To fix education, children need knowledge, not projects

David Brooks is nothing if not good at describing a problem. In a 2020 cover story for The Atlantic, Brooks focused on the American family, “once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms.”
Though the move toward greater dependence on the nuclear family didn’t seem so bad initially, “the fragmentation continued,” Brooks wrote. Which brings us to today, when “In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.”
Unfortunately, Brooks’s solutions are often as bad as the problem. Concluding that “the nuclear family was a mistake,” he suggested we should abandon the nuclear family altogether in favor of communal living where children “live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms.”
This is not only impractical. It’s a recipe for deeply troubled children. When everyone is caring for them, no one is caring for them.
Four years later, in another cover story for The Atlantic, Brooks has turned his attention to the meritocracy. Like many critics in recent years (mostly on the political left), he decries the evolution of our society from a century ago, when your family determined the trajectory of your life — from Exeter to Yale, to becoming president of a corporation or maybe president of the United States — to today when your family still determines your trajectory in a slightly different way — from an expensive public school district, with pricey extracurricular activities and SAT tutors, to Yale, to becoming president of an investment bank or maybe president of the United States.
Brooks writes that when universities “shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.”
It is true that the shift to meritocracy has changed the way we raise children and often not for the better. They are more sheltered, more scheduled, more anxious and less able to get along with others. Meanwhile the gap between those with a college education — particularly those with an elite college education — and those without has grown significantly.
How to fix this? Brooks suggests that we rethink the emphasis on “cognitive skills” in schools. He writes that “our meritocratic system encourages people to focus narrowly on cognitive tasks, but curiosity demands play and unstructured free time.” If we want to create a country which is less polarized and filled with kids who are not only smart but also creative and able to work successfully with others, we should rethink the current system.
Indeed, we should “orient our meritocracy around a definition of human ability that takes more account of traits like motivation, generosity, sensitivity, and passion, then our schools, families, and workplaces will readjust in fundamental ways.” Is that all? Seriously, Brooks says that the answer is schools that are centered on “project-based learning.” He is excited about schools where students “work together on real world projects” or where they try to “make the entire school day look more like extracurriculars — where passion is aroused and teamwork is essential.”
This all sounds amazing, except none of it is new and none of it has worked. If you have had a child attend a public or private elementary school in this century, you have likely encountered “project-based learning.” A 2011 article on the website Edutopia describes something like what I have heard for well over a decade at back-to-school nights at the public, private and parochial schools my kids have attended:
“When the project approach takes hold in the classroom, students gain opportunities to engage in real-world problem solving too. Instead of learning about nutrition in the abstract, students act as consultants to develop a healthier school cafeteria menu. Rather than learning about the past from a textbook, students become historians as they make a documentary about an event that changed their community.”
If you have watched your children engage in this type of learning, you’ve probably heard their frustration, too. First, group projects inevitably end up with one or two kids doing all the work. Ah, but you say the real world requires group projects so why not teach kids how to do this early? In the real world, assignments are clear and people who don’t do them get fired. In 7th grade, there are no consequences and the teacher rarely finds out which student did what and, more importantly, which student knows what.
Which leads us to the real problem with project-based learning. Daniel Buck, the author of “What’s Wrong With Our Schools?,” has delved into the research behind this and made two important findings. First, “Adopting (project-based learning) had no clear impact on either literacy (as measured by the Progress in English assessment) or student engagement with school and learning.”
And second, “The impact evaluation indicated that PBL may have had a negative impact on the literacy attainment of pupils entitled to free school meals.”
In other words, the very kids Brooks thinks he is helping by pushing this not-so-cutting-edge educational theory are actually suffering as a result. The problems with project-based learning are not dissimilar from the problems of “balanced literacy,” which asked kids to stare at words and try to recognize them rather than just telling them how to sound them out. The kids who are getting less explicit language instruction at home are the ones who are inevitably the most frustrated and fall behind.
As Buck writes, “While we learn elementary skills like verbal language through play and experimentation, more complex topics and skills — ancient history, scientific concepts, written language, the stuff of culture — require explicit instruction and practice.”
Some educators mock this idea as “drill and kill” because they think that it destroys kids’ sense of wonder and their desire to learn. They prefer teachers to be a “guide on the side” rather than a “sage on the stage.” But kids need knowledge and they need cognitive skills as a foundation for all the group projects. And low-income kids are not going to be able to get those things from their parents the way that well-off kids do.
Moreover, as Buck points out, “projects can be wildly inefficient. Time spent distracted, dealing with the project itself, figuring out software, and suchlike is less time for covering models, receiving direct instruction, practicing, and other productive uses of class time.”
Anyone who has wondered why their 7th graders are still producing dioramas will be acutely aware of this problem. And turning students from less privileged backgrounds into documentary filmmakers or menu consultants is not going to fix this.
The mid-20th century idea behind a meritocracy for college admissions was that kids across this country used to receive a decent public education regardless of their background. Now students from less privileged backgrounds don’t even have a guarantee they will learn how to read. If we want to fix the education gap and the income gap and the social polarization that Brooks decries, we have to make schools teach kids stuff again.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Deseret News contributor and the author of “No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives,” among other books.