Why 'Reinventing School' Usually Makes Things Worse

Scott Young pushes back on the popular instinct that schools should ditch desks, drills, and memorization in favor of critical thinking, projects, and discovery learning. The evidence, he argues, runs the other way. Project Follow Through, meta-analyses of problem-based learning in medical schools, and decades of reading research all point to the same conclusion: structured direct instruction paired with heavy practice consistently beats the constructivist alternatives that reformers find more inspiring.

The reason isn’t ideological but cognitive. Expertise in any domain is mostly an accumulated library of facts, procedures, and concepts, and there is no shortcut around acquiring that inventory piece by piece. General problem-solving skills don’t transfer the way reformers assume, and methods like mnemonics or concept maps underperform basic practice testing and spaced repetition.

That leaves only two realistic levers for improvement: making the existing grind more efficient through better-sequenced practice and cognitive load management, or changing what gets taught — a curricular fight even nastier than the pedagogical one. The uncomfortable implication is that a genuinely better school looks closer to the old-fashioned stereotype reformers want to abolish than to the project-based classroom they want to build.