Knowledge-Rich

In chapter six of Curious, the author, Ian Leslie, turns his attention to the importance of knowledge, not just for cultivating curiosity but for educating children as a societal imperative. For me, he’s preaching to the choir. But to my chagrin, it’s a choir that’s diminishing in influence. It feels like those who preach a knowledge-rich curriculum are going out of fashion. Yet again.

 

And that’s because the progressive education fad runs in cycles. It rises to a crescendo with seemingly simple small-scale interventions that show positive results. But when scaled-up, the supposed benefits begin to vanish – unless sustained with significant additional resources. The downswing results in knowledge-rich curricula and pedagogies becoming relevant again. But eventually the fad rises again in a new guise and the cycle repeats.

 

This is not to say there aren’t any positive things coming from progressive education ideas which got a large visible boost from John Dewey’s work in the early twentieth century. These new ideas forced educators to think about what they were teaching and how they were teaching, and brought balance to stale practices that had relegated the learner to a robot. Kids were unhappy about school. Teachers were unhappy about school. Everyone’s looking for that magic bullet to cure the travails of mass education.

 

There is no magic bullet. If there was, we’d be in an education utopia. The fact that we’re not and the failure of each fad reminds us of this. But hope remains and the cycles will continue. Does anything work? Yes, but it takes work. The learning sciences have accumulated plenty of data over the last seventy years suggesting that knowledge-rich curricula, at times seemingly tedious for everyone involved, continue to inch us forward in preparing children for an evolving milieu. It’s not sexy. There are accusations that it’s a killer of creativity. But the reality is that, unless we want to return to the static stratified society of the middle ages, a knowledge-rich curriculum for mass education is the best way forward. While it has its many flaws (rightly pointed out by its detractors), reducing the primacy of content knowledge is likely to have overall worse outcomes, both for tackling the ‘wicked problems’ of today and for societal fairness.

 

Leslie begins his chapter with Rousseau’s Emile, and describes the key disagreement starkly: “The fault line in these debates is this: Should schools be places where adults transmit to children the academic knowledge that society deems valuable? Or places where children are allowed to follow their own curiosity, wherever it takes them?” I would argue that schools need to do both. It doesn’t need to be an either-or. But when you listen to the progressive education camp rail against the strawman of ‘traditional’ education, the knowledge-rich curriculum gets painted as robotic and soul-killing. When executed poorly, that is indeed what it feels like. But I’d also argue that just because something feels tedious, repetitive, and un-fun, at least some of the time, doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable or that it’s being done badly. Leslie spends most of his chapter discussing three myths.

 

Myth #1 is that “the natural curiosity of children is stifled by pedagogical instruction”. Yes, it can be. But evolutionary evidence suggests otherwise. Human children are especially dependent and apt at learning from their elders. And “in the absence of knowledge imparted by adults, children’s natural curiosity only takes them so far.” They get discouraged, or give up, or learn things that are wrong. This is particularly true in the natural sciences, where direct instruction by teachers is crucial. Leslie provides a chilling example: “The Internet doesn’t solve this problem; it makes it worse. Imagine a group of children trying to learn about Darwinian evolution, for example, armed only with a broadband connection. How many would end up concluding that it is a Satanist plot? Some of them might learn some valuable information but only after wasting a lot of time struggling to distinguish spurious nonsense from informed discussion.” In addition, teachers can play a key role in introducing new things to students that pique their curiosity that the kids would otherwise never have been exposed to. Leslie argues that children “need to gain enough information to be conscious of their own information gaps, and sometimes require firm direction. Without it, we condemn them to be forever uninterested in their own ignorance.”

 

Myth #2 is that ‘traditional’ schooling kills creativity. Leslie’s book is about curiosity. Does curiosity naturally lead to creativity? It could, but if you want to be truly creative in a way that makes a difference, it turns out that you need lots of knowledge. That’s because meaningful creativity is, to a large extent, domain-specific. And for cross-domain creativity, you either need to know more, or better still you need to find creative partners with complementary knowledge. An interesting statistic: “Researchers who study innovation have found that the average age at which scientists and inventors make breakthroughs has increased over time. As knowledge accumulates across generations, it takes longer to acquire it, and thus longer to be in a position to supersede or add to it.” From an educational perspective, this means that we teachers should be helping students gain such knowledge. We help digest knowledge so students can consume it more efficiently, in the same way that cooking food helps us digest it. To push my cooked-food analogy further, cooking it to smell tasty whets the appetite – and we should be inspiring our students to do the necessary work to chew the food and not just be satisfied with the aroma.

 

Myth #3 is that students should be taught generic ‘skills’ (‘critical thinking’ is the popular one right now), more so than knowledge. I’ve stated this baldly. Of course, one needs knowledge to think critically. But the current fad wants to minimize content knowledge to focus on the ‘skill’. To this, my response is that doing so will lead to skills that are merely superficial at best. That’s what the research shows and I was pleased that Leslie (throughout the chapter) quotes relevant studies; he did his homework. Cognitive load theory makes its appearance although Leslie doesn’t name it as such: “Knowledge makes you smarter. People who know more about a subject have a kind of X-ray vision; they can zero in on a problem’s underlying fundamentals… The less we know in the first place, the more brain power we have to expend on processing, comprehending, and remembering what we’ve read and the less we have left over to reflect on it. The emptier our long-term memories, the harder we find it to think.” And how do you build your long-term memory store? Through knowledge-rich learning. Leslie cites example after example of how the gap widens over time between those who have knowledge and those who have not. The disparity is sobering.

 

I’ve become tired of the fight between educational camps. Once upon a time, I was more vocal in larger gatherings and formal meetings, in my attempt to temper the rising cycle of proponents putting new clothes on to Rousseau’s old argument. Now, I just do my own thing and wait for the cycle’s downswing. I guess I would be characterized as ‘old-school’ but I’m not sitting still. I’m curious and I like learning new things and trying new things out as evidenced by much that I’ve written on this blog. I hope more people read Leslie’s book, and I was refreshed that he took time to sift through the evidence and conclude that it favors a knowledge-rich curriculum. That’s now what’s popular right now.