Cuban's historical observations were confirmed by the more contemporary observations of John Goodlad. Talking requires the organization of thought and can be an important avenue to learning. We check out our ideas, argue with authors, bounce issues back and forth, ask friends to read our early drafts, talk together after seeing a movie, pass on books we have loved, attend meetings and argue out our ideas, share stories and gossip that extends our understandings of ourselves and others. Talk lies at the heart of our lives. Now it is true that within the teacher-centered elementary classroom, a number of things have changed over the years.
Classrooms are, by and large, pleasant places for children.
But schools are still often charged with being remote from the real world. He thought that was because so much of the knowledge had been produced outside the classrooms. He was right. The tradition of educational research was strongly influenced by E. L. Thorndike, who preferred to do his investigations in the controlled environment of a scientific laboratory and seldom ventured into a school. John Dewey, by contrast, saw the school as his laboratory, but it was Thorndike who served as the model for educational researchers.