Kids can’t read when they don’t know basic stuff

For those of you here who were in grade school over 30 years ago, do you remember what it felt like to spend a day in the classroom? Do you remember what homework looked like?

Let me refresh your memory.

Students sat at desks, silently listening to their teacher explain a concept, tell a story, lecture, or share an experience.

They learned about the different animal classes—whether an animal was a reptile, an amphibian, or a fish. They learned to memorize the names of all 50 states and fill in a blank map of the United States. And they crammed for quizzes that tested for this basic recall knowledge.

Kids were expected to sit still and listen, then work hard to commit the information transmitted to them to their memory.

Fast forward three decades, and this kind of learning, deemed “the factory model of education,” has gone out of vogue. The argument is that a) it’s boring, b) it’s “one size fits all,” and c) it limits creativity because—as the argument goes—recall does not equal application of a skill.

But while these arguments sound good in theory—and there were some positive shifts in the education system as a result—we accidentally threw out the baby with the bathwater. And the baby was knowledge.

We’re at a point where the current generation has become a headline because the average American doesn’t have the knowledge to pass the US citizenship test.

Ask any kid today if they can name a judge on the Supreme Court. Chances are they can’t—and neither can most adults. Even now, at its peak, only seven in ten adults can name all three branches of government.

How did we get here? One reason was the emphasis on teaching transferable skills (like creativity or higher-order thinking) instead of building a shared base of knowledge.

The two approaches should have complemented each other. In practice, too often, they didn’t.

The thought was that for kids to be successful in the 21st century – and break out of the factory automaton mold – they can’t just memorize facts. They need to collaborate with peers, conduct experiments, and complete projects. Often, the move away from knowledge went hand in hand with the move toward “hands-on learning.” Researchers in the Information Age argued that as Google and Siri became more accessible, where facts can be displayed at your fingertips, memorization of content became obsolete.

There’s also a harder problem: knowledge is political. We don’t always agree on what every child should know. It’s much easier to agree that kids should learn phonics than to agree on the history, literature, science, and culture that shape their worldviews.

Peek into a classroom today and you’ll see more kids moving around, doing hands-on projects that require collaboration than they did three decades ago. This tactical learning is important—but as is the trend in education—we’ve overcorrected, and we’ve lost something in the process.

What got sacrificed was the deeply human practice of passing down information consistently from one human to another, from one generation to the next. Today, fewer than half of K-5 ELA curricula in America even meet basic alignment expectations, which include knowledge-building as a core component.

And beyond just the basic lack of knowledge people have today, the bigger, more underlying consequence of this educational shift is how it is impacting literacy.

What many experts fail to explain is that reading isn’t a skill that kids can simply “master,” but rather a complex process that depends on what readers bring to the page—including their vocabulary and knowledge.

E.D. Hirsch was one of the first to write about this gap in his book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. While some may find it controversial, his core argument aligns with what decades of research tells us about how knowledge and memory support comprehension. He argued that the education system was failing to foster literacy because it eliminated an emphasis on content knowledge, choosing instead to focus on formal reading skills.

We’ve removed the expectation that kids need a rich store of knowledge they can draw on when they encounter a new text. The names of the 5 oceans? They can just Google it. Where’s Kansas? Boring!

The result is that while kids are being taught reading skills, they can’t actually understand what they are reading because they lack the background knowledge, vocabulary, and context required to comprehend it.

Imagine reading about a trip to the beach without knowing what an ocean is. You wouldn’t be able to understand it.

I saw this tragedy play out firsthand, thirty years later, during grad school. I remember observing a class of second graders. In a 90-minute period, students read separate paragraphs on ant colonies, Babe Ruth, and the Statue of Liberty. They were then asked to identify the main idea of each.

What do ant colonies, Babe Ruth, and the Statue of Liberty have in common? Nobody knows. The lessons were totally incoherent. The class was completely checked out, and despite being visibly frustrated, the teacher was unwaveringly committed to getting her students to master the skill of finding the main idea.

Each kid got a sticker for “progress” on the skill they were learning, but they left the classroom without building much of the knowledge they would need to make sense of what they were reading. Their takeaway? A whole lot of nothing.

As an adult, even I walked away confused with such disjointed topics. But in that classroom, observing the students who were disengaged and just not “getting it,” I felt so seen.

I was one of those teachers adding stickers to a chart when my student “demonstrated a skill” early on in my career, not understanding the role of having knowledge stored in your working memory. As teachers, we’re told to work harder, harder, harder. We’ve internalized this false idea that children will pick up knowledge if they can simply “master” these transferable skills—that if a kid is not mastering the main idea or the concept of inference, we’re doing something wrong.

Funny enough, some of the people most skeptical of knowledge-based instruction are the very people who benefited from knowledge-rich childhoods. If you grew up going to the beach, traveling, talking about books and geography at the dinner table, or simply learning about the world through your family, you may take for granted how much background knowledge you bring to a text.

Kids who don’t have these opportunities at home to help build their knowledge base depend on school to learn these facts. And if schools are laser-focused on skill-building at the expense of knowledge-learning, we’re making it harder for these kids to succeed.

The knowledge they bring to the process is the best predictor of how well a student will do in reading.

And today, it’s looking bleak. Reading scores have never been worse, and the achievement gap continues to widen. We’re graduating adults who can’t read labels on a prescription bottle.

But here’s what’s giving me hope: We’re finally seeing more attention on the research showing that reading comprehension depends on far more than the ability to decode words or identify a text’s main idea. Teachers are beginning to understand the difference between a curriculum that has knowledge in the foreground versus a curriculum that does not. The media is starting to shine the light on failed reading programs, and third-party curriculum review organizations like EdReports are prioritizing knowledge-building as a critical component of high-quality instructional materials.

We’re finally trying to right the pedagogical wrong of the last few decades.

I often think about that class of second graders. The ant colonies. Babe Ruth. The Statue of Liberty. A sticker gained, but not a thing to show for it.

I think about the version of me who also handed out stickers, convinced I was doing right by my students because I was teaching the way I was trained. It took years of research, confused kids, and the ability to step back and zoom out before I understood that the missing piece of the puzzle was knowledge.

Every kid deserves a classroom where a teacher gives them something they can carry with them: knowledge about the world and the human experience. It builds confidence, social capital, and self-efficacy. Knowledge stored in their memory is the enduring thing they can rely on the next time they open a book, come across an unfamiliar idea, or try to make sense of the world around them. Anything else puts children in a sea of meaningless slop that breeds confusion and anxiety.

That starts with the rest of us—researchers, educators, funders, policymakers—admitting we got it wrong, understanding why, and doing the slow work of fixing it.

It’s the best shot we have at making sure the solutions we choose to reform our education system are the ones that will help our kids learn to read.