Myth Number Five: We should teach transferable skills

Once educators drastically reduced their obligation to teach students knowledge, they had the problem of how to spend the resulting surplus time. The result was a new emphasis on "transferable skills" - critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis and evaluation - in short, teaching students how to learn to learn.

Unfortunately, research over the last few decades has proven that knowledge and skills are intertwined, and it turns out that it is not in fact possible to separate out individual skills and make students good at them in isolation. That's why if you ask real estate lawyers a question about criminal charges, chances are they will demur: although they have lawyerly skills, they can't exercise them in an area where they lack the relevant knowledge.

According to cognitive scientist Dan Willingham: "When we learn to think critically about, say, the start of the Second World War, it does not mean we can also think critically about a chess game, or about the current situation in the Middle East, or even about the start of the American Revolutionary War. Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge."

The author writes: "A few years ago I gave two groups of year 11 pupils an exam past paper. They were the top two sets. All 55 pupils were predicted C grades or above, and all 55 did indeed go on to get C grades or above. They had all been consistently working close to their target grades when I gave them this past paper. It consisted of an unseen extract from a short story by Arthur C. Clarke. The story is about a man who is the last human left in a futuristic London that has been submerged in ice and snow. He is constantly hearing loud noises from the North. He knows that if men were coming to rescue him, they would be more likely to come from the South, but he hopes against hope anyway. The punchline is that the noise turns out to be a glacier.

"As I read it in preparation for the lesson, I guessed what would happen - no one would get a very good mark because no one knew what a glacier was and proper understanding of the story depended on this. I was right. Out of the 55 pupils, not one fully understood what a glacier was and hence could fully understand what the story was about. Some clearly had vague knowledge that a glacier involved ice. Many of them thought that the glacier was some kind of tribe or army advancing from the North. They were supposed to spend an hour doing the paper in silence. Both were well-behaved classes who took activities like this seriously, but about 20 minutes into the task I heard groans and moans and complaints about how difficult it was. Some of the pupils were simply unable to answer any of the questions. They just did not understand what was happening. All the painstaking exam strategies and reading techniques I had prepped them with over the previous months were useless."

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