‘ “You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”‘ — Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Within the course of my short teaching career, one fact has been tattooed onto my clammy teacher’s palm: kids like to soak up facts in a way that would — at least superficially — do justice to Gradgrind’s mithering comment above. Children’s brains are wired to take on new words and linguistic devices from the day they are born, and their ability to do so remains strong all the way through adolescence. Since the brain has not undergone the pruning that renders adult brains less versatile but more focused, children are very good at quickly onboarding a wide, superficial dearth of data. From the armchair scientist’s basic logic, this would make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: learn about everything whilst you are still in your parents’ care, then put that to use when you’ve finally flown the nest.

Since starting teaching English, I have noticed that the children are drawn to two things: story-telling and linguistic devices. As basic as this may sound, students find it easier to learn things that they find interesting — and, surprisingly, they have never been drawn to lessons on ‘Use of English in the workplace,’ or ‘How to create a formal letter-head.’ Although these are very useful skills to acquire, their position in the curriculum should be much lower than the ‘knowledge’ sides.

In anecdotal defence of my view, I have seen lower-ability students sit in enraptured silence as they hear a story read to them, often forgetting their wiley distraction techniques to sit suspended in the narrative. On the other hand, they enjoy the much-researched dopamine hit of positive affirmation, which is most easily obtained when the student gets a fact right. Granted, my subject is not one of the ‘fact-based’ ones, but there is an undercurrent of linguistic facts and story knowledge that enriches the student’s understanding of the text and their mastery of the English Language.

Knowledge is vocabulary, and vocabulary unlocks the most abstract and complex ideas. Educationalist E.D. Hirsch made the radical statement that teaching knowledge in English schools, especially to less advantaged students, narrowed what is now dubbed as the infamous Pupil Premium:Non-Pupil Premium attainment gap. Hirsch argues that there is a snowball ‘Matthew Effect’, taken from Matthew 25: ‘To those who have, more will be given and to those who have not, even what they have will be taken away.’ Although this statement has been taken out of its biblical context, the sentiment is clear: those who ‘have’ the knowledge will have access to the higher echelons of reasoning, whilst those who ‘have not’ the prerequisite knowledge have not got the keys to the higher-security vaults.

Putting knowledge at the heart of curriculum, from a pragmatic standpoint, yields better test results and it is with bashful shoelace-gazing that I admit this to be somewhat important. According to OfSTED’s ‘Research for Education Inspection Framework’ (Jan. 2019), increased teacher subject knowledge correlates with students’ knowledge and thereby a student’s academic test results. However, this report is certainly not saying that there should be no element of skills-based learning, and it takes a carefully unbiased standpoint: it explores the idea that students must have the skills necessary for expression and application of knowledge. It develops this by emphasising the need of each curriculum’s knowledge:skills ratio to be tailor-made for school demographic — i.e. ‘meeting the students where they’re at.’ Using lesson time in learning to layout a formal letter-head may be of more use to some students than it is to others: some may have been less exposed to formal English at home. In other words, know your students. Must skills and knowledge have equal weighting in a curriculum, though? I think not.