Isn't "Constructivism" wonderful?

Here's the party line: Constructivism is based on the idea that knowledge is constructed in our minds when we learn new things. If we teach children to construct the knowledge in their own minds, we will improve learning. More importantly, if we don't teach children to construct the knowledge, they won't learn as well. It is very important that teachers "teach with constructivism in mind."

Sorry to burst your bubble, but all knowledge is constructed! Every time you learn something, anything, you tag those ideas onto things you already know. This is called building on prior knowledge, and teachers for the past 4000 years have been doing this. This benign form of constructivism is putting a new name on what is common sense to just about anyone who's tried to teach.

This is a bit like telling someone that the key to baking a cake is something special called flourpower. Well, duh, everyone bakes with flour, calling it something new doesn't make it a new concept.

The malignant form of constructivism, however, encourages teachers not to teach, since the child needs to construct his own knowledge from scratch.

The illegitimate child of constructivism and Mathematics is the NCTM's New New Math. Gone are mathematical knowledge and skills which have evolved over the centuries, and gone are the tedious paper-and-pencil calculations. It's much better to have students discover their own math and construct their own algorithms, isn't it?

Well, no.

A more pernicious form of constructivism arises in certain literature and history classes, whereby not only is the knowledge constructed in the student's mind, but each student is encouraged to construct his or her own meaning.

In other words, there is no right or wrong, just interpretation. There's no accepted meaning for anything, since everyone's different. (In higher education this philosophy is called deconstructionism, and its adherents typically don't do much but rail against the evil establishment, gleefully pointing out supposed instances of hypocrisy.)

But just as any legitimate university literature program rejects deconstrutionism, schools need to reject constructivism. There's no there, there.