Actually teaching CONTENT

The notable scholar E. D. Hirsch is offering a radical new proposal:  That schools actually teach CONTENT.  Ever since Dewey, the assumption has been that schools don’t need to teach knowledge; rather, they should teach processes.   (Classical education, of course, teaches both.)   Here Hirsch shows how the efforts to teach reading, as in No Child Left Behind, are failing. Gaining comprehension in reading, according to the research he cites,  involves building upon other KNOWLEDGE of what the reading is about.  You can’t just teach comprehension as a process.