It's fashionable these days to focus on teaching skills rather than content; train metacognitive strategies rather than memorize facts; endow students with procedural rather than declarative knowledge ("how to" vs. "what"). Proponents of this strategy have some good arguments in their favor, including:
The defenders of knowledge tend not to deny any of that (except, sometimes, the utility of the internet in light of its information/disinformation ratio). Instead, as I understand it, their argument for continuing to teach content rests on two or three additional convictions:
As usual in this sort of debate, both sides are probably right, and neither side entirely discounts the points made by the other. However, there is a crucial difference that tends to fall by the wayside in discussions of this sort: it is much easier to define which skills you need than it is to define which knowledge you need. In terms of skills, it is easy to agree that it is good if students are able to retrieve, evaluate and connect information, can understand and use at least one language effectively, etc. -- all of which can be broken down into sub-skills whose individual utility can be assessed and falsified. Since the advent of skill-based education, much debate and research has happened in this area, and while not everything is entirely clear cut, it seems at least like an answerable question. With regards to knowledge, however, the standard assumption seems to be that we should just fall back on the traditional content-based curricula that are structured by (mostly academic) subjects and have the weight of history and familiarity in their favor. This makes some sense in light of the "common ground" argument mentioned above, but other than that it is far from obvious that this should be the right path. If we concur that it is good for students to have a core of knowledge on which to build, what should that core contain? It is easy to say that everybody should know their history; but what parts of history does everybody really need to know? Is explicit knowledge about music or any of the other arts universally important? How about knowledge of neurology, or human cognitive biases? (Again, don't forget the adage about "a little knowledge" -- for biases, it can be argued that knowing a little about them may actually do more harm than good, for example.) Never mind that biology and physics can be interesting and fascinating -- the question of what physical and biological knowledge, if any, is essential and should be universally shared is not easily answered. What, then, does make a good foundation on which to build new, personalized edifices of knowledge? What is the irreducible core of facts that any educated person needs to be aware of? Or does it not matter what specific knowledge students gain in school, as long as they gain some of any sort? If so, does that knowledge need to be spread out across multiple fields (which ones?) in order to be any help? I have not yet seen a good answer to any of these questions, even though I have grappled with them (and watched other people debate them) for years. I do have a couple of intuitions, or educated guesses if you like, that I might set out in a future post; but I think we should be able to do better than that. As always, any pointers, links and ideas are very welcome.
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