Did Teachers Really Used To Make Kids Memorize Without Understanding?

Common Core supporters have been asserting that before Common Core's emphasis on skills, all our teachers did for 50 years was ask kids to memorize facts. So implies Alfie Kohn in The Schools Our Children Deserve, in arguing that students didn't understand what they used to be taught in arithmetic: "Drill does not develop meanings. Repetition does not lead to understandings." Kohn's version of the past was echoed and carried to its seemingly logical conclusion in Constance Kamii's well-known

Common Core supporters have been asserting that before Common Core's emphasis on skills, all our teachers did for 50 years was ask kids to memorize facts. So implies Alfie Kohn in The Schools Our Children Deserve, in arguing that students didn't understand what they used to be taught in arithmetic: "Drill does not develop meanings. Repetition does not lead to understandings." Kohn's version of the past was echoed and carried to its seemingly logical conclusion in Constance Kamii's well-known ass…