And indeed, if one studies the history of educational methods, one finds that every traditionalist theorist advocates hands-on methods where they lead to good results. The hidden progressivist agenda on this issue lies in the disparagement of verbal learning. An essential aspect of understanding in human beings is the ability to speak or write about what one has assimilated. Disparaging verbal learning is especially harmful to children who come to school with restricted vocabularies because of family disadvantages. Once again, the primary victims of this impoverishment of education are disadvantaged children.
Advantaged children gain much of the withheld knowledge at home.
Both traditionalists and progressives prefer instruction which shows how things fit together and at the same time helps secure what is being learned by reinforcing it in a variety of contexts. The result has been not integration at all but the failure of students to learn the most basic elements of the different subject matters. Yet every person with enough schooling to read these words knows that subject matters by themselves do not repel or attract interest. An effective teacher can make the most distant subject interesting, and an ineffective one can make any subject dull. The presumption that the affairs of one's own community are more interesting than those of faraway times or places is contradicted in every classroom that studies dinosaurs and fairy tales.