Skills Mania: Snake Oil in Our Schools

Dave Hutchinson is assistant superintendent of the School District of
Mystery Lake in Thompson, Manitoba.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. The title alone conjured up
images of yet another scholarly indictment of the state of Canadian
public education—heavy on critique and light on practical suggestions
for improvement. This, however, is not the case. Like few scholars in
the critical pedagogical vein, Bob Davis tends to focus more on
providing concrete instructional plans intended to counteract the
fundamental flaws associated with skills and outcomes-based curricula, a
recent educational movement that Davis characterizes as anti-democratic.
“The trend toward labeling more and more knowledge as skills,”
writes Davis, “and measuring whether you’ve learned such skills with
the notion of ‘outcomes’ is a trend which, for citizenship
education, plays down the transmittal of political or moral principles,
including traditional, liberal, or radical ideas of how the world of
government works, has worked, or should work. What appears to be an
emphasis on probing how things really operate is learning how ... to see
through all the systems while owing allegiance to none. Skills have
become unstuck from the anchors they should be attached to.”

Davis, a teacher of 30 years, does not become mired in this critique,
but rather offers a number of examples of ways teachers can circumvent
skills mania and hold true to their central role in helping to evolve a
social democracy. Written in a style that is more colloquial than
scholarly (and this is a good thing), Davis details lessons on a variety
of issues and topics ranging from the history of blacks in Canada to the
impact of Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) on the Grassy Narrows
Ojibway in Northern Ontario. By structuring his text in this way, Davis
has opened critical pedagogy to a much broader audience:
student-teachers, teachers, school administrators, teacher-educators,
curriculum developers, politicians, and parents. For all those who
believe public education is essentially about challenging students to
work together to forge a true democracy, this book is definitely for
you.