“Schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.”
So observes Dan Lerman, a professor of cognitive science at Columbia University, in his Free Press article The War on Knowledge. He writes,
As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era. But without facts, what are students actually learning?
In pursuit of equity–that is, equal results for all groups–many school districts in blue states have been reforming school policies. “These reforms typically eliminate harsh penalties for missing work or cheating; exclude homework, attendance, behavior, and participation from academic grades; and permit unlimited retakes of tests and essays.”
The College Board has revised its standardized tests to minimize the need to recall names, dates, and other specific facts. Instead, the new AP history test emphasizes broad trends and “historical thinking.”
Yes, there is more to education than recalling factual information. But not knowing actual objective knowledge prevents human beings from acquiring the higher levels of education. Lerman, himself a cognitive scientist, writes:
None of this is to say that education should become a trivia contest. Knowing facts isn’t the end goal, but facts are a prerequisite to higher orders of thinking, of the ability to separate reality from fiction.
Ask any cognitive scientist and they’ll tell you that factual knowledge is the foundation of thinking. Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, put it simply in his modern classic Why Don’t Students Like School?: “Thinking well requires knowing facts. . . . The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes like reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge.”
According to Lerman, “We like facts. They anchor us. They remind us that the world and reality are knowable things—and as we understand them, we better understand our own places in them.”
I totally agree with Prof. Lerman. But the problem goes deeper than he perhaps realizes. I would invite him to drop in on his colleagues at Columbia in the Humanities Departments, where he will be told that the world and reality are not knowable. Knowledge is not something objective that can be discovered. Rather, knowledge is a construction. Then visit his colleagues in the Social Sciences who will tell him that while it is true that knowledge helps us better understand our own place in the world, that place is determined by whoever is in power, whose knowledge constructions keep the less privileged under control. He should then visit his colleagues in the hard Sciences, who will tell him behind closed doors how their quest for knowledge is also being threatened by this anti-intellectual ideology.
When elementary and secondary schools downplay any kind of objective knowledge, they are simply following the educational implications of the contemporary philosophies that permeate the academic establishment: postmodernism, relativism, constructivism, and critical theory. (See my book Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture.)
The educational solution can be found not in the various permutations of progressive educational theory, but in classical education. It brings knowledge and academic content back to education. But it is not about knowledge of facts alone.
The genius of classical education can be found in its Seven Liberal Arts–which are NOT the same liberal arts as taught presently at Columbia, though that university used to be a great pioneer in this, but rather the trivium of grammar, logic, rhetoric (the mastery of language) plus the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the mastery of mathematics). But classical education also includes reading the great books, character formation, appreciation of the arts, and other exercises designed to promote the true, the good, and the beautiful. In classical Christian schools, that includes the cultivation of the Christian faith. The bottom line is that the classical approach to education is about teaching and acquiring knowledge AND understanding AND creative application.
Illustration: College of Education Constructivism by derekcx via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0
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