Dan & Don push knowledge

What do these two eminent gentlemen have to say about the explosion of interest in knowledge-rich curricula?

Over on Education Next, Daniel T. Willingham and E. D. Hirsch, Jr., published “Rediscovering Knowledge as the Key to Reading: Two champions of knowledge-rich instruction reflect on its current momentum.” The headline should be enough to communicate what they discuss, but just in case your background knowledge is inadequate, let’s just say that they are cheering at the 2025-2026 pep rally for ensuring that students get giant doses of content knowledge during their education.

For decades, reading instruction in the United States has focused on helping children acquire generic, transferable skills such as finding the main idea of a passage or drawing inferences. At the same time, educators have minimized the contribution that knowledge makes to reading—the idea that knowing something about the topic of a passage helps a reader make sense of it. Advocates for the skills-based approach have argued that children clearly needed to learn skills, but they didn’t have to store much knowledge in memory; they could always look it up, especially in the digital age. Contending that children need to learn some facts made one seem a nostalgic fuddy-duddy.

But something has changed, and knowledge is having a moment in education fashion. All of today’s best-selling reading curricula describe themselves as “knowledge-rich” or trumpet that they “build knowledge intentionally.” The authors of this article are tickled pink by this development—one of us has argued for the importance of knowledge to reading for 20 years, and the other for 40. But we use the phrase “moment in education fashion” advisedly, well knowing the faddish nature of education enthusiasms. Indeed, a cynic might wonder if some of today’s knowledge advocates will next week declare that knowledge is irrelevant to reading education, using some baseless logic such as the inevitability of brain computer-chip implants.

The Dan-&-Don Duo go on to provide evidence about the contributions of knowledge to reading comprehension, the reasons knowledge building has been overlooked, and some predictions about what the future will hold in light of the emphasis on knowledge. Their argument is extensive, grounded in both evidence and good sense, and compelling. It’s well worth a read.

However, do not read it to find explicit discussion of students with disabilities nor in hopes of learning methods for teaching knowledge. The good professors’ article is not posed at those levels. It’s promoting the importance of students having knowledge with which to integrate what they read.