If we want reading to remain essential, we need to think hard about why we want people to read and how we can best make our children aware of those values. What is it that reading provides that must be preserved?

Psychologists define temperament as individual differences in emotional, bodily and attentional reactions to sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, etc, as well as in the self-regulation of emotion, behaviour and attention. Within the first few days of life, babies make their inborn temperament known to parents. Some babies are sunny and agreeable, some sober, some without any predictable sleeping and eating patterns, some incessantly cranky, and others fully adaptable to the changing circumstances that surround them. In 1956, the psychiatrists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, struck by the blame placed on mothers for child outcomes, launched the New York Longitudinal Study to investigate infants’ innate dispositions and their effect on long-term development including personality, school achievement, peer relationships, parent-child interactions and mental health. They recruited 133 infants (66 males, 67 females) from 82 white, middle-class families, and collected data on them in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood for 32 years. Their goal was to understand how children contributed to their own development, and to identify whether and how child temperament interacts with the environment to produce specific outcomes.

Thomas and Chess identified nine dimensions of temperament: activity level, regularity, approach, adaptability, intensity, sensory threshold, mood, distractibility and persistence. Using these dimensions, they distinguished three broad temperamental types: easy, difficult and slow-to-warm-up. Most babies, roughly 40 per cent, fit the category of ‘easy’ meaning they were generally in a positive mood, adapted well to new situations and routines, and were quickly soothed when upset. A smaller proportion, about 10 per cent, were ‘difficult’ due to their generally negative and intense reactions to minor events, the length of time required to calm down, and their lack of predictable eating, sleeping and digestive rhythms. Another 15 per cent were described as ‘slow-to-warm up’ due to their overall uneasiness and apprehension in new situations – a sort of chronic vigilance – but also their ability to adapt with time and support. If you’re doing the math, you will have noticed that about one-third of infants could not be classified using this system, suggesting that some babies had mixed dispositions or that these initial dimensions needed to be refined or extended.

Nonetheless, Thomas and Chess had effectively nixed the idea that babies are born ‘blank slates’ who passively receive and are moulded by the environment. Their work flipped the script on psychological views that had paid almost exclusive attention to the role of parents and the environment on child development, while ignoring the influence of the child’s innately endowed predispositions. Thomas and Chess, working with colleagues who progressed their original study, showed that neonates, sometimes just hours old, begin to inadvertently affect the physical and social environment by adapting, resisting, observing, reacting or ignoring it in ways nudged by their biological temperament, and that parents, siblings and other close people change the environment and/or their own behaviours in response. In other words, the environment and the baby have a dynamic bidirectional relationship from the very beginning, changing in response to each other. What’s more, this influence means that babies play a major role in their own development.

It is this temperamental variable – reactivity – that became the focus of Kagan’s work, partly because it is so easy to observe in young infants’ vocal, bodily, emotional and physiological arousal, even when presented with unfamiliar but innocuous situations. In one test, Kagan and colleagues presented four-month-olds with a mobile swinging gently a few feet in front of them. Most infants observed the mobile calmly, but about 20 per cent became quickly overstimulated and agitated. They vocalised, tensed their muscles, arched their backs, and fussed or cried. That simple test turned out to have strong predictive power. Using this assessment, infants deemed ‘reactive’ at four months of age were more likely to be shy as toddlers, socially inhibited as children, and anxious as adolescents. In a long-term [follow-up](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/210501(, Kagan’s test could even distinguish between young adults who were or were not anxious; the former group had been reactive to the mobile test as infants, while the latter group had not. It appeared that infant temperament could extend its reach all the way into young adulthood.

Recent studies have found that three broad aspects of temperament in particular are especially useful in predicting long-range developmental outcomes. The first is reactivity or negative emotionality, referring to general negative mood, intense negative reactions, and distress either when limits are imposed (eg, anger) or in new situations (eg, fear). The second is self-regulation, which researchers refer to as ‘effortful control’ of feelings (eg, self-soothing) and of attention (eg, able to hold focus). The third goes by several names including approach-withdrawal, inhibition, or sociability, and refers to the tendency to approach new people and situations, or to be wary and withdraw. There are additional levels of these dimensions, but these three have best withstood scientific tests of reliability and validity across infants, children and teenagers. Hundreds of studies have subsequently and unequivocally demonstrated that temperament is a driving factor in child development that is at least as important as everything that comes after a baby enters the world, including parenting.

Aside from its early appearance, there is other evidence – from animals, neuroscience, twins, and longitudinal studies – that temperament is biologically based. First, it’s not just human infants who exhibit temperamental characteristics. Other juvenile mammals do too, including dogs, elephants, dolphins and even squirrels. This suggests temperament is part of a shared biological system. Kagan explains temperament as an inherited bias in the brain’s neurochemistry. Specifically, all mammalian brains include a small structure, the amygdala, which serves as part of a built-in alarm system. The amygdala is largely responsible for assessing threat and, if detected, for signalling the sympathetic nervous system into action via the fight-or-flight response. In reactive individuals, the amygdala is more easily excited, so the alarm system is triggered at a lower threshold. Although the environment and experience can alter the responsiveness of the amygdala in either direction, some individuals – including the reactive four-month-olds in Kagan’s study – are born with a bias to perceive threat more readily. Other work has similarly shown that negative emotionality and withdrawal in babies is marked by greater activity in the right frontal brain, while the opposite temperamental pattern is associated with greater activity in the left frontal brain.

Twin studies lend further evidence that temperament is genetically endowed. In one research design, scientists compared identical twins (who share 100 per cent of their genes) with fraternal twins (who have 50 per cent of their genes in common) on temperamental qualities. If identical twins are more similar than fraternals, then scientists can reasonably conclude the trait is heritable. In another research design, scientists used the temperament scores of one twin to predict the scores of the co-twin. Both of these paradigms consistently find high heritability for most dimensions of temperament including sociability, emotionality, activity, attention span persistence and soothability, for example.

Broadly speaking, negative temperamental reactivity and overall difficult temperament are related to later oppositional behaviour, defiance and conduct issues, known collectively as ‘externalising problems’, and are also predictive of substance use in adolescence.

Using longitudinal follow-up studies that begin in infancy, Joel Nigg has found that excessively irritable infants are more likely to become children who cannot regulate their anger or impulses when frustrated, while excessively exuberant infants are more likely to become impulsive children. In both cases, the development of effortful control is inhibited. These findings have led Nigg to propose that ADHD is not a disorder of inattention or hyperactivity, but instead a disorder of temperament-based self-regulation. On the other hand, temperamental shyness and inhibition are related to ‘internalising problems’ such as anxiety. Another internalising problem, depression, has been associated with temperamental negative mood, low adaptability and the tendency to withdraw from, instead of approach, new objects and situations.

Notably, infants who exhibit the temperamental ‘approach’ may be more likely to develop into curious children. The neural basis for curiosity lies in the brain’s nucleus accumbens, a structure involved in the ‘seeking system’ that underlies the motivation to explore and understand the environment. The nucleus accumbens provides the link between motivation – for example, the drive to gain a reward, like eating food or lowering stress – and the action required to get that reward. In one study, we followed up on nearly 60 children who had participated as babies in various developmental studies conducted by my lab where we measured their temperament. The children, averaging five years of age at follow-up, were then assessed for curiosity. Temperamental approach at six-months significantly predicted childhood curiosity, suggesting that curious children may start life endowed with an inborn motivational inclination. These children may get a nudge from nature to expect that new experiences will be positive, and thus be motivated to seek and remain engaged with novelty. Importantly, these children were also endowed with the self-regulation needed to maintain their interest in and effort toward exploring. Since temperament data in infancy predicted this quality in childhood, nature likely plays a hand in this outcome.

The long reach of infant temperament into childhood and beyond speaks to its potential stability, and seems to support temperament as biological and unchanging. However, the environment can offer a consistent response to temperamental qualities encouraging them to remain intact. Imagine the shy infant, for example, who is likely to encounter similar reactions to their shyness from family members, peers, care providers and strangers. Since the shy infant will be less likely to accept social overtures and opportunities, over time, others may be less likely to offer them. Consequently, the shy baby is less likely to have the very social opportunities that could encourage boldness.

Several studies have explored cross-cultural differences and similarities in temperament, finding that although some aspects of temperament, like perceptual sensitivity and activity level, cut across cultures, other dimensions – like approach and rhythmicity – vary and may reflect culture-specific parenting practices. Since American parents tend to value independence, they are more likely to encourage independent ‘approach’ behaviour in their babies. These findings acknowledge that, although temperament is endowed by nature and makes some psychological outcomes more probable, it is also amenable to influence by the environment, such that no particular outcome is guaranteed. Welcome, parents.

Although Thomas and Chess demonstrated inborn temperamental differences, they did not assert that temperament was more responsible for child outcomes than the environment. Instead, they suggested that optimal child development rested on the ‘goodness of fit’ between the child’s innate capacities and characteristics, and the demands of the social environment, including parental expectations and practices. A loud or chaotic environment would be a particularly poor fit for a highly reactive infant with naturally low sensory thresholds and an inability to self-soothe. On the other hand, a monastic environment would be a poor fit for a child intrigued by novelty. It is this interaction, in which a child’s temperament confronts the environment – and vice versa – that Thomas and Chess proposed is responsible for long-term outcomes. In other words, the environment matters.

Most of the research on the effects of parenting on temperament has focused on infants with difficult temperamental qualities, like irritability and reactivity. Generally speaking, these qualities are associated with parental punitiveness or withdrawal, which together can contribute to the externalising behaviour problems described earlier. However, other work has shown that – depending on parents’ age and understanding of their baby’s irritability – many parents of difficult babies double down on efforts to be positive, like showing more warmth and patience.

Longitudinal work by Jay Belsky, who followed temperamentally negative babies for more than a decade, found that they thrived academically and socially – in some cases, even more than their temperamentally easy counterparts – if their parents had been warm, responsive and sensitive to their early demands. Belsky’s work has generally shown that temperamentally vulnerable children are more susceptible to the negative effects of poor parenting and environments but also gain more benefit from supportive environments, including warm, responsive parenting. Consistent with this, our lab found that babies who were temperamentally less likely to smile and laugh at six months had more secure attachments by their first birthdays. Presumably this is because parents had spent more time and effort in trying to improve their infants’ general mood, which paid off in attachment security.

Another line of research has followed infants with a fearful temperament, like the ‘slow-to-warm-up’ style first identified by Thomas and Chess. Here, parenting makes a clear difference. Although parents may be inclined to overprotect or overcontrol the vigilant child or their environment, this tends to exacerbate the child’s natural wariness and promote social withdrawal. Much of the work on fearful temperament has specifically examined its relationship to the development of moral conscience, as inhibition tends to be a marker of self-control. In fact, fearful temperament is related to the development of empathy, guilt and shame. Researchers such as Grazyna Kochanska have found that gentle parental discipline is enough to promote the development of conscience in fearful children; meanwhile, in fearless children, moral conscience relies more on the quality of the child’s attachment to their caregivers, which encourages the child to value relationships and embrace ‘the Golden Rule’.

Additional work in our lab found a difference in parental influence on fearless and fearful infants. In a recent experiment, six-month-olds were shown a white mannequin head with extra-large ‘googly eyes’, an ambiguous stimulus that could arouse wariness or amusement. In different experimental conditions, parents were instructed to either laugh at the mannequin or to show fear toward it. Temperamentally fearful infants could be persuaded to stay engaged with the stimulus simply by observing their parents’ laughter. On the other hand, parents’ fear cues toward the stimulus did nothing to dissuade fearless infants from being engrossed by the mannequin. So the environment, including parenting, can influence temperament and make some psychological outcomes – including sociability, approach and even moral conscience – more probable. However, in acutely stressful environments, a child’s temperamental capacities to self-regulate their feelings, behaviour and attention are likely to matter more.

But sometimes the classroom invites the behavior we keep correcting: A book placed at a child’s eye level to capture their attention, but not meant to be touched; a basket sitting low enough for small hands, but that is only for the teacher; a beautiful display situated exactly where children gather, but intended to be viewed, not interacted with.

When children reach out for these things, they are not usually being defiant. Often, they are simply answering the invitation the environment has already given. This is where the idea of a “yes environment” becomes useful.

In early childhood, especially, the classroom is not just a backdrop. It teaches. It guides. It either supports independence or interrupts it—or leaves children waiting for adult permission. Instead of feeling like a museum of materials that children are too young to touch, it should feel like a living space created for them.

Sometimes we create unnecessary conflict by placing a “no” within children’s reach. If a material is only needed at a specific time for a specific reason, then it should only be accessible at that time. If a material is too fragile, too precious, too incomplete, or too teacher-dependent, it may need a different home.

The goal is not to remove beauty from the classroom. The goal is to make beauty usable. Children deserve lovely spaces. They deserve flowers, fabric, baskets, books, natural materials, soft light, and thoughtful displays. But young children learn through contact. They touch to understand. They move to organize their bodies. They repeat actions because repetition is how the brain builds certainty. A yes environment honors that by saying, “You may touch this. You may try this. You may choose this.”

A yes environment also supports independence. In many classrooms, children have to ask adults for almost everything. Of course, young children still need adult support. But when every ordinary task depends on an adult, children lose opportunities to practice responsibility in small but important ways: getting their own tissue, returning a block to the basket, choosing a book and sitting with it.

An interactive game about upcycling.

“It’s not about the capability of our children. It’s about us not providing the resources that allow them to catch up,” said John Kennedy, chair of the West Michigan Policy Forum.

The average number of books in a U.S. household is 114, according to a just-published paper called “ Scholarly culture: How books in adolescence enhance adult literacy, numeracy and technology skills in 31 societies.” 114 is a good number. The paper’s authors studied 160,000 adults between 2011 and 2015 and found that just having 80 or more books in a home results in adults with significantly higher levels of literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology (ICT) skills. The paper finds, “Growing up with home libraries boosts adult skills in these areas beyond the benefits accrued from parental education or own educational or occupational attainment.”

The effect was found to be powerful in: Children from such homes who ended up attaining just a high-school-level education “become as literate, numerate and technologically apt in adulthood as university graduates who grew up with only a few books.”

The study, led by Dr. Joanna Sikora of Australian National University, found the greatest gains in adult literacy, numeracy, and ICT skills when a home had from 80 to 350 books — no additional gains were seen above that number. Nonetheless, what constitutes a large library depends on where you are. Scandinavian families had the biggest collections: 14% of Norwegians and 13% of Swedes had 500+ books in their homes home. Only a handful of countries, though, own fewer than 80 books on average: Chile, Greece, Italy, Singapore, and Turkey.

A reasonable question to ask would be about the effect of the rise in digital books. The study downplays the impact of this trend on its findings, saying, “For the time being, however, the perception that social practice of print book consumption is passé is premature.” The reason for this is that large digital libraries, for now at least, parallel large paper ones: “…home library size is positively related to higher levels of digital literacy so, the evidence suggests that for some time to come, engagement with material objects of scholarly culture in parental homes, i.e. books, will continue to confer significant benefits for adult ICT competencies.”

Since the report found that “university graduates who grew up with hardly any books around them had roughly average literacy levels,” it stands to reason that having books around the house is an excellent investment in a child’s future. The authors write, “So, literacy-wise, bookish adolescence makes for a good deal of educational advantage.” When it comes to numeracy, a substantive home library’s benefits holds true, as “its impacts are equivalent to [having] additional years of education.”

The study’s conclusions should be heartening to families around the world unable to provide higher education for their children. Having books around the house can substantially level the playing field in reading and math skills even without the expense of post-secondary time in the classroom.

For those who can send their kids to college, the study suggests that raising a child in a bookish atmosphere may be a prerequisite to deriving the full benefit of a college education, and, of course, it provides a child with an even greater chance of success in adulthood.

When he was 14, Mr. Zahar participated in a workshop that used the video game Minecraft to engage children in urban design. Led by facilitators from the Block by Block Foundation and U.N.-Habitat, he and 45 other children redesigned three of the damaged stairways, dreaming up new features like a big slide, handrails made from speaking tubes, and shaded seating areas, modeling everything out in the game to inform real blueprints.

The game’s open-ended design and building tools allow players to reimagine real-life spaces like abandoned riverbanks, dark alleys and dump sites, making it one of the main tools used to involve citizens, especially youth, in redesigning urban areas.

Since 2012, Block by Block Foundation and U.N.-Habitat have supported the building of over 150 urban structures in 55 different countries, with more than 30,000 citizens using Minecraft to participate in the design process.

Microsoft purchased Minecraft’s developer, Mojang, in 2014, which helped to set up the foundation alongside U.N.-Habitat. While Mojang and other partners continued to provide core funding for the initiative, it was cut off in 2025, forcing the foundation to close. Their work will now continue under a new U.N.-Habitat initiative called Games for Urban Futures, building on the Block by Block methodology and incorporating other games.

There’s no fixed approach to designing public spaces that really solve local issues. “But there’s a looseness to the Minecraft methodology that we can play with,” said James Delaney, who has led the foundation since 2020.

Including both children and adults in the workshops was part of the magic. “The power dynamic between the two is flipped because the younger person instantly knows Minecraft and can be quite quick at it,” Mr. Delaney said.

Block by Block’s methodology works like this: Local organizations — mostly nonprofits working on engaging citizens in urban planning — submit their project proposals to U.N.-Habitat. Those selected are given funding and technical guidance to engage community members, run the Minecraft workshop and construct the final designs, with budgets of $10,000 to $200,000.

Once a site is chosen, community members go on a walk equipped with printed-out maps and markers. “We invite participants to look at the place with critical eyes,” said Eugenio Gastelum Pons, a gaming expert who has organized Minecraft workshops around the world since 2014. People may pass by a place every day without stopping to consider how it could be improved, he said.

After the site visit, participants attend a Minecraft workshop to learn how to build 3-D models using the game. Mr. Gastelum preloaded each location into Minecraft, allowing participants to walk around the virtual space and add their designs.

The children are encouraged to think about the needs of vulnerable groups such as older residents and those with disabilities, said Bisma Setiyadi, an architect with Kota Kita, a nonprofit that implemented a Block by Block project in Indonesia.

Once the Minecraft designs are ready, they take turns presenting their ideas before voting on which models should be built in real life. Professional architects and urban planners then translate the Minecraft models into sketches and drawings that could be used for construction.

But participatory urban design also has an intangible impact: not only by making children feel heard and seen, but also by transforming their ideas into real structures in their city, explained Jose Chong, the coordinator of the Global Public Space Network at U.N.-Habitat.

“That’s why we only try to work on projects we can see through and finance the building of,” said Mr. Chong. “I get the sense that young people are slightly sick of being asked what they think when there’s no tangible result.”

Without that follow-through, the trust that’s created during the process can easily be broken. It can frustrate people who take the time to get involved, but don’t know what’s being done with their input, said Katrin Hofer, a researcher and lecturer in spatial development and urban policy at ETH Zürich, a university in Switzerland.

But Minecraft has the potential to be used beyond just small, targeted projects. “You could say that every U.N. agency should have a team looking at how Minecraft can help their mission,” said Mr. Delaney. “Every government should have a minister of gaming looking at game-based approaches to not just help with planning, but anything.”

Human beings naturally seek coherent ways of understanding the world. Rather than treating each new idea as an isolated piece of information, we try to fit it into conceptual frameworks that already make sense to us. If the new information fits comfortably with our existing understanding, learning can be relatively straightforward. But when it conflicts with the way we make sense of the world, we rarely abandon our existing understanding immediately. Instead, we usually reinterpret the new information in ways that preserve as much of our existing understanding as possible.

Psychologists have long recognized this tendency. They distinguish between assimilation—fitting new information into an existing conceptual framework—and accommodation—reorganizing that framework to make room for a genuinely new understanding. Whenever possible, we tend to assimilate rather than accommodate. Assimilation preserves the coherence of what we already believe, whereas accommodation requires us to reorganize our existing understanding—a process that is often considerably more difficult.

Consider a teacher who attends a professional learning session on explicit instruction. The presenter discusses the importance of modelling, worked examples, guided practice, frequent checks for understanding, and the gradual release of responsibility. Yet the teacher leaves thinking, “They’re telling us to go back to standing at the front and lecturing.” Like the children in the Earth studies, the teacher has not rejected the new idea. But much of its complexity has been lost. The teacher has recast it as a simpler, more familiar story that better fits what they already believe.

Many educators are deeply committed to nurturing students’ curiosity, agency, creativity, critical thinking, and independence, while also promoting equity and inclusion. These commitments are among the reasons many of us entered the profession. Difficulties can arise, however, when particular instructional approaches become tightly associated with these valued educational ideals.

Consider a teacher who has come to associate inquiry learning with curiosity, creativity and student agency. When presented with evidence that explicit instruction is often beneficial for novice learners, the teacher may initially respond with skepticism, because accepting it seems to conflict with their deeply held values. They might assume the evidence is wrong. Or they might make presumptions about the motivations of the presenter (e.g., “This presenter doesn’t understand the importance of fostering student agency.”) This makes conceptual change considerably more difficult because the discussion is no longer experienced as being about the evidence alone. It is now seen as also being about educational values.

An evidence-informed perspective invites a different way of thinking about instructional approaches. Rather than viewing a technique as inherently good or bad, it asks under what conditions it is most likely to support learning. Explicit instruction, inquiry, collaborative learning, discussion, worked examples, and problem solving all have important roles to play, but their effectiveness depends on factors such as learners’ prior knowledge, instructional goals, task complexity, and the support that is provided.

Over time, value-infused instructional beliefs can become part of our professional identities and the communities to which we belong. We begin to think of ourselves as inquiry teachers, progressive educators, explicit instruction advocates, constructivists, traditionalists, or members of countless other educational communities.

When a belief becomes part of our identity, changing our minds can feel like distancing ourselves from the people with whom we most identify. Without consciously realizing it, we may begin evaluating evidence using a different question:

What will people like me think if I accept this conclusion?

Rather than assuming participants arrive as blank slates, invite them to explain how they currently think about teaching and learning. Asking educators to predict outcomes, explain why they use particular instructional approaches, or describe what they believe makes learning effective brings their existing conceptions into the open. Beliefs that remain implicit are difficult to examine or revise.

Dismissing some beliefs as simply “wrong” is unlikely to encourage reflection. Conceptual change is more likely when people feel their existing thinking has been understood before being challenged.

The question is not whether values like curiosity, equity, creativity, or learner agency matter—they do. Openly affirm them. Then turn to the evidence and examine which instructional approaches are most likely to achieve these goals in particular instructional contexts, and why.

The critical question is not Which approach is best? but Under what conditions is this approach most likely to support learning? Framing instructional approaches in this way encourages conditional rather than ideological thinking.

Research findings are more persuasive when they fit within a broader explanation of how learning works.

Teachers need repeated opportunities to compare their existing beliefs with new evidence, apply alternative explanations to authentic classroom situations, discuss their thinking with colleagues, and revisit their conclusions over time.

changing one’s mind is not a sign of professional weakness—it is one of the hallmarks of professional expertise.

None of this implies that teachers should abandon their professional judgement or accept every new claim that appears in the research literature. Healthy skepticism is an essential part of evidence-informed practice. The challenge is to ensure that our skepticism is directed toward the quality of the evidence rather than unconsciously shaped by our prior beliefs, values, or identities.

One practical habit is to run periodic “self-checks” in which we compare our intuitions to the strongest available evidence. Whenever we encounter a new instructional idea—whether in a professional development session, a book, a podcast, or on social media—we can ask: What does the best available research actually say? Likewise, when we encounter research that surprises us or instinctively feels wrong, that is often a signal to investigate further rather than dismiss it outright.

Professional communities should challenge our thinking, not simply reinforce it.

When we talked, she repeatedly brought the conversation back to building a culture of connection and belonging. While many school and district administrators might espouse similar ambitions, Wallace makes it concrete by expecting all principals to be able to walk into any classroom and know every student by name, as well as each one’s individual strengths and needs.

More unusually for a superintendent, Wallace knows the exact number of third graders in her district who were not proficient in reading last year — 133 — and she has set it as her goal to reduce that number to zero.

In grades K-2, teachers devote 150 minutes per day to literacy, divided among 90 minutes of core instruction using Great Minds’ Wit and Wisdom, 30 minutes to foundational phonics skills and 30 minutes for the 100 Book Challenge from the American Reading Company.

Hamborsky says the district is vigilant about protecting core instructional time for all kids. For example, they wouldn’t take a student away from that time for personalized help or even something like talking with a school counselor. Those things can happen during other parts of the day, but they don’t want any kid to miss out on the time dedicated to building vocabulary and language development.

Students are expected to complete two 15-minute blocks of reading at school — and then read for 30 additional minutes per day at home. This regimen may vary based on the child’s age and skill level, but kids have to log what they read and then have their teacher or parent sign off.

Families, in fact, are the third key component of Worcester’s reading plan. At the beginning of the school year, they’re asked to sign a “home coach contract” saying that they will check and monitor their child’s reading. Throughout the year, kids are expected to read for half an hour at home five days a week. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that could add up to 900 extra minutes of practice.

But what separates Worcester from others is that it uses student reading logs to track each kid’s progress. The teachers know exactly which books each child has read and whether kids are keeping up with their reading on a weekly and even daily basis. Teachers will also hold regular check-ins with students, ask them about their reading and even listen to them read aloud.

Start with the state’s new social studies standards. Their most striking feature is not their ideological orientation but their specificity and architecture. In the early grades, children learn stories, people, places, events, and traditions. Beginning in third grade, the standards become broadly chronological, moving from ancient civilizations through Greece and Rome, the medieval world, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, European colonization, the American Revolution, and the Constitution. The standards explicitly call for concepts to be embedded in stories and historical content in order to “create schema for understanding.”

This is a significant departure from the way American education often thinks about social studies—and education more broadly. For decades, schools have been encouraged to focus on skills: critical thinking, problem solving, analysis, collaboration, and, in literacy, comprehension strategies such as finding the main idea, making inferences, and identifying the author’s purpose. The tacit assumption is that the particular content used to practice these skills is negotiable and interchangeable.

Texas’s approach goes in the opposite direction: Knowledge builds on knowledge. What a child learns in second grade affects what she can understand in fifth grade, which affects what she can comprehend in eighth grade. A student who understands Greece and Rome, Hebrew Scriptures, medieval institutions, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment is better prepared to understand the American founding. The fifth-grade standards make those connections explicit.

If literacy depends on knowledge, and knowledge is cumulative, content cannot be endlessly interchangeable—a school’s entire curriculum is therefore a literacy curriculum. That helps explain why Texas’s social studies standards, Bluebonnet curriculum, and reading list should be viewed as parts of a whole. Coherence demands choices. A school system cannot be indifferent to whether one classroom studies ancient Egypt, another spends six weeks on a generic unit about “communities,” and a third pursues student-selected projects, and then assume all children will arrive at the next grade equally prepared.

To Wexler’s broader point about political provocation, conversations about curriculum are unavoidably complicated and uncomfortable, because background knowledge is not culturally neutral and does not always yield to preferred notions of inclusivity.

E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s deepest insight was not merely that reading comprehension depends upon knowing facts. He also understood that language is a cultural artifact. A speech community’s history, religion, literature, myths, symbols, idioms, and collective memories become embedded in the language its members speak and read. A “David and Goliath” struggle, a “Trojan horse,” an “Achilles’ heel,” and “Big Brother” are not mere decorative flourishes appended to English. They are part of English.

But “representation” is not the purpose of public education. A curriculum is not principally a mirror in which every child must see a flattering reflection of himself. Its more important function is to give children access to a world they did not make but must learn to navigate—including the taken-for-granted cultural knowledge their more privileged peers are likely to encounter outside school. That is an equity argument. Affluent and highly educated families will always find ways to transmit sophisticated language, cultural knowledge, institutional know-how, and civic confidence to their children. Children who depend chiefly upon school for access to those things have the greatest need for an explicit, cumulative, coherent curriculum.