Howard Anglin: Alberta’s social studies curriculum is filled with facts, and the left can’t handle that

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The idea of universal education — the belief that the poor as well as the rich, the farmer as well as the philosopher, should receive a basic grounding in the sciences and the humanities — has been one of the great advances of recent centuries. The success of this project has been so complete that, until recently you could say with confidence that, at least across the developed world, ignorance and illiteracy had been stamped out and knowledge had triumphed. That is why it has been so astonishing to see the partisans of ignorance come roaring back in the criticisms of the new Alberta K-6 social studies curriculum.

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If you haven’t been paying attention to the radical drift in university departments of education over the last two generations, or if you tuned out the so-called “history wars” of the 1990s, the new curriculum may look unremarkable, even a bit predictable. It begins by teaching world history and the history of Canada, including Indigenous history, through stories and myths from the ancient world, Europe, China, and North America, and it continues up to Alberta’s entry into Confederation. Not exactly provocative stuff.

Now, I am not exactly unbiased. I worked as principal secretary in the office of Premier Jason Kenney for the first year and a half of his government, including during much of the time that the new K-6 curriculum was being developed. I do not claim to be an objective source and this piece draws on some observations from my work inside government, but the views expressed are mine alone. With that said, I have tried several times to set aside my biases and read through the whole curriculum as someone coming to it from the outside might.

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My impression is the same as when the draft curriculum was made public in March, earlier this year. I maintain that, if you showed the curriculum to most people over 50 or anyone who attends school today in Europe or Asia, they would have a hard time explaining why it would be controversial. They might quibble, as I do, with some emphases or be surprised at the diversity of the content, but otherwise they would probably assume this is what students are already being taught. By contrast, the reaction from the education establishment and the opposition NDP has been incendiary.

The attacks began the day the new draft curriculum was unveiled, which means they had almost certainly been prepared well before critics had time to absorb all 550 pages. Some of the reactions were reasonable and thoughtful; others were inane and uninformed; a few were even unintentionally amusing. But by far the loudest and most sustained reactions were overtly political with a strong undertone of opportunistic partisanship.

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In the inane category, we can put the accusation promoted by some opposition politicians that teaching schoolchildren about the Ku Klux Klan’s activities in Alberta in the early 20th century is part of a nefarious plan to make them sympathetic to white supremacy, which makes about as much sense as worrying that teaching about the Second World War is a Nazi recruiting tool.

Among the amusing responses was a tweet from an NDP MLA, who fretted that she “could weep” at the thought that in Grade 2 her child would be taught about “Genghis Khan & Silk Road” instead of “Iqaluit, Saskatoon, Ukraine & city govt” as provided for in the current curriculum, which is “(100 emoji) more relevant to his understanding of the world.”

Put aside that the new curriculum contains far more Alberta history than either the current one or the NDP’s historically-empty 2018 draft, one can only pity someone traumatized by the thought of her child being taught about centuries of cultural, religious, economic, and demographic exchange between Europe, Russia, India, and China. Relevance is a myopic way of measuring a curriculum, but since this MLA brought it up, introducing a child to the history of four of the five global superpowers and a region that will likely dominate the politics of this century seems rather more “relevant,” not to mention engaging, than learning about the municipal government of Saskatoon (no offence to Saskatoon).

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Progressives love to talk about teaching students to be “global citizens.” It’s a nonsensical phrase, but to the extent it means anything, it means taking an interest in the world outside our own country and beyond the personal and the local. It means introducing children to figures like Genghis Khan — or Marco Polo and his Muslim Chinese counterpart Zheng He, who are also in the Grade 2 curriculum — at an age appropriate level. It means opening young minds to the idea of the world as an immense web of cultures and ideas interacting over centuries.

For flustered incoherence, the NDP’s horror at the thought of teaching children global history is matched by the Twitter progressives outraged that the curriculum will introduce students to the tenets of world religions. The screenshots, of course, usually focus on Christianity, making it look as though the curriculum were a project of “Eurocentric” indoctrination, but the basics of Christianity are taught alongside Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, not as fact but as what adherents of those faiths believe. Being for diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism, but against teaching the facts of world religions — which are also the religions of our neighbours — requires gymnastic levels of ideological contortion.

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Not all of the critiques have been so ignorant or transparently political. One of the more reasonable concerns has been that the history of Indian Residential Schools isn’t introduced until Grade 5 (it is currently taught in Grade 10). It would be naïve to think that this has always been raised as a well-intentioned concern and not as a way to deploy a serious tragedy as political ammunition, but either way it is a fair question and it deserves a serious answer. I think there are three possible responses.

First, the residential school story is not taught only in social studies. The English language arts and literature resources, for example, contain age-appropriate books about the residential school experience starting in earlier grades. Second, the Social Studies curriculum is broadly chronological, and to teach the residential school history as a stand-alone unit would disconnect it from the rest of Canadian and Indigenous history.

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The third response is related to the second point, but it is more subtle — and more important. Teaching the history of the Indian Residential Schools out of context would not prepare students to appreciate the impact they had and continue to have on their victims. Children can understand at a personal level why it was wrong to remove children from their families and to then cut off from their culture and their people. But to really understand the evil of the program, students should know something about the richness of the Indigenous cultures that the Canadian government was trying to suppress.

The new curriculum begins in Grade 1 by teaching First Nations creation stories and the Indigenous history in this land before Europeans arrived and follows that with the complicated and conflictual history of Indigenous-settler interactions over the next two centuries. Then, once students understand something of the rich and diverse history of Indigenous cultures and languages, they are prepared to learn why the government’s attempt to eradicate it — through the Indian Residential Schools program, but also by banning ceremonies like the potlach and the Sun Dance, restricting First Nations to reserves, and imposing an alien socioeconomic system through the Indian Act — inflicted such trauma on its victims and their communities.

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There are, no doubt, many plausible responses to this approach, and I expect that the government is listening to them. My point is that the issue is (surprise) more complicated than the sound bites on social media. It is not unreasonable to think that students who bring to the residential school history an understanding of the culture, the languages, and the people that the program targeted will be better prepared to understand what the process of Reconciliation means, and what it will take.

The problem the Alberta government faces is that all evidence in support of its approach is beside the point when the opposition is implacably ideological

Another thoughtful criticism, and one that has been levelled even by people who otherwise welcome the revised curriculum, is that the scope and level of the material covered are too ambitious. These people do not object to the content itself, but they worry there is too much of it and that some of it is too advanced for the grade in which it is assigned. Given the shamefully little time Canadian students spend on each subject in a given year, these concerns should be taken seriously.

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Revising a curriculum inevitably brings uncertainty. It involves some trial and error to get right. This is why the government is piloting the curriculum in some schools for a year before rolling it out province-wide. I would be surprised if, when it receives feedback from the piloting teachers, the government doesn’t pare down the curriculum significantly in some areas and refine it in others. But as the government balances a desire for rigour with the reality of complex classrooms and finite instruction time, I hope it keeps in mind the scope of leading independent and home school curricula, which are typically much more challenging than public school curricula.

Ensuring Alberta’s students have the same educational opportunities as the best schools in the world is a rare practical example of that much-abused buzzword “equity.” A demanding curriculum, rich in great ideas, art, history, literature, and advanced science and math, helps close the gap between children whose parents have books in the house and read to them, take them to museums and plays and on international holidays, or send them to science camp and the children of parents who don’t have the time or the resources to supplement their education. A culturally rich curriculum is a great leveller of privilege.

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That revelatory experience, unfortunately, is just one of the things that would be eliminated by the most vocal academic critics of the curriculum, whose ideological biases have seeped into the attacks by the NDP and the teachers’ union and, unfortunately, even some teachers. The progressive critique is more fundamental than misgivings about the volume of content: it opposes the very idea of a fact and content-rich curriculum and it is skeptical about teaching students about important events and figures in history and great works of art and literature.

At its most benign, the progressive critique scoffs at teaching young children Greek and Roman or ancient Chinese myths because, as implied by the NDP MLA concerned over Ghengis Khan’s presence in the curriculum, old and far-away places are irrelevant and therefore uninteresting (The Walt Disney Company, with its billions of dollars of revenue from Aladdin, Hercules, and Mulan might dispute that.) At its most insidious, it opposes the very idea of a hierarchy of knowledge and even between teacher and student.

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For the education establishment, direct instruction of factual knowledge is “old fashioned” and the traditional teacher-student relationship reinforces the unequal social hierarchies they want to dismantle across society. This is why so much of their criticism of the Alberta curriculum focuses, oddly, not on whether students will learn better but on claims that it is “regressive” and will make Alberta a “laughing-stock” at international academic conferences. To many education professors, being au courant with academic trends is more important than student learning outcomes.

The Alberta curriculum is, to these critics, doubly offensive. First, because a content rich curriculum goes against prevailing academic fashion, which can be traced back to the godfather of progressive education, John Dewey. It was Dewey’s rejection more than a century ago of the traditional view of education as the transmission of knowledge that led to the development of “inquiry” or “constructivist” methods of education in which students learn (or “construct”) knowledge for themselves with minimal prescribed content or direction from the teacher.

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Second, because these critics view school as a process of socialization first, and a place of education second (if they recognize the distinction at all). Following Dewey’s goal of using public education as a way to reshape society, 20th century theorists like the enormously influential Paulo Freire (whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed remains one of the three most-cited works of social science more than fifty years later) borrowed the “oppressed-oppressor” view of society from Karl Marx and put it at the centre of modern education.

To critics who view education through this ideological lens, it is irrelevant that teacher-directed instruction of core knowledge has been shown for decades to produce better outcomes than the constructivist methods. The traditional ways of learning must be discredited and defeated because they get in the way of the all-important program of social change. When the sweep of centuries can be reduced to victims and oppressors — or, as Lenin pithily put it: “Who? Whom?” — what need is there to learn names and dates?

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It is important to understand these small-p political roots of this opposition or you could easily miss amid the din of attacks the most important fact: the evidence supports Alberta’s approach. And it isn’t close. Dan Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies the application of new findings in cognitive science to education, has written that “(d)ata from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts.”

Willingham’s research is reinforced by University of New South Wales professor John Sweller, who has demonstrated that the way our brains store information when we learn is wired in favour of direct instruction of factual knowledge. In a 2010 paper, Sweller and his co-authors explained that: “The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.” After reviewing the results of more than a dozen studies, they concluded that “(t)he findings were unambiguous. Direct instruction involving considerable guidance, including examples, resulted in vastly more learning than discovery (methods).”

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In his most recent paper, published earlier this year, Sweller updated these findings. His conclusion was, once again, blunt: there appears to be “a causal relation between the emphasis on inquiry learning and reduced academic performance.” The problem with the constructivist approach (which includes discovery and inquiry-based learning), it seems, is that it doesn’t stimulate the long-term memory change in students that would show evidence of learning, and this is borne out in empirical studies showing worse student outcomes.

This should not come as a surprise. We have known since the early work of education researcher Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s that teaching through “well-developed and carefully planned lessons designed around small learning increments and clearly defined and prescribed teaching tasks,” to use one definition of Direct Instruction, results in better student outcomes than constructivist methods. A detailed, knowledge-rich curriculum like Alberta’s helps with Direct Instruction because, instead of spending time planning what content to teach, teachers have more time to think creatively about how best to teach their classes.

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As described, new studies regularly reinforce these findings. Daisy Christodoulou’s “Seven Myths about Education,” which is clearly written but meticulously supported by detailed footnotes, is one example, as is the engaging “Filling the Pail” blog by Australian teacher and scholar, Greg Ashman, who came to my attention when he was clumsily attacked for defending the Alberta curriculum by its critics here in Canada.

The problem the Alberta government faces is that all evidence in support of its approach is beside the point when the opposition is implacably ideological. When the primary goal is not learning outcomes but social change, what does the evidence matter? One can explain to most reasonable people why it is important to learn about the Silk Road, but there is no arguing with someone who believes the goal of education is social engineering and denies that the curriculum should require students to learn specific historical facts at all.

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Shortly after I started working for the Alberta government, we asked to see the research that supported the NDP’s 2018 draft curriculum. In response, the Department of Education sent us a curious chart. It showed the evolution of education policy from Perennialist (focussed on works of the past and “reason and logical thinking” with the “teacher viewed as subject area expert”) through Essentialist and Progressivist to Reconstructionist (designed to “bring about change” with “curricular emphasis on student experiences and relevant social issues”).

This chart was based on work from the 1940s by the Marxist-Leninist philosopher of education, Theodore Brameld. Brameld’s plan, which he referred to as “political-educational action on a genuinely radical social frontier,” was to replace teaching the history of events and ideas unfolding over time with an ideological framework that encouraged radical social change and experimentation by children. Once you read a chart like this, the almost complete absence of content, facts, and history in the NDP curriculum starts to make sense.

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The hollowness of the new “Know Nothing” approach to education can be seen in a common defence of a content-light curriculum: that there is no need to teach facts because children can just “Google it.” What is important, in this view, is to teach transferable skills like “critical thinking” that can be applied in any context. But search engines are not a substitute for knowledge. You can’t look up a reference you didn’t get, and you can’t make connections between facts and ideas you’ve never heard of. There is also good evidence that a foundation of core knowledge improves critical thinking in general, and that even experts don’t think much better than novices outside their area of expertise (a weakness that is often piteously exposed by Twitter).

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Ultimately, the belief that constructivist learning can replace core knowledge taught by well-prepared teachers is belied by the graduates of schools that adopt that approach. In his 2011 memoir Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, Princeton professor Shamus Rahman Khan quotes a conversation he had with a freshman at Harvard.

“I don’t actually know much … like the Civil War or what France did in World War II” the student confesses. But, he hastens to assure Khan, “I know something they don’t. It’s not facts or anything. It’s how to think.”

When Khan asks him what he means, the boy replies: “I mean, I learned how to think bigger. Like, everyone else at Harvard knew about the Civil War. I didn’t. But I knew how to make sense of what they knew about the Civil War and apply it. So they knew a lot about particular things. I knew how to think about everything.”

This is where the fad for constructivist education gets us: students “thinking bigger” about things they don’t really understand because they never learned the basic facts of history. Another word for this is ignorance.

Howard Anglin was Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and served as Principal Secretary to Premier Jason Kenney in Alberta between May 2019 and September 2020. He is currently pursuing post-graduate research in law at Oxford University.