When you have a kid after spending a good portion of your life training to be an academic, you tend to go out and read a lot about child-rearing, mostly out of habit. As a result you learn a bunch of interesting facts, some of which may or may not be helpful for parenting, but that will indeed make you the life of the party (assuming it's a very dorky party) when you rattle off said interesting facts to an astonished and surprisingly receptive audience.
But you also get hit over the head with the simple disconnect between what years of studying child psychology and biology has generated as a body of knowledge and the radically different and poorly named "body of knowledge" that animates political reality. Take, for example, the exemplar of incendiary stupidity known as the No Child Left Behind Act, which has the almost paradoxical distinction of pushing education in the absolutely wrong direction - towards routinized tests rather than critical thinking - and then failing miserably in its efforts to actually do anything with that push, thanks to inadequate funding and patently absurd test material.
Now we can appreciate that the body of knowledge generated by child psychology is contingent and laced with all sorts of assumptions that bias and limit its potency, even as we acknowledge that there is a danger in letting a myth of its potency become too dominant. Nevertheless, when you read these books, you'll encounter a variety of people reporting on and describing what the field thinks it knows. And then you'll come across someone synthesizing that knowledge, someone who is writing about how different types of learning literally rewrite how the brain works in children, and who argues convincingly that this rewriting carries over into the corresponding ways of thinking for adults. And then you start to worry about this, because if it's true then it means that early education plays a really fundamental role in shaping how adults will behave and what capacity they will have for certain types of thought. And then you'll see that same person, after all that synthesis, remark:
While we still want to give children every chance to succeed in traditional learning environments, we now appreciate that learning may happen in many ways, through varied channels. Moreover, what has been so important in schools – a facility to memorize rules and large amounts of data – is becoming increasingly obsolete as computers do these tasks better and faster. Students still need basic academic skills, of course, but in a dynamic, fast-changing technological world, different forms of intelligence are assuming new importance. For today's kids the ability to solve all kinds of problems, get motivated, think reflectively and flexibly, synthesize data, and actively pursue learning throughout life will be important hallmarks of success. (Jane Healy, Your Child's Growing Mind, 218)
That was, I believe, first written in 1987, thought it may have been 1994. Regardless, it sees print years before politicians initiated the ill-fated disaster that is No Child Left Behind. It is, in effect, an argument against over-emphasizing fact-based learning, not because such learning fails, but because it fails to account for the contemporary technological climate. Obviously the politicians who embraced Bush's education "reform" did not or chose not to pay attention. And soon, in a just a handful of years, the first generation raised almost exclusively on routinized testing will begin flooding college classes, and the full extent of the damage will become apparent. I wonder if, in the meantime, with a new congress at hand, we might have a real debate that challenges not the funding or the metrics for No Child Left Behind but that rather focuses on the problem of metrics altogether and the general inadequacy of educational funding in this country. I am not holding my breath.