Why We're Neo-Traditionalists

This one is from both of us.

Is your pedagogy student centered? Are your assessments authentic? Is your curriculum relevant to today’s students? Are your lessons focused on 21st-century skills rather than mere content? If so, you’re an educational progressive. We’re not. At 4QM we’ve recently taken to calling ourselves “neo-traditionalists.” Here are three defining characteristics of our approach.

1. We believe that content comes first.

People can’t think about what they don’t know, so the first goal of school should be for students to learn stuff. If you think learning content is irrelevant today because of smartphones or AI, you misunderstand how the human brain works. All the “critical thinking skills” that progressives want to teach kids are predicated on content knowledge. If your working memory is tied up figuring out your search terms or reading whatever ChatGPT just told you (hallucinations and all!), you don’t have the cognitive resources left over to “think critically” about anything. If you don’t learn a lot, you won’t be able to think a lot.

The original educational progressives were rebelling against 19th century schools that required students to memorize content and recite it back, full stop. They were right to complain about that. But today’s progressives are totally wrong to denigrate content knowledge. You can’t ask intelligent questions if you don’t know where to begin asking. That’s why our mantra at 4QM is “Story First!”

2. We believe that “relevance” is irrelevant.

When educational progressives trumpet “relevance” they sometimes talk about the “real world” or “authentic” experiences, as if things that happen outside of school are ipso facto more interesting to students than things that happen inside school. At other times they push the notion that children’s interests never wander far from themselves and things they’ve directly experienced. Both of these premises are demonstrably false. If you’ve ever seen a four year old who is excited and deeply knowledgeable about dinosaurs, or a teenager who is entranced by the Roman Empire, you know that the progressive “relevance” trope is simply wrong. You know what gets young people excited about content? Learning it in a way that helps them succeed with reasonable effort and guidance. Learning it in a way that builds their knowledge coherently. Learning it in a way that reveals the structure of the discipline beneath the content.

The original educational progressives complained that learning dead languages like Latin and Greek were not relevant to most students. They had a point. But today’s progressives are wrong to think that all kids care about is their own here and now. Students become interested in content if we teach them well and structure their learning so that they can succeed.

3. We believe that technology is a distraction.

Recent technological innovations—smartphones and social media—were explicitly designed to be distracting. But even the older ones—computers and laptops—are just as distracting in the classroom. That’s because computer technology does not change the essential task of education: to teach kids important content and how to think about it. Technology puts a shiny bauble in between kids and learning. Technology is expensive for schools and without educational benefits for most students. Most defenses of technology in the classroom are just variations on the “relevance” arguments addressed above: we need computers in the classroom because they’re important in the ‘real world,’ or because kids are familiar with them already. This makes no sense. Airplanes are important in the real world, but we don’t need them in the classroom. Kids are familiar with microwave ovens, but we don’t need them in the classroom.

Instead of getting distracted by flashy new inventions, we should use technology that actually helps kids learn. The 4QM curriculum is built around students articulating their thoughts through writing. By hand. Writing is an old technology—one that doesn’t distract from learning, but enhances it.

These three principles separate us from educational progressives. We’re “neo” traditionalists because we’re not advocating a return to 18th century schooling—we acknowledge that educational progressives got some important things right. But today they get too many things wrong.

How should students prepare for the new world? Learn a lot. Think a lot. Read and write a lot. Argue and get feedback. Sounds like school, right? We’ve got work to do.

J.B. and G.S.