"Knowledge Curriculum"

I do agree that there is not enough time in any lifetime, let alone by the time a child leaves school, for a person to learn by discovery and I certainly would not advocate this. However, there are better ways of learning that giving children lists of facts to learn.
Noble, we seem to be in agreement that telling someone, showing someone and letting someone do something are ways of teaching. I just think the emphasis in some parts of the curriculum is leaning too much to "teach these boys and girls nothing but facts", which is literally Dickensian.

kesstrel - the beliefs you describe are pretty well backed up scientifically. Humans are primed for number, logic, talking, walking etc. There is also much more understanding of the order in which skills should be developed in order to optimise learning.

Many people now believe that we are biologically "primed" to learn to talk, which is why we don't need explicit instruction to do so. Same with learning to walk, and working out basic things about properties of the physical environment (what psychologists call "folk physics"). People in all cultures learn these things with little effort.

Other types of knowledge and skill developed much more recently in the history of our species. Many cultures still don't have reading and writing, for example. Schools developed in order to teach us these things - what you might call 'academic' knowledge, because these are much more difficult (in some cases impossible) to learn just by watching and doing. They are often things that required the most brilliant minds of their generation to develop and work out, and for most people they require deliberate, sustained effort to learn and understand in a way that can be called upon later.

In primary my DD1 'learned' science by doing. I've put 'learned' in quotes because on various occasions she came home with incorrect conclusions.

You need both, knowledge and understanding.

I'd rather a homework at secondary was 'learn these definitions' than 'make a model' (unless of course it is a DT homework).

noble - it’s a bit more nuanced than that, however. Some things are better learned by doing (learning to talk - in whatever language, mother tongue or otherwise).

IME people learn by doing, not by being told

All the evidence shows otherwise. Telling pupils stuff and modelling how to do things (obviously they then practise) is more effective then setting them off on a voyage of discovery.

IME people learn by doing, not by being told and being given facts to learn is another way of being told.

For some people. Generally speaking that doesn’t seem to be the case. Or at least not in schools.

DNiece’s primary used this approach in her last year there. It doesn’t seem to have destroyed her confidence or love of school in any way. The ridiculous zero tolerance behaviour policy at secondary has had far more of an affect.

Learning vocabulary lists in MFL is a pretty ineffective way of learning MFL. However, learning definitions/vocabulary relevant to school subjects is very effective indeed. You need to be fluent in a language in order to acquire and appropriate new vocabulary from lists.

I think that if there are terms you have to know, then drip feeding them for 5 years is preferable to cramming in y11.
DD2 is in y9 (not done options yet) and has started to get some definitions hw. We are focussing on the subjects she is going to continue as she doesn't really have the bandwidth for everything.

What is the "Knowledge curriculum approach"? Is it another teaching fad? Learning lists seems an ineffective way of learning. Only in MFL is dd given a list of words to learn. With only a list of words without context dd hates the tedium and does not do well in the tests. I have told her not to worry and just to do more on things where she is using the language.
I love Midsummer Nights Dream. I doubt I would have liked it quite so much had I opened the first page, found the list of characters and been told I had to learn them. I could probably name most of the characters now. IME people learn by doing, not by being told and being given facts to learn is another way of being told.
I can also use a sewing machine. My mum just showed me how to use it to sew.

You need to learn the facts of a topic before you can understand what those facts mean. You need to learn what a needle in a sewing machine is before you can understand what it does.

Would you prefer a teacher explains that the thingy in a thingy machine goes up and down.... please go and learn what a thingy is and what a thingy machine is.

Just sounds like you dont like homework or teachers asking your children to actually learn anything.

My DD is taught a lot of vocabulary and definitions, across all subjects. She is tested regularly. I think this is great, though it is certainly not all the homework she has to do.

Although I'm a teacher, I manage to miss most of the training for these "initiatives" as it's always on my day off (when I work elsewhere) so I'm not completely up to speed on this.

However, my main school is trying to get us into the habit of frequent low-stakes testing of knowledge which helps to teach the kids resilience as well as hopefully reinforcing their learning. As an example, we have around 250 key words in my subject at GCSE. My line manager has decided to introduce 2 or 3 of these every week from year 7. So if I am teaching a lesson about woodwind instruments, I might include clarinet, reed and embouchure as my 3 words. By the time we start the GCSE, they have already encountered most of the more generic terms. At the start of each lesson, I give them a definition of some of last week's or even previous week's words, up to 5 in total for them to write down and I then mark them. It's not the focus of the lesson, it takes a couple of minutes and helps reinforce their learning.

To be honest, it sounds like you've pretty much made up your mind already (shrug).

WindDoesNotBreakTheBendyTree, what do you mean by "er again"? Do you really want to learn something by asking a question here, or do you just want people to agree with you that knowledge curriculum is terrible? If you want experience, I have a MSc in cognitive psychology and all the scientific evidence and research supports knowledge curriculum initiatives. If you don't want to hear about it, fine. Why not just read research about it rather than looking for other mumsnet posters to confirm your biases?

Consider it excellent memory training, it does help and it won’t hurt her to know facts. I assume it’s not all they do. If you find it too narrow, you can always encourage her to study the wider context behind the facts on top, but there is nothing wrong with learning facts, and research does suggest that this results in better academic outcomes.

Knowledge is useless without understanding, but you can’t have the understanding without the knowledge.

The test each lesson is usually just a few short questions based on the principle of spaced retrieval, which has a good evidence base behind it. It’s not really new either. In theory it should reduce the amount of revision needed just before GCSE but no idea if that works in practice

Of all the issues with Michaela/GY/WLFS, I’m not sure the way they teach the curriculum is one of them.

It’s being driven by a small but influential group of right wing, self serving heads led by Inspiration Trust (who have very strong relationships with Theodore Agnew, Nick Gibb and previously Gove and James Pryor).
It is pandering to grammar schools have better results brigade (which they don’t) and a return to more stringent exams supporters.
All schools are knowledge based and most have always been thus.

It is Tory idealism at it’s worse and strongly disadvantages the most vulnerable and those living challenged lives. Most children from the Great Yarmouth estates can’t begin to imagine what use learning the Kings and Queens of England might be but can understand the impact of universal suffrage on their lives.

It means many schools who want to be seen as very good and high achieving encourage lower ability children out by a number of means - discussion with parents about whether it’s the right school, expensive uniforms and stringent haircut rules, limiting subject choices to ‘academic’ subjects rather than offering vocational qualifications that allow more children to access higher education.
Might be fine for individuals (as Michaela is ) but not very good for society as a whole.

Memorizing the parts of a sewing machine seems relevant if someone is studying Textiles.

But yeah, if you are a Ken Robinson fan you are probably not going to like the school's approach much...