Poor learning outcomes of American school students, which I briefly discussed in Chapter 6, have propelled many unsuccessful attempts to reform the American system of school instruction. Discussing the reasons for the failure of these reforms in her best-selling book, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch emphasizes the fact that all these reforms failed to address “what teachers should teach and what students are expected to learn.” To remediate this situation, Ravitch suggests that a coherent curriculum should be developed that would prescribe the knowledge in various subject areas that students need to learn.

Although, of course, knowledge in different subject domains differs (knowledge in history is different from knowledge in math), knowledge in each subject domain can be classified into the same types, and the acquisition of any knowledge proceeds in accordance with some general laws. What follows is a brief analysis of findings of American cognitive psychologists and Russian Vygotskians about different types of knowledge and the process of its acquisition.