One could argue that the University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham is one of the most influential Americans of the 21st century. Willingham has observed that we have learned more about how people learn in the last 25 years than in the previous 2,500 combined. His book Why Don’t Students Like School? examines how that recently acquired understanding can be used to accelerate learning.
Yet, however great his influence has been in the United States, it has been far greater in my own country, England. In fact, while the U.S. is perhaps the world’s largest exporter of educational ideas, it is an “equal opportunity exporter”—pushing out transformative ideas both powerful and catastrophically misinformed. Our efforts in England across a decade to understand the difference between good and bad ideas in education has led to a transformation of our schools from moribund to global leadership at exactly the time the U.S. has continued to struggle.
Many “progressivist” ideas that came to dominate teaching emanated from Teachers College Columbia in New York in the 1920s under such luminaries as William Heard Kilpatrick and John Dewey, based on the ideas of the 18th century Romantic philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He thought that a rigorous academic education stifled the natural creativity and goodness of children; better to have them learn through “self-discovery” or projects than by teacher-led instruction, with less emphasis on the importance of knowledge and more on a set of amorphous skills such as learning how to learn and critical thinking.
These ideas carry different names and have different emphases. But whether it’s “constructivist,” “child-centered,” or “progressivist,” the results wherever they are tried are the same: a weaker education system where children’s life chances, particular those from poorer families, suffer.
Over time in Britain this ideology was increasingly absorbed by our schools, from the 1970s to its peak in the 2000s, and it did enormous damage to our education system. The U.K. plummeted down the OECD rankings of nations’ education standards, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In reading, the U.K. fell from seventh in the year 2000 to 25th by 2009 and in math from 8th to 27th over that period.
When the Conservative Party came into Government in the U.K. in 2010, the newly appointed Education Secretary, Michael Gove, and I were determined to reverse this decline, and to do this we knew we had to challenge the child-centered, progressivist ideology that we believed had been its cause.
In setting about our reforms, we were greatly influenced by the writings of another University of Virginia academic, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., whose book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, challenged the progressivists who said what matters was not knowledge but skills such as critical thinking and problem solving. He pointed out that these skills (important though they are) come from having deep and broad knowledge and that schools that focused on these skills at the expense of knowledge would, counter-intuitively, fail to instill these very skills in their pupils. Only a knowledge-rich curriculum, properly taught, can help develop a student’s ability to think and to be creative.
Daniel Willingham’s research into cognitive science explained that higher-order thinking skills take place in the working memory, which is small—only able to handle half a dozen new pieces of information. Try asking someone to recite ten phone numbers you’ve just read to them. But, of course, all intellectual activity requires more than six bits of information. For Willingham, education is about ensuring students have access to vast amounts of knowledge, secure and understood, in long term memory.
The work of Hirsch and Willingham informed our far-reaching education reform program in England between 2010 and 2024, which has helped drive wholesale change to the quality of the curriculum, to teaching methods, and in the reading ability and math attainment of young people emerging from our schools. I believe it played a significant role in in England rising from 27th in math in 2009 to 11th in 2022 (the U.S. is 33rd).
In reading, we required schools to teach children to read using phonics, with them learning the 44 sounds of our 26-letter alphabet and how to blend those sounds into words. The alternative method, which swept the world from the 1960s, encouraged children to intuit a new word from the context of the story or the grammar rather than by sounding out the letters. Teaching reading using phonics has helped take England to fourth in the world for the reading ability of nine- and ten-year-olds (the PIRLS study).
Phonics is gradually being re-introduced around the world. In the U.S., broadcast journalist Emily Hanford, with her exposé of the scandal of the widespread use of failed methods for teaching children to read in American schools, is having an impact in many U.S. States through the science-of-reading movement.
And this is happening not only in the U.S., but in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, too. Six Australian States have introduced England’s Phonics Screening Check—a test for six-year-olds we pioneered in 2011 to ensure schools were teaching children to decode words using phonics. New Zealand is doing the same this year, and their Education Minister, Erica Stanford, has abolished their failed skills-based curriculum and replaced it with one based on a rich content of knowledge, as has Flanders in Belgium.
The insurgency has begun. Across the world, the failed progressivist agenda is being challenged and overturned. American thinkers and educationalists—such as Doug Lemov, who wrote the best-selling guide, Teach Like a Champion, as well as Willingham and Hirsch—are at the center of this movement. Is it too much to hope that their ideas will have even more impact in the United States?
