Recently I have been reviewing my notes on Seven Myths About Education by Daisy Christodoulou, a book I read a few years ago. Christodoulou is an educational thinker in the UK, who attempts to explode some of the common myths in the educational landscape of today. Myth one is “Facts Prevent Understanding”.
Myth 1: Facts Prevent Understanding
For those of you who aren’t involved in education, you probably read something like this and think, “Who on earth would believe that?” For those of us involved in education, we are perhaps more familiar with some of the thinking of educational ‘experts’. Rousseau, for instance, argued that experience alone should be the way scholars should learn. One cynically wonders what lessons his five children whom he deposited at a foundling hospital after their births learnt by their experiences. John Dewey, a hero of education to many, suggested that friction and waste would be the result of a child who is forced into a receptive and absorbing attitude, while the more modern educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argued that the banking deposit concept of education (depositing knowledge in the minds of children) is a misguided system.
So too, many in education today argue that teaching kids facts is a problem. Rather they argue that we need to be teaching understanding and a deeper level of thinking to children. As is often the case, an element of this sounds plausible. We all know that knowledge is not enough. We don’t want our children to be robots who can spit out random facts. Rather, we want them to be able to use their knowledge; to develop higher-order thinking. We would rank highly the ability to analyse and evaluate for instance.
Christodolou points to research that highlights the fundamental importance of knowledge acquisition in education. It seems that research into human thinking demonstrates the importance of long-term memory for cognition. The more information that a child has stored in their long term memory, the more they can overcome the difficulties of cognitive overload in their working memory. Simply put, the more facts a child has possession of, the easier it is for them to work with more complex problems.
A classic case of this is learning the multiplication tables. A child who has not got these ‘down pat’ will struggle to perform division of mixed numbers. Too much of their working memory is being devoted to figuring out the particular times table they need so that there is not enough ‘thinking space’ left to convert the mixed numbers to improper fractions and then change the division sign to a multiplication sign and change the last fraction to its reciprocal. A child with the multiplication tables committed to long term memory is ready to deal with this new complexity.
Creativity, problem-solving and ability to analyse and evaluate are skills that are reliant on large bodies of knowledge securely committed to memory. Dan Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia argues that the data from the last 30 years of research leads to the conclusion that thinking well requires knowing facts. He writes,
“The very processes that teachers care about most – critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving – are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory.”
This research is a timely reminder to educators to keep the main thing the main thing. We need to pass on a solid body of knowledge to our children. This is foundational in the development of critical thinking. Knowledge is the tool our children need to think.