also think that there is so much geography and civics along side whatever history we have in American history, and geography and archaeology along side the world history, that no one discipline can claim to be essential and denounce the other majors. So I contend that the 49% figure is the better for the middle grades. As such, social studies as more majors teaching students than all other academic fields, exceeded only by art, music, and physical education.
Let’s look next at high school. 79% of high school social studies teachers have a degree in the social studies. That’s better than all the other academic fields again. English is 76%, math is 73%, and science is 75%. If we look beyond the department someone is in, and look to the courses, only 63% of courses are taught by someone with a degree in the field, and only 33% of history courses are taught by people with a major in history. This is comparable to the other academic fields (62%, 59%, 65% as above). In history, that 33% compares to some of the sub-disciplines in science, where 48% of biology courses are taught by biology majors, 31% for chemistry, 16% for geology, and 23% for physics. If we look, finally, at the students, we find that 72% of students in a social studies class are taught by someone with a major in one of the social studies. This exceeds every other subject, except science, where there are far more core sub-fields. Only history is a core sub-field in the social studies (indeed, history is the queen of the social studies in a way that neither biology, chemistry, or physics could say about science). While there are psychology and sociology courses at most high schools, and many high schools require a geography credit, history dominates the social studies. And the curriculum requirements for courses tend to rely much more on the history skills and knowledge than they did in the middle grades. At high school it is reasonable to argue that any degree in the social studies is no longer just as good as any other. However, we might ask at this point about minors. While its pretty clear that a history major would not do as well as a psych major for a high school psych course, what about the history major who minored in psych? Unfortunatly, the data doesn’t really tell us how many people were majored in the main assignment field, and minored in the course subject area. Though it can be argued that the number of sociology majors with history minors is small, are they as qualified to teach most history classes as the history majors are? The data offer no specificity here. So, while 72% if all social studies students are taught by someone with a major in one of the social studies fields, only 38% of students in a history class are getting a history major. Again, this compares to the science sub-fields (55%, 39%, 21%, and 34%).
So, what kind of difference is there between a political science major and a history major in the teaching of American history? Students are getting as many broad field majors as they are in any other field. For example, the survey doesn’t even bother to separate creative writing and literature types in the English areas, presumably because every course involves both writing and literature. But that also means that every English student is getting at least partly an out-of-area teacher even when the survey says they have a major in the course subject area. Certainly the best case is for those 38% of history students that receive teaching from a history major. Less desirable is the situation for those students whose teacher is a social studies field major, but is teaching some allied field. How many students this applies to is hard to measure because only the sub-field of history is recorded. At a minimum its 35%, but is almost certainly higher. The next category are those who are certified for social studies, but have no major in the field, some 12% (actually 12.4%, basically one in eight). As it turns out, 76% of students learned social studies from someone with a major or a minor in social studies, 4% more than those who just had a major. Only 9% of students had teachers who lacked both a major and a minor, despite being certified, some 3% less than those whose teachers lacked a major. The percent of teachers who lack a major, a minor, and a certificate is about 1%.
In conclusion, the number of teachers who have a major in their main assignment field is about the same, or better, for the social studies as it is for other disciplines. Like the sciences, the number of history majors accounts for only a third of all social studies teachers. Unlike the science sub-fields, history dominates the social studies at the higher grade levels. What remains unclear is how significant this is. While the survey demonstrates that slightly more than a third of all social studies teachers have majored in the allied fields of the social studies other than history, how effective they are teaching a field dominated by history remains a question.
I happened across this post at Number 2 Pencil linking to a post by Polski3 on problems with history education. Issues noted include
• NCLB’s emphasis on reading and math
• History teachers are not typically history majors
• Textbooks are dry as brick, and just a heavyPolski3 adds the following
• Intentional neglect of history
• Political correctness
• Parents who’d rather entertain than educate their children
I think the issue most worth pursuing is that too many history teachers are teaching without a history background. The rest are either red herrings or are actually useful to history. Do we suppose that illiterate or innumerate students will comprehend history? History is the study of authentic documents. If I hand out a speech by Henry VIII to Parliament, can the students make sense of it? Only if they are competent readers. If I throw a pair of data sets on the wall of women’s participation in the workforce, can students recognize what we’re doing (rate of change, percentage calculations, math reasoning) in order to interpret the data? Let them emphasize reading and math in the early grades; I want students who have those skills in my class. Second, too much of history and social studies is abstract and is difficult for concrete learners to grasp. There is a limit to how effective teaching about different times and places can be without introducing all kinds of mental errors that would require unlearning. What can be done is to have some of these reading materials young children are expected to read and master include a heavy dose of biography (Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, &c) historical adventure (Lewis and Clark, Johnny Tremain, Kit Carson, &c) and exiting events (Kittyhawk, Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor) which will have a natural appeal to children. But this isn’t teaching history so much as it is making history part of the fabric of reading and learning. The social studies taught in most of Missouri in elementary school are foundational civics and economics. They learn the three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), the division of federal, state, and local government (federalism), and so forth.
Textbooks as they exist now should be treated as reference books to be consulted for elaboration on key terms and events, not to be read for content. Readings should be more intensive than any textbook would be anyway. Teachers should select readings (primary and secondary) based on what they want to emphasize and encourage students to consult textbooks to look up people, dates, and places when they missed something in their notes. This would be much easier for teachers with BA’s in history (or better, MA’s), but I get ahead of myself.
Political correctness is a problem, but not for history itself. History is still being taught; it’s just not the content, emphasis, or understanding that many people think should be taught. This is part of the social reconstuctionist agenda. But there is a difference between arguing that history is being taught poorly and being taught with somebody else’s political slant. Again, this just isn’t a problem where the teacher selects their own documents and materials. I knew a civics/sociology teacher who used the text as a device to argue against. He had the class perform a close reading of the textbook during class and evaluated its bias, sources, and politics covering the material in the text. Good teachers can make use of poor materials.
Parents generally regard the school as the people who should do the education, leaving them to do the entertainment. If I could change something about parents, I’d encourage parents to communicate to their children that its essential to acquire skills, to encourage a love of learning, a curiosity, and an interest in the world around them. Taking kids to museums, historic sites, and the like are great, but its also great if kids build a robot, give up television for telescopes, take up sculpture, play jazz clarinet, or write poetry. Any intellectually engaged student will learn more, will have learning skills, and is easier to teach. Spending family time on my subject would just be gravy.
That leaves us with teachers who teach history, but don’t have history degrees. This is the cause I take to be the primary source of weak history learning. So let’s consider it in greater detail. The best available dataset is the School and Staffing Survey from 1999-2000 from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. (some revisions here)The NCES calculate the statistics several different ways. They survey out of area teachers by the following criteria: main assignment field, classes taught, and students taught. They consider subjects and sub-fields. They break teachers down by those with majors, those who just minored, and those who are merely certified, and they run combinations of these as well.
At the middle grades, 52% of teachers who teach social studies have a major in one of the social studies. That’s higher than any other academic field, exceeded only by art, music, and physical education. The other fields show majors in the mid-40’s, except math, where the figure is 33%. If we look at the number of courses taught in the social studies in the middle grades, 40% of them are taught by people with majors, which is only somewhat higher than other fields (such as 32% in English). If we look at specific history classes, the number of classes taught by history majors is only 22%. These numbers look better if we look at the number of students. 49% of students in the middle grades learn their social studies from a teacher with a degree in the social studies. 29% of students in the middle grades have history majors teaching them in distinctly history classes.
There are several issues here. First, which is more meaningful the percent of social studies teachers with degrees in one of the social studies, or the percent of history teachers who are teaching history? Is it OK for a certified geography major to teach whatever your 7th grade curriculum is? Is the work at a level of generality (a course that is multi-disciplinary, so that the American colonies unit looks at the geography, economics, politics, culture, and history of the colonies, not just the history) that any one of these majors is just as good over the course of the year as any other major? Second is the level of content difficult enough that an allied field is out of its depth teaching across disciplinary boundaries? Should we take as the more meaningful figure the fact that 49% of social studies students are taught by certified teachers with a major as discussed, or should we look to the 29% of history students? How many classes are that specifically historical? In my observation, middle school is pretty multi-disciplinary with strong doses of geography and political science a part of the curriculum. As such my own sense is that the content difficulty is light enough that a political science major can handle the history and geography, and frankly an anthropology major (especially one with a grounding in archaeology) can handle the whole thing as well. I also think that there is so much geography and civics along side whatever history we have in American history, and geography and archaeology along side the world history, that no one discipline can claim to be essential and denounce the other majors. So I contend that the 49% figure is the better for the middle grades. As such, social studies as more majors teaching students than all other academic fields, exceeded only by art, music, and physical education.
Let’s look next at high school. 79% of high school social studies teachers have a degree in the social studies. That’s better than all the other academic fields again. English is 76%, math is 73%, and science is 75%. If we look beyond the department someone is in, and look to the courses, only 63% of courses are taught by someone with a degree in the field, and only 33% of history courses are taught by people with a major in history. This is comparable to the other academic fields (62%, 59%, 65% as above). In history, that 33% compares to some of the sub-disciplines in science, where 48% of biology courses are taught by biology majors, 31% for chemistry, 16% for geology, and 23% for physics. If we look, finally, at the students, we find that 72% of students in a social studies class are taught by someone with a major in one of the social studies. This exceeds every other subject, except science, where there are far more core sub-fields. Only history is a core sub-field in the social studies (indeed, history is the queen of the social studies in a way that neither biology, chemistry, or physics could say about science). While there are psychology and sociology courses at most high schools, and many high schools require a geography credit, history dominates the social studies. And the curriculum requirements for courses tend to rely much more on the history skills and knowledge than they did in the middle grades. At high school it is reasonable to argue that any degree in the social studies is no longer just as good as any other. However, we might ask at this point about minors. While its pretty clear that a history major would not do as well as a psych major for a high school psych course, what about the history major who minored in psych? Unfortunatly, the data doesn’t really tell us how many people were majored in the main assignment field, and minored in the course subject area. Though it can be argued that the number of sociology majors with history minors is small, are they as qualified to teach most history classes as the history majors are? The data offer no specificity here. So, while 72% if all social studies students are taught by someone with a major in one of the social studies fields, only 38% of students in a history class are getting a history major. Again, this compares to the science sub-fields (55%, 39%, 21%, and 34%).
So, what kind of difference is there between a political science major and a history major in the teaching of American history? Students are getting as many broad field majors as they are in any other field. For example, the survey doesn’t even bother to separate creative writing and literature types in the English areas, presumably because every course involves both writing and literature. But that also means that every English student is getting at least partly an out-of-area teacher even when the survey says they have a major in the course subject area. Certainly the best case is for those 38% of history students that receive teaching from a history major. Less desirable is the situation for those students whose teacher is a social studies field major, but is teaching some allied field. How many students this applies to is hard to measure because only the sub-field of history is recorded. At a minimum its 35%, but is almost certainly higher. The next category are those who are certified for social studies, but have no major in the field, some 12% (actually 12.4%, basically one in eight). As it turns out, 76% of students learned social studies from someone with a major or a minor in social studies, 4% more than those who just had a major. Only 9% of students had teachers who lacked both a major and a minor, despite being certified, some 3% less than those whose teachers lacked a major. The percent of teachers who lack a major, a minor, and a certificate is about 1%.
In conclusion, the number of teachers who have a major in their main assignment field is about the same, or better, for the social studies as it is for other disciplines. Like the sciences, the number of history majors accounts for only a third of all social studies teachers. Unlike the science sub-fields, history dominates the social studies at the higher grade levels. What remains unclear is how significant this is. While the survey demonstrates that slightly more than a third of all social studies teachers have majored in the allied fields of the social studies other than history, how effective they are teaching a field dominated by history remains a question.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
"Terrorism is just a Tactic"
Unrestricted submarine warfare was just a tactic. Americans had no interest in whether the Kaiser set up a puppet state in Poland, annexed Belgium, or whether the flavor the Reich was not to their liking. American support for war increased as German submarines attacked American shipping. What ultimate goal they purused was not the critical issue. British impressment was sufficient a cause for many Americans to support the War of 1812. Why the British needed these sailors was not the issue, the procedure itself was.
One of the key arguments that the administration put forward for the war on terror, including the attack on Iraq, was that in a era when terrorists were only a plane ride away, it was unaccepable for terrorist supporting states to obtain weapons of mass destruction. This argument states that regardless of their aims, this tactic is unacceptable. We have no problem with this reasoning in law enforcement. If I pursue a lauable goal (feeding my sister's children) through criminal activity (stealing) I am still subject to the law. The ends, as they say, do not justify the means.
The advocates of salafi jihad have three tactics: preaching, political action, and terrorism. Suppose the Salafiyyah pursued only preaching as a tactic. Would we still pursue a war against Islamic extreamism? What about preaching and political action? Indeed, its only the use of the terror tactic that makes them our enemies. We might otherwise regard them as ideological rivals. We might be wary of their thinking. Would we attack them?
However, just as we have begun wars over unacceptable tactics, American frequently fight wars to end war, and so put the ideology central into our war aims. Americans frequently believe or are easily persuaded that bad ideologies are much more liable to using bad tactics. Therefore, Americans pursue root causes to end problems once and for all. If a tactic is so unacceptable that we will go to war to end its use, let's end its use! Set up a democracy and shift that plot of land from the danger column to the friendly column for ever.
Unrestricted submarine warfare was just a tactic. Americans had no interest in whether the Kaiser set up a puppet state in Poland, annexed Belgium, or whether the flavor the Reich was not to their liking. American support for war increased as German submarines attacked American shipping. What ultimate goal they purused was not the critical issue. British impressment was sufficient a cause for many Americans to support the War of 1812. Why the British needed these sailors was not the issue, the procedure itself was.
One of the key arguments that the administration put forward for the war on terror, including the attack on Iraq, was that in a era when terrorists were only a plane ride away, it was unaccepable for terrorist supporting states to obtain weapons of mass destruction. This argument states that regardless of their aims, this tactic is unacceptable. We have no problem with this reasoning in law enforcement. If I pursue a lauable goal (feeding my sister's children) through criminal activity (stealing) I am still subject to the law. The ends, as they say, do not justify the means.
The advocates of salafi jihad have three tactics: preaching, political action, and terrorism. Suppose the Salafiyyah pursued only preaching as a tactic. Would we still pursue a war against Islamic extreamism? What about preaching and political action? Indeed, its only the use of the terror tactic that makes them our enemies. We might otherwise regard them as ideological rivals. We might be wary of their thinking. Would we attack them?
However, just as we have begun wars over unacceptable tactics, American frequently fight wars to end war, and so put the ideology central into our war aims. Americans frequently believe or are easily persuaded that bad ideologies are much more liable to using bad tactics. Therefore, Americans pursue root causes to end problems once and for all. If a tactic is so unacceptable that we will go to war to end its use, let's end its use! Set up a democracy and shift that plot of land from the danger column to the friendly column for ever.
Monday, August 08, 2005
Constructivist Setback
The weak constrcutivist position argues that everyone constructs knowledge for themselves. The strong constructivist position goes further and argues that because of this, teaching should be child centered, especially finding what a child's prefered method of learning is (seeing, hearing, touching, moving) and tailoring the lesson to the child. However, via a link at Number 2 Pencil, there is another installment of Ask The Cognative Scientist at the AFT website. Its very interesting, and worth a look-see. The thesis is a blow to the strong constructivist:
"What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. "
We might call this the Structuralist theory of knowledge. Content has its own best structure independently of the mind that understands the content. This was the dominant approach to knowledge, which often viewed knowledge as a tree, dividing subjects into specialities based one how they are related. Sciences would be grouped together, because they have common mental tools, for instance. Structuralists, I have have termed them, would argue that it is best to thing about science in a scientific way, rather than in what ever way is most pleasing to the student. The class, the unit, the lesson should all reflect the structure of the subject.
Aristotle proposed that knowledge is a series of catagories, some broad, some specific. This is based on logic. All blue-jays are birds, and inherit the qualities of "bird". So I can imagine a catagory "bird", and "blue-jay" and "that blue jay who nests in my yard" as ever more specific catagories. This is the basis of deduction. It is said that the Syrian philosopher Porphyry famously employed a tree as a metaphore for this process, and it has been used by taxonimists ever since.
Stong constructivism generally makes two kinds of attacks on this kind of approach. Either they deny the metaphysics of it, arguing that the world lacks the order being presented, and that the only order that exists is in the mind; or they they deny the epistomology of it, arguing that we cannot truly know anything and we just construct our own knowledge of things. These ideas stand in strong opposition to realism (Aristotealian philosophy) and empiricism (Lockean epistomology).
The weak constrcutivist position argues that everyone constructs knowledge for themselves. The strong constructivist position goes further and argues that because of this, teaching should be child centered, especially finding what a child's prefered method of learning is (seeing, hearing, touching, moving) and tailoring the lesson to the child. However, via a link at Number 2 Pencil, there is another installment of Ask The Cognative Scientist at the AFT website. Its very interesting, and worth a look-see. The thesis is a blow to the strong constructivist:
"What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality. "
We might call this the Structuralist theory of knowledge. Content has its own best structure independently of the mind that understands the content. This was the dominant approach to knowledge, which often viewed knowledge as a tree, dividing subjects into specialities based one how they are related. Sciences would be grouped together, because they have common mental tools, for instance. Structuralists, I have have termed them, would argue that it is best to thing about science in a scientific way, rather than in what ever way is most pleasing to the student. The class, the unit, the lesson should all reflect the structure of the subject.
Aristotle proposed that knowledge is a series of catagories, some broad, some specific. This is based on logic. All blue-jays are birds, and inherit the qualities of "bird". So I can imagine a catagory "bird", and "blue-jay" and "that blue jay who nests in my yard" as ever more specific catagories. This is the basis of deduction. It is said that the Syrian philosopher Porphyry famously employed a tree as a metaphore for this process, and it has been used by taxonimists ever since.
Stong constructivism generally makes two kinds of attacks on this kind of approach. Either they deny the metaphysics of it, arguing that the world lacks the order being presented, and that the only order that exists is in the mind; or they they deny the epistomology of it, arguing that we cannot truly know anything and we just construct our own knowledge of things. These ideas stand in strong opposition to realism (Aristotealian philosophy) and empiricism (Lockean epistomology).
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