Bob Shepherd—teacher, author, textbook writer, assessment developer, etc.—posted the following here as a comment while discussing the negative effects ofCommon Core and other efforts to standardize the curriculum:

This is what an entire generation (20 years) of standards-and-high-stakes testing has done to the field of the English language arts. Department chairpersons now make comments like, “We don’t teach content in English, only skills.” Imagine a so-called “teacher of English” who knows nothing of and has not experienced, himself or herself, the value of having content knowledge of particular great authors and works in the literary canons of the world (British, American, European, Asian, African, etc); of literary techniques, structures, periods, and genres–their characteristics and historical development; of literary history; of the relations of literary history to the history of ideas and events; of prosody; of rhetoric; of approaches to literary works (i.e., the varieties of literary criticism and the methods of each); of syntax and semantics and phonology; of the elements of speech; of dialects; of literary archetypes; of the varieties of folk orature; and so on. Knowledge enables one to see what’s there. If I teach you about the varieties of grasses and other plants on your lawn, then it will not longer seem like an undifferentiated mass of green to you. You will see communities interacting. Let’s consider something that people typically think of as “a skill”–public speaking. If I’m serious about making you into a better public speaker, then I will teach you descriptive knowledge of the elements of speech–pitch, or intonation, and range; stress, or accent; length; rhythm; pace; volume; timbre; tone; articulation and enunciation; diction; respiration; facial expressions; eye contact; gestures; stance; proximity; silences and pauses; register; movement; dialect; dress; paralinguistic vocalization; body language; and resonance. And I will teach you procedural knowledge about how you can use that descriptive knowledge: If you vary the pitch of your voice, this produces melody, and your voice will be more attractive to listen to; most people vary their pitch a tiny bit around an average pitch that is too high; by lowering your average pitch and varying your pitch around that center, you can make your voice much more melodious to an audience. And so it is with each of these bits of descriptive knowledge–they make it possible to learn procedural knowledge that will empower you. But the person who does not possess that descriptive knowledge cannot use it to teach procedural knowledge. And so the student does not grow.

It would be an altogether good thing for the English language arts if people stopped using the term “skills” altogether and instead spoke in terms of “procedural knowledge,” for then they would have a clue that knowledge is key to being able to do things. The woodworker needs to have knowledge that there is something called grain and that it runs in a particular direction. If he or she knows this, then it becomes possible to plane a piece of wood to make it smooth–one works in the direction of the grain. Knowledge is KEY.

People who think that they are teaching “skills” in the absence of content, or knowledge, are totally confused. There is, for example, no general “finding the main idea skill” or “inferencing skill.” These are as fictional as were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fairies. Let me give another example. One of the very few actual texts mentioned anywhere in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. Is one going to have any clue what this is about based on applying some general “finding the main idea” skill? Of course not. Understanding what’s going on there requires a lot of background knowledge about what Plato was concerned with and how he thought. Plato was highly influenced by Greek mathematics. He recognized that perfect forms, like a point or a triangle, don’t exist in the world but that they can be conceived of in the mind. In Greek, the word psyche meant both “mind” and “spirit.” The fact that people can conceive of perfection, of perfect forms, led him to think that there exists a separate spiritual world of perfect forms, of which the psyche partook, and that simply by thinking carefully enough, one could discover these perfect forms–the real meaning of “truth” and “virtue” and so on. If you are a student and know all that, then the allegory will make sense to you. Otherwise, good luck trying to apply your general finding the main idea “skill.” LMAO!