There is no battle between skills and knowledge

But claiming that there is apparently makes for a good headline. Knowledge and skills are intertwined; unless schools start acknowledging that  critical thinking can only result from detailed  content knowledge, conversations about whats ailing American education will continue to be an exercise  in nonsense. The fact that anyone can use the  phrase knowledge-based  learning in a non-ironic way  creeps me out  to no end. Whats next? Word-based reading? Number-based math? Language-based speech? I dont believe Common Core is really going to change many things here.  Its a set of skills; it does not lay out a coherent, specific body of knowledge. The ELA standards, at least, are so vague and repetitive as to be virtually meaningless, and would be met automatically  in any rigorous traditional classroom headed by a knowledgeable, well-trained teacher. If school districts  use CC to implement  a more content-rich curriculum, that is their choice. Requiring students to learn any  particular set of facts, no matter how anodyne, is  so politically contentious that no one would dare attempt such a thing at the national level. Writing in the  New York Times, Natalie Wexler acknowledges that: engineering the switch from skills to knowledge will take real effort.  Schools will need to develop coherent curriculums and adopt different ways of training teachers and evaluating progress. Because the federal government can’t simply mandate a focus on knowledge, change will need to occur piecemeal, at the state, school district or individual school level. To believe that such a change could miraculously occur piecemeal goes far beyond wishful thinking and into the realm of pure fantasy. And no, the fact that a bunch of people have downloaded a free online curriculum isnt exactly going to compensate. Poor scores on CC tests are unlikely to simply incentivize low-income schools to shift over to a stronger emphasis on  subject content, especially if their curriculums are effectively centered around test-prep. Besides, doing things  in such a haphazard fashion  is  a pretty great way to ensure that huge disparities (geographic, economic, etc.) continue to exist. When you take  a crop of teachers indoctrinated by ed schools to believe that lecturing  and memorization  are forms  of child abuse; pair them  with administrators who use the threat of poor evaluations to keep less progressive teachers in line; and mix  in  an obsession  with testing and accountability, you end up with a chaotic system driven by quick fixes. (But hey, no worries, the market will sort it out, right?) In order for the focus to shift more towards teaching content, you need a critical mass of people who believe that subject  knowledge is the basis for critical thinking, both in the classroom and in the administrative  offices. Right now, those people are in pretty short supply. And with the number of people entering teaching dwindling, the chance of getting highly educated/knowledgeable/competent  teachers, who believe even partially in the importance of transmitting knowledge,  in front of classrooms on any sort of wide scale in the near future is pretty small. The Right isnt exactly helping here either. Rather than embrace what would actually be a  conservative concept of education (classical curriculum, back-to-basics, etc.), theyre too busy screaming about school choice and privatizing everything. Its a perfect storm of factors, and while everyone is busy setting up false dichotomies and waiting for technology to save the day, the descent into chaos continues. I think a commenter named Emile from NY said it best: I dont know in depth the various pedagogical theories about K-12 education, but from the perspective of a college professor whos been teaching at a mid-tier university for more than 25 years, K-12 education has been in a steady decline over the past few decades, and [E.D.] Hirsch is absolutely right about the reason for it. I ask everyone in K-12 education this: What should a college professor who is teaching a course on Enlightenment ideas do in the face of a whole class of intelligent freshmen who dont know the dates of the Civil War, or the Second World War, or the French Revolution, or know that once upon a time there was a Roman Empire? How, exactly, would you proceed? Or how, exactly, would you proceed in a basic college course in mathematics when faced with a college class of intelligent freshmen that cant, as a whole, move easily between fractions, decimals and percents?   People hate the word memorization, but Im here to tell you students love it. People who malign memorization often ask, Why should anyone memorize dates that theyre bound to forget? Not every date is remembered over the long haul, but the mind loves inductive reasoning, and has a way of gathering particular dates loosely into centuries, and from there building a kind of organized closet into which more knowledge can be added. Im not suggesting  that first graders need to be able to able to discourse in detail about ancient Mesopotamia, but seriously, is it that unreasonable for  college students to be expected to have  a basic understanding  of what happened in the past?