Myth Number One: Facts prevent understanding

In Seven Myths About Education, the first myth is that facts prevent understanding. The author begins by explaining how this myth grew up - past thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, and Paolo Freire - who obviously did not have access to the scientific research of the last half-century. 

"Rousseau, Dewey and Freire were wrong to see facts as the enemy of understanding. All the scientific research of the last half-century proves them wrong. The modern bureaucrats and educationalists who base policy and practice on their thinking are wrong too, and with less excuse, as they have been alive when evidence that refutes these ideas has been discovered."

In working to develop a machine with artificial intelligence, scientists had to understand human thought. They learned that the facts stored in long-term memory are crucial for cognition.

"Long-term memory is capable of storing thousands of facts, and when we have memorised thousands of facts on a specific topic, these facts together form what is known as a schema. When we think about that topic. we use that schema. When we meet new facts about that topic, we assimilate them into that scheme - and if we already have a lot of facts in that particular schema, it is much easier for us to learn new facts about that topic.

"Critics of fact-learning will often pull out a completely random fact and say something like: who needs to know the date of the Battle of Waterloo? Why does it matter? Of course, pulling out one fact like this on its own does seem rather odd. But the aim of fact-learning is not to learn just one fact - it is to learn several hundred, which taken together form a schema that helps you to understand the world. Thus, just learning the date of the Battle of Waterloo will be of limited use. But learning the dates of 150 historical events from 3000 BC to the present day and learning a couple of key facts about why each event was important will be of immense use, because it will form the fundamental chronological schema that is the bais of all historical understanding."

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"As we have seen, the popular Bloom's taxonomy suggests that knowing is a lower-order skill, while analysing and evaluating are higher-order skills. The metaphor of lower and higher skills leads to two false conclusions. First, it suggests that knowledge is somehow less worthy and important. A better metaphor than the lower/higher one is that used by E.D. Hirsch. He sees the relationship between knowledge and skills as being like a scrambled egg. You cannot unscramble an egg, and you cannot unscramble knowledge and skills. I also like th metaphor suggested by my colleague Joe Kirby, that knowledge and skills are like a double helix, progressing in tandem from surface learning to deep learning. Rather than characterising passive fact-learning as surface, and active skill-practice as deep, we should understand that knowledge and skills are intertwined, and that skill progression depends upon knowledge accumulation."

SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT