It matters what subjects we teach in schools but we’ve been getting it wrong for a long time
Education includes increasing a child’s knowledge and understanding of a subject… but does it matter which subject? In the U.K., the government believes it to be of such importance that they regulate what is taught in schools to an enormous degree. Even outside the core areas of mathematics, English and science, almost every single lesson that a child receives during their time at a state secondary school is aligned to a topic prescribed by the Department of Education. The U.K. is not alone in this position, and there is a growing international consensus, as more countries sign up to the OECD’s programme of international student achievement (PISA), on what a child should know and be able to do by the age of fifteen. The prevailing position of those with the power to change the curriculum is that it matters very much indeed what children learn. What is more, they are confident they know what it is our children need to know…
One long-standing argument against this view is that what you learn in school isn’t really the essence of education at all. It doesn’t matter what you learn, it is the skill of learning—amongst other things—that a child gains from their education. The point was articulately put as long ago as 1892 by Charles Thwing (pronounced Twing), president of Western Reserve University, when he wrote:
I do not care what you know; I do not care what you are ignorant about; but I do care much, very much, for your power to think; for your power to weigh evidence; for your power to receive facts, and to bring forth from those facts a proper inference. The man who can think, no matter what school or college he has or has not been to, is educated.
Albert Einstein agreed. When reflecting upon his life, he compared the training of the mind with that of the body: in the same way that both gymnastics and walking prepare you for physical work, so all kinds of learning prepare you for mental work. For many of us, the facts we were given at school are not directly relevant to our everyday life, because we don’t calculate the length of hypotenuses or identify fronted adverbials at work. There is a growing community of educators making a convincing case that the content of school lessons is not as important as many governments take it to be. In England, the position is, to a certain extent, a backlash against the increased emphasis on factual learning about by the 2014 changes to the national curriculum. The argument has taken on a more extreme form in the age of the internet. Because it is not clear that the employers of our children will place much value on the skill of memorisation, the challenge is no longer merely to justify learning a particular set of facts, but to justify whether children need to learn any facts at all.
The argument is at its most powerful when we are thinking of the rote-learning of stand-alone facts—the dates of battles, capital cities, the names of the planets—which can be immediately comprehended using only the skills of everyday language. This is the kind of thing most of us are thinking about when we’re thinking about “facts”. It doesn’t matter which facts we learn when they are all just one click away on the internet. Knowledge, however, is layered: the most important and interesting cannot be properly comprehended without getting to grips with a whole load of other stuff first. The upper echelons of knowledge isn’t just a Google search away for the uninitiated. It is possible to teach oneself vector calculus with very little prior knowledge of mathematics but, in addition to access to Google, it requires a lot of confidence and time.
The argument also gains some of its intuitive appeal because we tend to unconsciously think of facts and skills as very different things. This tendency of society at large is prevalent in teaching: a teacher may describe, for example, a student as having natural ability, but not knowing very much. The separation of knowledge from skills makes it easier to suppose that we can do away with the former and concentrate on the latter. It helps bring us to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what children learn, because the true purpose of learning is to develop more generic skills. The problem reaching this conclusion in this way is that our abilities in the world aren’t so cleanly divided up into how much we know and what we can do. You get better at being kind, for example, simply by knowing a lot more about the shit that other human beings are dealing with. It’s not just that knowledge that is layered, but that it is intertwined with skills too. Learning is a sinking in of knowledge that opens a bigger worldview.
Take, for example, the question of why a startlingly wretched conflict has arisen this century in Syria. A deeper and more widely held understanding of this conflict throughout the U.K. would prepare us better as a nation to debate issues of immigrants and refugees. It is a topic that requires more than a Google search; even those of us rehearsed in GCSE history have been given very few of the baseline facts needed to explain the causes of this conflict. There are many areas of higher-layered knowledge that are relevant to our future as a nation: the powers of the European Union, the long-term hazards of nuclear power stations, the causes of house price inflation,… Factual information—and the skills that come with it—can bring us to a deeper understanding of other people, times and the world we live in. It changes how we view the world, how we act and what we do. If we had been teaching international relations, the economics of trade, European history and politics to all our children for the last fifty years, its plausible that different political decisions would have been made by our nation in recent times… teaching facts matters.
One reason that this isn’t always obvious is that, with a few exceptions, the subjects that dominate the school curriculum in the U.K. have been handed down to us from Victorian school masters. There’s an awful lot to say for the teaching of trigonometry and geography, but an awful lot against it too. Although any kind of learning will help prepare us to a certain extent to understand why dead bodies are washing up on European beaches and how to best react to the current refugee crisis, particular topics of history, politics, religion and human psychology would help us far more than others. The point is not that we should put the current conflict in Syria in the school curriculum, just that what we put on it is important. What we teach matters and a lot of what we do teach matters half as much as we think it does.
COMMENTS MOST WELCOME!