"Knowledge Curriculum"

[WindDoesNotBreakTheBendyTree]

Hi DD has just started secondary (not transitioning well but that is another thread).

They are starting a new "knowledge curriculum approach" which involves homework from every lesson learning facts/information and then they are tested next lesson. She brings home photocopied sheets with for eg the list of characters in Midsummer Night's Dream or naming the parts of a sewing machine to learn. Sometimes 4 subjects worth per day.

It sounds like Michael Gove's wet dream set in a chapter of Hard Times ... am I right to be worried? Anyone else got experience of this?

FWIW its a very mixed catchment/cohort with a high proportion of kids with SEN, strong on nurture, but heavily criticised in last inspection for not getting the best results from the more able by Ofsted.

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.

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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.