Grant Wiggins

The Futility of Trying to Teach

Everything of Importance
Students cannot possibly learn everything of value
by the time they leave school, but we can instill
in them the desire to keep questioning
throughout their lives.
The aim of precollegiate education is not to
eliminate ignorance. The view that everything of
importance can be thoughtfully learned by the
12
th
grade notice I did not say "taught" is a
delusion. Those who would treat schooling as
designed to educate students on all important
subjects are doomed to encounter the futility that
faced Sisyphus: the boulder of "essential content"
can only come thundering down he (growing) hill
of knowledge.
By now, you may have read the articles in this
issue describing the many things students should
know but do not know. I, too, have been
dismayed to discover that some students don't
know where Mexico is or how to read a timetable,
never mind solve an algebra problem with two
variables. But, oh, how we forget our earlier and
current ignorance!
1
How easy it is to feel
indignant when some student doesn't know what
we know. But somewhere out there, in this highly
specialized world, is a well-educated adult who
also neither knows it nor deems it essential.
From a Medieval View
Of Curriculum
The irony of the fuss about student ignorance is
that the causes of such ignorance are never
adequately explored. To gain one insight into the
causes, we need only look at any textbook.
Teaching has been reduced to the written
equivalent of TV news sound bitesin part,
because so many groups lobby hard for inclusion
of their pet ideas. Moreover, much of what they

1
A personal example: having never had a
history course that went beyond World War I,
it wasn't until I was 28, watching "The World
at War" on PBS, that I discovered that Russia
had been our ally in the second World War.
wish to be taught is now taught; the problem is
that it isn't learnedand can't easily be, given the
inert and glib quality of the text. Content is
reducible to sound bites only when curricular
lobbyists (and an alarming number of educators)
believe that learning occurs merely by hearing or
seeing the "truth." The problem of student
ignorance is thus really about adult ignorance as
to how thoughtful and long-lasting understanding
is achieved.
The inescapable dilemma at the heart of
curriculum and instruction must, once and for all,
be made clear: either teaching everything of
importance reduces it to trivial, forgettable
verbalisms or lists; or schooling is a necessarily
inadequate apprenticeship, where "preparation"
means something quite humble: learning to know
and do a few important things well and leaving
out much of importance. The negotiation of the
dilemma hinges on enabling students to learn
about their ignorance, to gain control over the
resources available for making modest dents in it,
and to take pleasure in learning so that the quest
is lifelong.
An authentic education will therefore consist
of developing the habits of mind and high
standards of craftsmanship necessary in the face of
one's (inevitable) ignorance. Until we accept the
sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, view that
students, by definition, are ill-equipped at the end
of their tutelage for all that their professions and
intellectual lives will require, we will keep
miseducating them. Curriculum design could
then finally be liberated from the sham of typical
scope and sequence whereby it is assumed that a
logical outline of all adult knowledge is
translatable into complete lessons, and where a
fact or theory encountered once in the 8
th
grade as
a spoken truism is somehow to be recalled and
intelligently used in the 11
th
.
Our attempts to avoid the dilemma reveal our
naivete or hubrisso much at the heart of Greek
myths like that of Sisyphus. Given the pain of
necessary curricular deletion, critics retreat to rigid
ideology to ensure someone else's canon is cut.
The traditionalists demand complete cultural
literacy; the progressives deify "thinking" and
multiple points of view. The former see
themselves as the guardians of rigor, standards,
and disciplinary knowledge; the latter see such
views as elitist, narrowly pedantic, unmindful of
nontraditional knowledge and modern
epistemology. Alas, "literacy" somehow always
gets reduced to memorized lists or cultural
hegemony, and "perspective" ends up being my
perspective, that is, egocentrism.
Both views end up making the same mistake.
In trying to "cover content" or in treating facts as
equivalent fodder for some vague set of skills
called "critical thinking," both sides ironically
reduce essential knowledge to Trivial Pursuit. In
neither case do students understand that some
ideas are indeed more important than others. In
neither case are students equipped to see for
themselves, as a direct outgrowth of schoolwork,
that some skills and ideas offer touchstones of
such power that our own worldviews must change
as a result of encountering them. On the contrary,
the typical lesson becomes important only because
the teacher says so. (Worse, "This is important"
often reduces to "Take notes because this is going
to be on the test.")
To subscribe to the myth that everything of
importance can be learned through didactic
teaching amounts to a pre-modern view of
learning. The pejorative simile of the school as
factory could only have taken hold in a culture
which already believed that knowledge is facts
passively received. The view that learning is
nonproblematic and inactive reflecting upon
knowledge is the persistent residue of a medieval,
static, and sectarian tradition. The substance of
education is "truth"; the number of essential
truths is limited; there is a catechism and a sacred
text providing sanctioned, effective ways of
explaining all phenomena; the means of knowing
are nonempirical: understanding is essentially
passive, dependent upon the self-evident truth of
doctrine or through contemplation of it. The
lectureonce necessary in a world without ready
access to bookssurvives as a dominant
methodology despite our technological advances
and recognition of diverse learning styles.
Toward a Modern View
of Curriculum
We will now escape our essentially medieval view
of curriculum, premised on the finite and static
quality of knowledge, until education learns the
lessons of modern intellectual inquiry. Today's
curriculum design should thus have as its motto
that of the 17
th
century Royal Society: Nullius in
Verba. The best translation, as Boorstin (1985)
has noted, is "Take nobody's word for it; see for
yourself." Only by apprenticing in the hands-on
work of knowledge production can students learn
to turn inchoate feeling and received opinions
into unforgettable, vibrant, and systematized
knowledge.
2
Given the Sisyphean task of teaching so that
all important ideas are thoughtfully learned, the
only wise goal is to reframe the problem. Our aim
should be to develop in students a thirst for
inquiry and a disgust for thoughtless, superficial,
and shoddy academic work, irrespective of how
"little" they know. Students must be educated to
feel what all wise people know: the more you
learn, the more you are aware of your ignorance.
They must be shown that there is a perpetual need
to think and that all "official" knowledge
(including that in the textbook) is thinking
fashioned into facts by rigorous, sustained but
personalized work.
Such epiphanies are possible only when we
treat every "fact" as the result of inquiry and not
as a given, finished thing produced ex nihilo.
Conventional curriculums reinforce the idea that
knowledge is uncontroversial or self-evident, when
the opposite is often true. The test for a modern
curriculum is whether it enables students, at any
level, to see how knowledge grows out of, resolves,
and produces questions. Rather than the TV-view
that by the end of a class or school career all the
"answers" have been "taught" and tied together in
a happy ending, closure would consist of taking
stock of the current state of the boundary between

2
Readers of Dewey will hear an echo here of
How We Think (1910/1933). There, Dewey
argues that neither conservatives nor liberals
understand the mind's native interest in
thinking and the need to culminate, not begin
with, one's work in a "logical" organization of
subject matter.
one's knowledge and ignorance, and gauging the
depth of one's grasp of the questions.
In short, the aim of curriculum is to awaken,
not "stock" or "train" the mind. That goal makes
the basic unit of a modern curriculum the
question. Given the intimidating, easily trivialized
mass of knowledge, what the modern student
needs is the ability to see how questions both
produce and point beyond knowledge (whether
one's own or the expert's). Educational progress
would thus be measured as the ability to deepen
and broaden one's command of essential
questions by marshaling knowledge and
arguments to address them.
Note, therefore, that questioning is not a
context-less skill any more than knowledge is inert
content. One learns the power of the question
only be seeing, for oneself, that important "facts"
were once myths, arguments, and questions. And
one therefore learns self-confidence as a student
only by seeing that one's questions, not one's
current store of knowledge, always determine
whether one becomes truly educated.
Freedom to Go Where
Questions Lead
Curriculums should therefore be organized
around essential questions to which content
selection would represent (necessarily incomplete
and always provocative) "answers."
3
What is an
adequate proof? What is a "great" book? Does art
imitate life or vice versa? Are there really heroes
and villains? Can one medium of discourse or art
adequately translate into others? Is there a fixed
and universal human nature? Is "history" the same
as "progress"? These more general questions
would have subsets of specific questions under
which content would be organized.
The task is to reorganize curriculums more
than to add or subtract from them. The aim is to
establish clear inquiry priorities within a course,
around which facts are learned the method of
athletics and the technical and performing arts, by
the way. To demonstrate that such a curriculum is
feasible, let us look at the essential concepts of
science cited in the AAAS report, Project 2061:

3
See Wiggins (1987) for a further account of
"essential questions." For examples of
curriculums designed around such questions,
see the June 1989 issue of Horace, the
newsletter of the Coalition ofEssential
Schools, based at Brown University.
Science for All Americans.
4
The following
"Common Themes" are stressed: systems, models,
constancy, patterns of change, evolution. Now,
turn them into questions under which content
would be organized: Is nature "systematic"? In
what senses is the body a "system"? What are the
strengths and weaknesses of the "model" of light
as a wave or of atoms as planetary systems? Does
scientific knowledge change by gradual evolution
or by revolution? All student inquiry, specific labs
and assignments, and final exams would be used
to ascertain the degree to which the student
understands the question.
The modern educational task is thus to put
students in the habit of thoughtful inquiry,
mimicking the work of professionals. That
naturally implies that essential questions must also
derive from students: the best questions in my
classes invariably came from engaged students.
Sometimes all a teacher need do is ask students to
design the questions and tasks composing the final
exam, based on their knowledge of the
"essentials." (In theory, one would assess students
on their ability to anticipate the essential
questions. In fact, in my teaching and that of
many others, the students' growth in question-
asking over the course of the class is assessed.)
The implication for curriculum design in all
of this is profound: if the students' questions
partially determine the direction of the course, it
will now longer be possible to write scope and
sequence lesson plans in advance. The teacher and
the students must have the intellectual freedom to
go where essential questions lead, within bounds
set by the general questions, themes, and concepts
of the syllabus. The teacher must have access to
material that offers a variety of specific inquiries
to pursue, with suggestions on how to deepen
student responses and to use the text as a more
effective resource. The textbook, instead of being the
syllabus outline and content, would be a reference
book for student and teacher questions as they
naturally arise. Like the music or athletic coach
and the vocational education teacher, the
classroom teacher's job is to help the student "play
the game" of the expert, using content-knowledge,
as contextually appropriate, to recognize, pose,
and solve problems. Most important, the teacher-
as-coach would use the curriculum to help
students develop the habits and high standards of

4
American Association for the Advancement
of Science (1989), pp. 123-131
the expert (as opposed to thinking of content
mastery as a superficial and desiccated version of
all professional knowledge). We have learned this
lesson in the arts and in writing, thanks to the
work of the national and regional Writing
Projects in the latter case. But we have yet to
translate it into the learning of history,
mathematics, foreign language, and literature.
The reference to "high standards" may well be
lost or misconstrued here. The "standard" was
originally the flag that soldiers rallied around, the
source of self-orientation and loyalty; it
represented what mattered, what one was willing
to fight for. To speak of high standards if to
invoke images of pride in one's work, a loving
attention to detail, an infusion of thoughtfulness,
whether one is learned or not. What is sadly
visible in so many American classrooms, even in
the "best" schools, is that there is so little evident
student craftsmanship in academic work a far cry
from what one witnesses on the athletic field, on
stages and in vocational wings, by the way. The
cause? Seeing facts as the remedy of ignorance and
accurate recall as the only sign of knowledge.
Standards are intellectual virtues habits of
mind. In workshops I ask teachers, "What "bad
habit" gets in the way of students' learning what is
essential?" They quickly offer many good ones:
inability to delay gratification, inability to listen,
no concern for thoroughness or discipline in
proofreading, and so on. When one then asks
them to imagine the solving of each problem as
the changing of a habit, there is a noticeable set of
sobered faces. Didactic lessons obviously cannot
work. Days of reinforcing actions are required.
What then often follows is the more painful
realization that teacher habits unwittingly
reinforce the student habits deemed undesirable,
especially the teacher habit of "coverage" and
short-answer tests.
But it is not only that skills are habits. An idea
is a habit of mind. Only with repeated use, and by
investigating it from various points of view, do we
learn to understand a new idea whether it be
F=ma or irony in literature. To imagine that one
verbal exposure to such ideas or a few mindless
used of them (as if they were plug-in algorithms
not requiring judgment) is sufficient for students
to understand them is as nave as Sisyphus'
thinking that this time he has the tools to make it.
The Ability to Keep
Questioning
What students need to experience, firsthand, is
what makes an idea or book "great" something
hard to do well, but possible with students of all
ages if teachers grasp the need for cycles of
Question-Answer-Question instead of merely
Question-Answer. The issue is ultimately not
which great book you read but whether any book
or idea is taught in a way that deadens or awakens
the mind, whether the student is habituated to
reading books thoughtfully, and whether the
student comes to appreciate the value of
warranted knowledge (as opposed to mere beliefs
called "facts" by someone else).
One irony in the fuss over Cultural Literacy is
that Hirsch has written a classic liberal argument:
the point of cultural literacy is to enter the Great
Conversation as a coequal. But Hirsch made a
fatal (and revealing) error in his prescription of a
shared base of essential information.
5
The capacity
to understand is only partially dependent on facts;
rarely do we need to know the same things that
our fellow conversants know. It is far more
important for a novice to possess intellectual
virtues (moral habits of mind, if you will); one
must:
know how to listen to someone who knows
something one does not know,
perceive which questions to ask for clarifying
an idea's meaning or value,
be open and respectful enough to imagine that
a new and strange idea is worth attending to,
be inclined to ask questions about pat
statements hiding assumptions or confusions.
So-called "liberals" in education have been
myopic in thinking that one can evade the
question about what facts, ideas, or books are
worth spending limited time on. There is no
"critical thinking" without substantive ideas and
criteria for distinguishing between exemplary and
slipshod work, no matter what the age or
experience of students. But didactically teaching
sanctioned bits of knowledge from a silly list will

5
He has also erred in his portrayal of Dewey's
thinking. The caricature he presents of what
he calls Dewey's "formalism" overlooks a
massive corpus of writings that provide
substantive guidelines on how to ensure that
students truly understand academic ideas of
value and substance.
promote only thoughtless mastery and the very
ignorance we decry. "Knowledge" remains a
forgettable patchwork of adult sayings in the
absence of our own questioning and verifying.
"Knowledge" must solve a problem or provoke
inquiry for it to seem important.
Since it is impossible to teach everything we
know to be of value, we must equip students with
the ability to keep questioning. The value of an
idea, when time is limited, stems from its ability
to pass this test: does it sufficiently illuminate
student experience and provoke new thought? If
not, it clutters up the curriculum.
A truly liberal education is one that liberates
us from the oppression of unexamined opinion
and feelinga far cry from letting students
encounter only what they think relevant or fun.
As the philosopher Gadamer put it, the enemy of
the question is dominant opinion, be it the loud
voice of a textbook or one's student peers. The
aim of the modern curriculum ought to be to use
selected content as a vehicle for developing in
students an unwillingness to accept glib,
unwarranted answers from any source. They must
leave school with the passion to question, without
the fear of looking foolish, and with the
knowledge to learn were and how the facts can be
found.
The sign of a poor education, in short, is not
ignorance. It is rationalization, the thoughtless
habit of believing that one's unexamined,
superficial, or parochial opinions and feelings are
the truth; or the habit of timid silence when one
does not understand what someone else is talking
about. Most first-rate questions or comments I
have heard from my high school students were
inevitably preceded with "I know this sounds
stupid, but" The principal sign of the failure of
curriculum-as-content is that admitting ignorance
becomes increasingly rare as students age: many of
our best high school students will not openly
express their ignorance, while younger students
happily inquire regularly.
Toward a Thoughtful
Education
Curriculum must develop in students the habits
of mind required for a lifetime of recognizing and
exploring one's ignorance. The modern
curriculum should thus: (1)equip students with
the ability to further their superficial knowledge
through careful questioning, (2) enable them to
turn those questions into warranted, systematic
knowledge, (3) develop in students high standards
of craftsmanship in their work irrespective of how
much or how little they "know," and (4) engage
students so thoroughly in important questions
that they learn to take pleasure in seeking
important knowledge.
To enable students to be more thoughtful
about what they do and do not know, the
following aphorisms should be kept in mind in
curriculum design:
1. The most essential habit of mind we can
provide students is the ability to suspend disbelief or
belief as the situation may warrant. Experts are so
called not because they know everything of
importance in their field but because they have
developed the habits required to avoid believing
the first thing the see, think, or hear from other
so-called experts.
6
Ask yourself, then: how would we teach the
same content from the perspective that students
should feel the need and desire to be critical or
empathic when most people, when encountering a
would-be problem, are inclined in the opposite
direction? At Central Park East Secondary School
in East Harlem, for example, all courses are
designed around the following five sets of
questions:
Whose voice am I hearing? From where is the
statement or image coming? What's the point
of view?
What is the evidence? How do we or they
know? How credible is the evidence?
How do things fit together? What else do I
know that fits with this?
What if? Could it have been otherwise? Are
there alternatives?
What difference does it make? Who cares?
Why should I care?
As these questions reveal, the criteria of good
answers become more important than merely
whether one possesses a seemingly-adequate-but-
really-superficial "right answer." When content is

6
Note, for example, the recent "cold fusion"
controversy and how careful some scholars
have been about testing the initial claims b
Pons and Fleischman before responding one
way or the other. Note, too, that many
experienced chemists may have been
(necessarily) ignorant of all they needed to
know about nuclear physics to settle the
matter.
organized to address such questions, the student's
(limited but growing) knowledge becomes a
means to the end of mastering the standards the
disciplineof scholarship. Second, when the
questions are continually asked, the student gets
in the habit of asking good questions
unapologetically. (While visiting the school last
year, I heard an 8
th
grader ask, after the teacher
gave a history lecture, "From whose point of view
were the facts in the talk from?" leading to an
exemplary inquiry of the teacher's sources.)
2. The deep acceptance of the painful
realization that there are far more important ideas
than we can ever know leads to a liberating
curricular postulate: all students need not learn the
same things. Why do we persist in requiring all
students to take mathematics courses that are
designed only for would-be professionals? Why do
we require all students in an English class to read
the same books? High standards matter, not
whether we have all marched through the same
"content."
The teacher should be an intellectual librarian,
constantly making it possible for students to be
challenged anew to pique their curiosity and raise
their standards and expectations. Just as there are
different learning styles, there are different
equivalent books and tasks that will serve such
purposes. And if different "essential questions" are
tackled by groups of students drawing upon
different books and experiences, the possibilities
for genuinely cooperative learning are heightened.
3. If everything taught is said by teachers to be
important, then nothing will seem important to
students. Of all the "important" things students
are learning, some are more important than
others. This concept is one that few students are
ever helped to grasp through their schooling
experience. How do we help students grasp
priorities within a course? "Importance" is only
"learnable," not "teachable": the student must be
helped to directly perceive and astutely judge an
idea, fact, skill, model (or whatever) to be essential
for understanding or uniting the other elements of
a course. (The ultimate test: the student's ability
to say "This is important," when the teacher is
silent on the matter.)
The only practical cure for our bloated
curriculum, in which everything is important, is
to stop thinking in terms of adult logic and
specialized priorities. Rather than asking, "What
will my course cover?" or "What are the
important outcomes of this course?" teachers
should ask:
"What must my students actually demonstrate
to reveal whether they have a thoughtful as
opposed to thoughtless grasp of the
essentials?"
"What will 'successful' student understanding
(with limited experience and background)
actually look like?"
The only realistic way to deemphasize or
reduce content to stress priorities in teaching is to
align one's curriculum in the true sense: design
final tests and scoring rubrics that reflect
thoughtfulness as a curricular priority, and then
teach to them. (And, as I have argued elsewhere,
the operational sign of a school's priorities can be
found in those things we take points off for on
assignments and tests.)
7
A sign of successful
curriculum and instruction, where priorities are
clear, can be found in the students' ability to
anticipate the final examination in its entirety and
provide accurate self-assessments of their finished
work.
4. Curriculum is inseparable from assessment:
the tests set standards of exemplary performance,
as point number 3 implies. But as the notion of
intellectual performance implies, competence can
be shown in various, sometimes idiosyncratic
ways. Why must all students show what they
know and can do in the same standardized way?
Craftsmanship and pride in one's work depend on
"tests" that enable us to confront and personalize
authentic tasks.
School-given tests, whether bought from
vendors or designed by teachers, are typically
inauthentic, designed as they are to shake out a
grade rather than allowing students to exhibit
mastery of knowledge in a manner that suits their
styles and interests and does justice to the
complexity of knowledge. We must once again
return to the idea of the public "exhibition" of
knowledge, where the student's incentive to reveal
high standards and competence is greatly
increased through personalized "performance."
8
5. The "essentials" are not the "basics." The
laws of physics, the rules of grammar, the
postulates of geometry, the difference between
fact and opinion, or the shades of meaning and

7
See Wiggins (1988).
8
See Wiggins (1989a) and (1989b) for more
on authentic forms of assessment.
usage with respect to words are not unproblematic
givens. They represent embedded and persistent
problems within organized knowledge. Students
are rarely taught to appreciate the fact that the
logical foundations were typically discovered or
invented last in the history of a discipline: they
area the least obvious facts or truths and often
represent stunning triumphs in problem
resolution.
Put in terms of the classroom, essential ideas,
like essential questions, should recur in different
guises and levels of difficulty within each course.
9
That is the only way for students to perceive
knowledge to be essential. Also implicit in such a
view is that to enable students to understand the
essentials of a discipline, we need not teach the
basics first and proceed in "logical" order. Only
experts have the discipline and perspective to
grasp the importance of studying the basics,
whether it be van Gogh learning about color for
eight years or professional writers laboring over a
few word-choice problems in a manuscript. We

9
Echoes, of course, of Bruner's (1960/1977)
"spiral curriculum" in The Process of
Education (which borrowed the phrase from
Dewey's Experience and Education). But the
point here is that students need to see
knowledge "spiral" within each course, not
just over the K-12 years.
should teach the minimum basic content
necessary to get right to essential questions,
problems, and workwithin and across disciplines.
Pride in one's work leads to greater care for the
basics; pride depends on authentic and engaging
work, and a product "owned" by the student.
What Socrates Knew
The dilemmas of curriculum and instruction are
real, the problems increasingly intractable. There
is simply too much for any one of us to know,
never mind teach to dozens of students in a
crowded day. Such a tragic fact leads to a
liberating realization: wisdom matters more than
knowledge. However, as a wise Greek curriculum-
basher pointed out 2,200 years ago, and who was
killed for his trouble, few people know or admit
this essential lesson about our own
ignorancenone of us readily imagine ourselves to
be unaware of things worth knowing. This was
the one thing Socrates knew deeply and
unequivocally. The ideal curriculum would use
knowledge judiciously to further that insight.
Maybe, therefore, the myth of Sisyphus is
appropriate for curriculum work. As Camus
suggested at the end of his essay of Sisyphus, given
a deep awareness of the "absurd" plight of his
task, "One can imagine Sisyphus as happy."
References
American Association for the Advancement of Science. (1989). Project 2061: Science for all Americans.
Washington, D.C.:AAAS
Boorstin, D. (1985). The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself. New York:
Vintage Books.
Bruner, J. (1960/1977). The Process of Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Dewey, J. (1910/1933). How We Think. New York: Henry Holt Publishing
Wiggins, G. (Winter 1987). "Creating a Thought-Provoking Curriculum." American Educator 11, 4.
Wiggins, G. (Winter 1988). "Rational Numbers: Scoring and Grading That Help Rather Than Harm
Learning." American Educator 12, 4.
Wiggins, G. (May 1989a). "A True Test: Toward Authentic and Equitable Assessment." Phi Delta Kappan
70, 9.
Wiggins, G. (April 1989b). "Teaching to the (Authentic) Test." Educational Leadership 46, 7.
Grant Wiggins is Director of Educational Research and Development for CLASS, a Rochester, New York,
consulting firm. He may be contacted at 56 Vassar St., Rochester, NY 14607.
Wiggins, G. (November 1989). "The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance." Educational
Leadership.
Permission to reprint granted by Grant Wiggins at <http://www.relearning.org>