I avoided reading Seven Myths about Education by D. Christodoulou (2014) for many years. When I picked up the book for the first time, I put it down once I got to the part in which the author describes how she failed to learn to effectively question in three years of her teaching. It seems that she claims that strategies that relate to using questions at the start of a unit/ new learning are ineffective. Here, she failed to account for the value of such an approach, something she might be discussing in her book about the future of assessment (which I have yet to read). Using prior knowledge as a starting block for planning and teaching has proven to be vital in my teaching at both primary and university levels. Yes, the answers are usually shallow and limited but provide important information for me to pitch and adapt my teaching to make learning accessible. I would not be able to do so without asking them questions.
I only returned to the book after seeing the recently published Czech translation of the book being promoted on Twitter. I do not have the access to the translated version of the book but I hope that the foreword provides sufficient context explaining the current state of English education, its recent developments and directions. This together with reading the authors whose work is being discredited might allow a Czech educator to fully appreciate the lack of depth and the number of unbalanced arguments Christodoulou introduced. She correctly identifies some myths that still prevail in some classrooms but the abridged version presents a biased view of the "myths". Truly, some of the statements such as "immigrant families will bring less knowledge" (p. 115) infuriate me. I hope that I am not the only person in the UK who has met an immigrant family with knowledge greater than mine. Giving Christodoulou a benefit of the doubt, I am assuming that she possibly meant children from war-torn countries without access to education or children whose education has been severely disrupted. Yet, still, this group of children has greater knowledge than I do.
The question is "what knowledge?". The book fails to define this and as a result, it presents a very narrow interpretation of a number of educational theories and approaches. The field of education is complex, often contextualised and contested, drawing on multidisciplinary research evidence. This book then falls into a category of the 'post-truth' world, where personal beliefs and possibly even appeals to emotion are more influential than balanced arguments. As it fails to sufficiently define key terms used, the cherry-picked facts present a very narrow and biased view. Christodoulou's last two words are "knowledge liberates" yet she spends the first two chapters criticising the work of Freire... Cherry-picking is dangerous.
Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however, tending rather to camouflage it - sometimes unconsciously - by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom. They give their doubts and misgivings an air of profound sobriety, as befitting custodians of freedom. But they confuse freedom with the maintenance of the status quo...
(Freire, 1996, p.18)
References:
Christodoulou, D (2014) Seven Myths about Education. London: Routledge.
Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books.