> That the way we teach what we teach is often more important than the what.
Partially agreed.
Whatever we teach today will be solved or obsolete tomorrow anyway. In fact, in school we learn methods that are never used in real life anyway. So the "what" is not fully the point.
It's how we teach it and what the point of it. The point of it is to teach how to learn things, how to practice, how to become experts, how to struggle with them and persevere eventually. It is not a sort of an exercise for our minds, but it is exactly an exercise for our minds. That's the point.
The "what" matters in that it is a foundation of knowledge upon which future knowledge and understanding is built.
So, I agree with the spirit of the argument but it is a bit more nuanced.
Based on my experiences with the teachers my kids had a decade or so ago, all you would have to do is find a way to test for it and then put it on the state-mandated test that is used to evaluate schools.
Often the only thing that is taught is what is on those tests.
That’s a good thing.
Assessing and measuring student knowledge is very important. Impossible to evaluate and improve current teaching methods otherwise.
The one-two punch of Goodhart's law and the McNamara fallacy bites hard here, though. We only measure things we can easily quantify, and then we optimize around those measurements, destroying their efficacy as second-order indicators of the things we couldn't figure out how to measure.
For example is the purpose of educating children about history A) to give them a systemic, if somewhat cursory, understanding of the evolution of society, in order allow them to contextualize the present? or B) ensure they know a list of a hundred or so people and events that happened?
It is much easier to quantify the latter.
I somewhat disagree- I think a lot of what is taught today will be useful in most people’s lifetimes.
While I agree with this, it seems like by this measure the educational system is failing in most places.