Her big question is "Do students really learn best this way?". Nobody knows. Because education researchers don't care about empiricism. The English-speaking ed

Her big question is "Do students really learn best this way?". Nobody knows. Because education researchers don't care about empiricism. The English-speaking education research community abandoned empiricism when they started getting "bad" results. There were a series of studies that proved a right-wing education fad (Direct Instruction) was empirically better than all the left-wing education fads. So the left-wingers in education academia decided it was better to throw out empiricism than lose the battle. I'm not saying DI is great. It's a fad, like all the other fads. But using empiricism to iterativly improve it, or search for alternatives would be the way to go. Instead, education research is now often based on Sophistic arguments, appeals to authority, appeasing policy czars (yay funding!), appeasing parents, and other methods which simply don't work. I know this is, itself, not empirical. A more solid argument would be a pointer to what teachers are taught these days, and so we can see how much empiricism vs ex-cathedra-style argument they are exposed to.