[Karin Chenoweth, author of It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, is currently with The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization. Before joining The Education Trust, Chenoweth wrote the Homeroom column for the Montgomery and Prince George’s Extras of The Washington Post, which gained a national readership for its focus on schools and education.]

... For decades there has been a systematic debasement of the role that knowledge plays in an education. This was exemplified for me in a talk I recently heard by a well-known education professor who said that he didn’t care if kids knew the kind of “trivial pursuit” question of where Kansas is. What he cared about, he said, was whether kids could “think critically” about the causes and effects of the Civil War. Any student of American history could have told him that knowing the location of Kansas is integral to understanding the causes of the Civil War. But by pushing for a system of education that would expect students to expound on subjects without the requisite background knowledge, that professor is helping perpetuate a very shallow education that does not serve students or society well.

A few years ago I wrote a column about this issue of background knowledge for The Washington Post. I used as an example a paragraph from a Washington Post op-ed column written by Atlantic Magazine editor Michael Kelly, who was subsequently killed while covering the war in Iraq.

I wrote about my suggestion to my daughter that she read Kelly’s column, and that I watched her face cloud over while she was reading the following paragraph:

The chief points for the “axis of evil” doctrine may be seen in considering the chief points against it… It is simplistic, or simple-minded, as the French foreign minister, whose name is Petain or Maginot or something, sniffed last week. C’est vrai. It is indeed “simplisme” to pick fights with evil regimes just because those regimes want to kill you or enslave you or at least force you to knuckle under and collaborate in their evil, when one might choose the far safer and far more profitable path of shrugging one’s shoulders in a fetchingly Gallic fashion and sending one’s Jews off to the camps, as one’s new masters in government request. On the other hand, as the foreign minister might have noticed, the French may today enjoy springtime in Paris without the annoying sounds of jackboots all over the place, and the reason for that was the simple-minded determination of the British, the Russians and the Americans to fight the Nazis and to die by the millions, in order to make the world safe for, among other creatures, future French foreign ministers. “Simplisme” works. Against evil, it is the only thing that does.

Seeing her befuddlement, I tried to read the passage through my daughter’s eyes, and I saw how incomprehensible it was if you didn’t know:

1) who Petain was

2) what the Maginot Line was

3) that the word Gallic is used as a synonym for French

4) that the stereotype of the French people is that they express their deep-rooted cynicism and fatalism through the body language of shrugs

5) that France was occupied, with little resistance, by the Nazis and was for the most part complicit in sending Jews to labor and death camps

6) that jackboots were the favored footwear of Nazi soldiers

7) that the alliance that defeated the Nazis and thus freed France from Nazi rule consisted primarily of the British, Russians, and Americans

8) a little bit of French—not much, but enough not to get thrown by the words “simplisme,” and “c’est vrai.”

9) that Paris in springtime is considered one of the great places in the world.

10) a lot of other stuff that is in the background of the facts listed above—such as, the world is organized into countries and areas, and France and Germany are two countries in an area known as Europe, and Paris is the major city of France, and the Nazis were fascists who controlled Germany from 1933 until their defeat in World War II, and on and on.

My daughter knew some of that list but not all of it, and she hadn’t absorbed any of it enough to be able to draw on the knowledge automatically and thus be able to understand Kelly’s elliptical and allusive paragraph.

A very skilled reader in many ways, my high school daughter was unable to read the Op-Ed page of The Washington Post because she didn’t have sufficient background knowledge. That doesn’t mean that she should have sat down with the above list and memorized it. No one would argue that kids should be drilled in disconnected facts. But studying the rich, interesting history of World War I and II with depth and coherence would have gotten her most of the above information in a connected way, and she had never done that. That wasn’t a tragedy in her case—she had family members who could fill her in.

However, as long as we don’t think very carefully about how children build the background knowledge necessary for good reading comprehension, we are going to see the kinds of results that we saw a couple of weeks ago. That was when an international reading comparison (PIRLS) showed that American fourth-graders are stagnating while their peers in other countries are moving forward in being able to gain meaning from text. One of the interesting findings of the study was that 68 percent of students in the U.S. receive more than six hours a week of reading instruction compared with just 25 percent internationally. Students in the U.S. receiving more than six hours of reading instruction are scoring lower than students receiving three to six hours of reading instruction (538 versus 546, respectively).

To put it yet another way, we really might want to make sure that all that time our children spend in reading instruction is time well spent.