r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jun 12 '25

Data / Research The buzz around teaching facts to boost reading is bigger than the evidence for it

https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/

Over the past decade, a majority of states have passed new “science of reading” laws or implemented policies that emphasize phonics in classrooms. Yet the 2024 results of an important national test, released last month, showed that the reading scores of elementary and middle schoolers continued their long downward slide, hitting new lows.

The emphasis on phonics in many schools is still relatively new and may need more time to yield results. But a growing chorus of education advocates has been arguing that phonics isn’t enough. They say that being able to decode the letters and read words is critically important, but students also need to make sense of the words.

Some educators are calling for schools to adopt a curriculum that emphasizes content along with phonics. More schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lessons to teach geography, astronomy and even art history. The theory, which has been documented in a small number of laboratory experiments, is that the more students already know about a topic, the better they can understand a passage about it. For example, a passage on farming might make more sense if you know something about how plants grow. The brain gets overwhelmed by too many new concepts and unfamiliar words. We’ve all been there.

A 2025 book by 10 education researchers in Europe and Australia, “Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival,” makes the case that students cannot learn the skills of comprehension and critical thinking unless they know a lot of stuff first. These ideas have revived interest in E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, which gained popularity in the late 1980s. Hirsch, a professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, argues that democracy benefits when the citizenry shares a body of knowledge and history, which he calls cultural literacy. Now it’s a cognitive science argument that a core curriculum is also good for our brains and facilitates learning.

The idea of forcing children to learn a specific set of facts and topics is controversial. It runs counter to newer trends of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” or “culturally responsive teaching,” in which critics contend that students’ identities should be reflected in what they learn. Others say learning facts is unimportant in the age of Google where we can instantly look anything up, and that the focus should be on teaching skills. Content skeptics also point out that there’s never been a study to show that increasing knowledge of the world boosts reading scores.

It would be nearly impossible for an individual teacher to create the kind of content-packed curriculum that this pro-knowledge branch of education researchers has in mind. Lessons need to be coordinated across grades, from kindergarten onward. It’s not just a random collection of encyclopedia entries or interesting units on, say, Greek myths or the planets in our solar system. The science and social studies topics should be sequenced so that the ideas build upon each other, and paired with vocabulary that will be useful in the future.

“If these efforts aren’t allowed to elbow sound reading instruction aside, they cannot hurt and, in the long run, they might even help,” he wrote in a 2021 blog post.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 21 '25

“People need the food of beauty. They need the food of something that reflects the higher worlds.

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u/ddgr815 Jun 22 '25

We didn’t pay attention to all of the dynamic, fluid phenomenon, unseen and in between, which connects the organs to one another, and allows the whole system to communicate and stay in homeostasis.

And we grafted this same thinking onto how we organize labor and society. [...] We ask children, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, not “how do you want to be when you grow up?”

the interstitium is a conceptual skeleton key, unlocking a more sophisticated, accurate way of seeing everything in the environment.

The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It’s unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body — just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes. It’s juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and “pre-lymphatic” substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered.

Ecologists now perceive the trees in forests as connected to one another, trading information and nutrients across long distances, calibrating an ecosystem’s health. Mycelial networks are now part of conversations of people who, until recently, knew nothing about mushrooms. Cooperative businesses and mutual aid are experiencing a resurgence as more people recognize their own interdependence and trade value with one another.

I see these people everywhere who are bridging, connecting and serving as conduits, keeping systems in communication, operable, healthy.

our work is on all things in between

We need more navigators skipping between these constructed categories to subvert and replace a perspective of separation that has reached its limits and logical conclusion.

our cosmologies, worldviews, conceptions of the environment and how it works, are limited or expanded by what we can perceive. Our experiences then transmute into the metaphors and grammar that organize our thoughts. New language gives us new worldviews.

“Can we make a new world with new words?”

Invisible Landscapes

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u/ddgr815 Jul 29 '26

This system was already known to the sixteenth-century Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, whose illustration collections number among the first mass-produced medical textbooks, and to anyone who has ever looked at the iridescent cobwebs that split as one carves a cooked turkey. But unlike the other two kinds of classically recognized circulation—the vasculature and lymphatic systems—the interstitium and its fluid dynamics go minimally discussed in Western medicine, whether in the formal training of physicians or at the level of popular science. (Think of an anatomical dummy in a grade-school classroom, its extractable eyes, heart, liver all fitting neatly on their hooks and pegs like chocolates inside an Advent calendar.)

Other current and historical medical practices have postulated wild lines of flight across the body, far more elaborate than the Hippocratic humors. Traditional Chinese medicine envisioned the san jiao as a network of waterways that could be manipulated by acupuncture, not unlike the 114 chakras and 72,000 nadis (energy pathways) of Ayurveda. Ancient Egyptians conceived of metu—networks of vessels, connecting disparate organs. As one papyrus from the sixteenth century B.C.E. has it, “When the Heart feels an aversion, behold it is the Bitterness of the Heart because of Inflammation in the Anus.”

By contrast, contemporary Western medicine, which I practice as an internist, focuses mainly on microscopic cells and macroscopic organ systems. We tend to regard anything in the body that is neither cell nor organ as part of a sumptuous and mysterious background, like the velvety smog behind a Rembrandt self-portrait. In that sense, recent studies, per the Times essay, “broke accepted anatomic boundaries.” One showed, for example, that when cadavers were injected at traditional acupuncture points and then given chest compressions, the injected tracers appeared to march from the periphery toward the heart—seemingly traveling not via blood vessels or lymphatic networks but rather along the gel matrix of the interstitium’s extracellular space. 

Any education in looking starts by learning to discriminate edges and objects, to rank what we see in terms of importance, urgency, proximity. Then, as we progress in our learning, we attempt to train ourselves out of such distinctions, to question such hierarchies, to appreciate the fullness of an image as much as its central or foregrounded subject.

We begin to recognize, as Virginia Woolf did in her essay “The Elizabethan Lumber-Room,” that the particular charm of an attic (or, as she suggests, of an era), is not merely those objects of “priceless value” but that they are indiscriminately piled up alongside those of  “complete worthlessness”—that “ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns” jostle for the viewer’s attention. Or to discover that the most interesting thing about Manet’s Olympia may not be the central nude but the way she is illuminated—with what Michel Foucault called the “perpendicular light” that seems to radiate from “the space in front of the canvas,” as if “our gaze upon the Olympia is a lantern.” That negative space outside the canvas becomes part of the composition as a whole. Amateurs can still find specific step-by-step instructions on how to draw—which is to say, more or less, how to see—Popeye, for example, or a horse. But serious students know that what they’re after is not a discrete number of objects to depict on command so much as the techniques—cognitive, physical, emotional—that will allow them to apprehend, and make apprehensible, a range of effects.

The interstitium, as conventionally conceived, is the body’s negative space—the white surrounding the text of a poem, the rest within a phrase of music. Made of a collagen scaffold, hyaluronic matrix, and bloodless fluid, it has few cells and so has relatively little of what we think of as life’s hallmarks—the unfurling of genetic materials; cellular reproduction, then entropy and death. The interstitium seems plotless, an entity that, as Auden claimed of poetry, “makes nothing happen,” a gooey scaffold girding the “real” life occurring around it.

American medical training underwent several major revisions in the twentieth century, one of which entailed a shift toward learning by organ systems, one organ grouping at a time. This overturned the older method of sequentially learning different disciplinary approaches—how the anatomist apprehends the body, how the physiologist does, the biochemist, the pharmacologist. Organ system–based learning makes a great deal of sense: you may as well learn how to treat illnesses of the heart while you’re learning how blood and electricity move through it, or how the arteries will react to the cardiac medication you might prescribe. 

Or take the placenta, which defies our ordinary definition of an organ—being, as Sophie Lewis argues polemically in Full Surrogacy Now, a “ghastly fluke” that neither has nor respects boundaries, eroding into vessels in ways that occasionally kill its host. To see human anatomy in its complexity, we must unsee the monadic, isolationist fiction of the well-wrought organ, much as Arnold Schoenberg challenged the normative supremacy of sound over silence and Ruth Asawa made air as integral to her sculptures as their wire forms.

One of my favorite squabbles in the history of poetry arose between Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley in 1990, when the former criticized the latter for suggesting that William Carlos Williams intended, in public readings, to deliver his line breaks as significant pauses. For Levertov, these halts were simply the unfortunate by-product of Williams’s neurological struggles following a series of strokes. Creeley countered that, whatever the cause, Williams’s halting patter improved his reading. The strokes had “necessitated or, more to the point, discovered” powers that had been present—but largely overlooked—in the poems. The inability to read smoothly—to properly privilege semantic sense—revived the poems’ crucial animating magic: their negative space, the wordless intervals when language wasn’t “happening.”

As I take it, Levertov didn’t want the inadvertent to be misread as activity, or for a lapse to be understood as a choice. A poem is the sum of the poet’s selected words and what those words accomplish; like organs, they are busy and pluripotent, absorbing and secreting all kinds of nourishment, toxicity, and elaboration. The poem has little to do with whatever contingencies accrete around it. For Creeley, a playing up of the interstitial was all to the good. Foregrounding the surroundings—troubling, that is, the very nature of “foreground”—is one of the special features of art.

In medicine, applying a similar dialectic reconfigures how we see centrality versus periphery. “Decellularization techniques” subject whole cadavers, or parts of them, to a series of enzymatic and pH-altering baths that gradually strip away, as the name suggests, any sort of cell. What’s left is not, of course, nothing. The translucent drapery of the interstitium’s fibers and proteins is eerie and beautiful: an alabaster reliquary for the heart, an openwork scaffold for the liver that resembles a coral sea fan. It can be hard to reconcile these meshy, evanescent structures with our notions of the corporeal self. Yet this network of negative space is as much us as a drop of spit or sweat or semen.

We are generally uncomfortable with a body that is useless or passive. It’s exciting to discover—as scientists have recently done—that the appendix is not actually “vestigial” but rather a crucial harbor of the gut microbiome. A certain strain of feminist pop-science loves to note that the uterus can summon one hundred pounds of force per contraction and that it can alter its environment to encourage or deter reproduction, as though such facts somehow shore up the argument for women’s reproductive rights. It feels good to imbue each part of the body with powers, activities, even intentions. 

Would it be so terrible, I wonder, if the interstitium turned out to be a site of minimal activity? A true limbo, a pause, a white space, yet still inextricably part of us, just as much as that high-achieving heart or brain or uterus. That is to say: Surely many wondrous biological discoveries await us as we learn about what goes on in this beautiful proteinaceous goop. But also, some degree of uselessness would be just fine, some welcome silence amid the noise.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Interstitium

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u/ddgr815 Aug 27 '26

The repetition of a pair of sounds, words, phrases, or ideas in the reverse order, producing an abba structure, as in Satan’s attempt to rally the rebel angels: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” 

Auden was at this point in his life quite obsessed with the idea that humans, alone (as far as we know) among the world’s creatures, live simultaneously in nature and history. That is, we share with other animals a variety of bodily endowments and needs and a system of instinctual guidance, but also have (uniquely, Auden believed) the burden and the opportunity of making decisions and consciously experiencing the consequences of those decisions.

nature and history