Interesting. Just purchased that book. I imagine I will be able to answer some of the below questions after I read it, but as of now I am wondering the following:
Recently I have heard that "Direct Instruction" is very effective, but I'm very skeptical as to what it is effective for. What exactly can you teach through that method, and what can you not? What does that method absolutely skip over? For example, through it, can you learn critical thinking, rhetoric/debate skills, rationality & logic, philosophy? Does it help students learn about themselves (self-discovery) -- how they think, learn, what their interests/passions are, what drives them? Does it help them find truth for themselves? Or, does it ignore all these and even more than our system today try to fit every personality into the standard box?
Does it at all care for each individual student or is it comprehensively uni-directional, from instructor to student?
DI is not a perfect method. It's a little crackpot itself. But it's both empirically better than all the other fads and as sexy as Bush in a bikini, so it more or less killed empirical study of education. Now there's a bit of a revival of quantitative education studies, but it's too short term in it's scope (a good teacher doesn't just help the students pass the next test).
IIRC, studies showed that DI did actually help the good students, the bad students, the mediocre students, the rich students and the poor students.
It also helped "higher order" skills.
I think that from a cognitive psychology perspective (though I'm not an expert), this is because the brain needs to learn fundamentals before it can work through more advanced things.
As for "self discovery", I think students are pretty good at that themselves. Current fads just pile on the homework though (because "testing doesn't teach anything"), which in my view is a big development killer.
I'm not a DI fan. I'm not a fan of capitalism either. But if you don't know why something works, you shouldn't just dismiss it for being unattractive.
Recently I have heard that "Direct Instruction" is very effective, but I'm very skeptical as to what it is effective for. What exactly can you teach through that method, and what can you not? What does that method absolutely skip over? For example, through it, can you learn critical thinking, rhetoric/debate skills, rationality & logic, philosophy? Does it help students learn about themselves (self-discovery) -- how they think, learn, what their interests/passions are, what drives them? Does it help them find truth for themselves? Or, does it ignore all these and even more than our system today try to fit every personality into the standard box?
Does it at all care for each individual student or is it comprehensively uni-directional, from instructor to student?