Dear Editor:
A cautionary tale for Kindergarten to Grade 9 curriculum renewal:
"There once was an impatient farmer. He was so anxious that he went into his field every day to measure his plants. To his dismay, they just would not grow as fast as he wanted them to.
"So one day he devised a solution. He would tug each shoot upward just a little bit each time he visited. Thus his plants appeared taller when he measured them.
"The farmer was happy to see this result. For six days he went around boasting about his brilliant new method of encouraging growth. On the seventh day his neighbours came to see for themselves this miracle - only to discover that the crop had withered in the night."
Some of the principles outlined in the renewed provincial curriculum and assessment testing for K-9 students remind me of this fable. Their author claims that the principles reflect "the growing body of research on brain development and learning."
But so often today's insight from research becomes tomorrow's discredited idea in practice. For example, "whole-language" learning and "sound-it-out" phonics have each had their turn as insight and discredited idea in teaching of reading and writing in our public schools.
I believe that a child's brain is like a digital recorder - uncritically absorbing everything the child encounters.
This divine design is intended to equip our children to take in the large amounts of information (facts, data and images) they must first absorb before they can start learning the skill of pattern recognition that enables them to make sense of the world.
Only then, after mastering second-order pattern recognition can they learn third-order adult skills of "critical thinking" and finally how to constantly evaluate incoming information - keeping or discarding it as appropriate.
The period of uncritical absorption lays the foundation for all that follows. Just as dwellings built on incomplete foundations later sag; so educations based on incomplete absorption of evidence-based knowledge (from maths to reading and writing, history, biology, chemistry, physics and geography, etc.) will later fail.
K-9 students already have all that they can do in an average school day to absorb the basics of what they need to know to prepare for their lives in what promises to be an intensely competitive global economy.
Let's not require them to also practise "critical thinking" so soon.
In short: let's get back to basics, let's lay a solid foundation of literacy and numeracy in K-9 and leave the critical thinking to high school (grades 10 to 12).
Heather Leung
