Beware of Procedural Knowledge

I'm embarrassed to say that I just learned the State of Virginia is in the process of revising its math standards. I will provide updates as I learn more, but apparently they've already taken comments online from parents, teachers and others. There may be other opportunities to comment however.

I learned about it when I approached my school board representative about the possibility of using Singapore Math in Fairfax County where I live. She seems interested in it and passed on my note to the Assistant Superintendent's office. In the reply back which covered several different items, the following sentence leaped out at me:


"We have not looked at the Singapore curriculum in a couple of years; the last time we did it focused on procedural knowledge and was not as aligned to the POS as other texts."

Uh, excuse me? Could you explain why procedural knowledge is a bad thing?

On the other hand, please don't.