Knowledge Base

I finished reading How to Educate a Citizen by E. D. Hirsch, a well-known voice of experience in the world of education. (I’ve read a number of his papers over the years.) This recent book echoes many themes from his earlier work. It’s a swan song reminding the American people that having a shared knowledge-based curriculum is crucial especially at the early levels of primary school. Acquiring more knowledge content then pays dividends as children go to secondary school and beyond. It’s a Matthew effect: To those who have more, they acquire even more. To those that don’t, the gap widens.

 

I’m a proponent of a knowledge-rich curriculum that spells out what students need to know and that sequences the material coherently. This is crucial in chemistry because you can only get to more advanced material if you’ve mastered the basics. There is broad agreement among chemistry educators what these basics should be. At the college level, the content knowledge and its depth are relatively uniform for general chemistry and organic chemistry from one institution to another. Yes, there are some differences, but there is often at least 80% similarity (our rule-of-thumb for deciding whether a similar course from another university will be accepted for transfer credit).

 

Hirsch stresses the importance that this knowledge be common to all students. The commonality of language and concepts allows people from different walks of life to potentially engage in meaningful conversation. There is a shared basis of knowledge that facilitates the communication. When I came to the U.S. as an international student, although I spoke English competently, I did not share similar cultural touchstones with almost everyone else. (I was the only person from my country.) So I observed, asked questions (usually timidly) and started to learn. This is probably why, when I meet people, I often ask them about their background, their family, what it was like for them growing up, and so on.

 

In my home country, I went through what Hirsch would call a Core Knowledge curriculum (that he favors). I honestly don’t recall very much of what I learned if you asked me “What did you learn that sticks out to you?” But in the flow of conversation, things that I learned a long time ago, bubble up when the appropriate context presents itself. With the appropriate triggers, I would likely be a fount of information. It helps that I enjoy learning and I read voraciously as a child. (There was no TV, and I was very blessed to have access to a wide range of reading material – something that cannot be taken for granted where I grew up.)

 

Coming to college in the U.S. was my exposure to a palette-style smorgasbord education. There wasn’t much of a common curriculum, although there were distribution requirements (pick one from Group A, pick one from Group B, etc). I’ve since experienced the pros and cons of setting up a common curriculum. One of the major advantages of the common curriculum is that it provides a shared language of discourse that can pay dividends in subsequent courses. Another advantage is that it strengthened community through that shared experience, even when it was struggling through said experience.

 

Are there things that I think an educated person should know about chemistry? I’d say some Atomic Theory and Chemical Bonding, making a connection between the microscopic and the macroscopic, the Periodic Table as an organizing principle, and what make chemical reactions “go” (i.e., the role that energy plays in chemical reactions). I think students should recognize common vocabulary: that sodium chloride (NaCl) is table salt and that its properties stem from it being an “ionic compound”. I think these basics can be covered at the secondary school level, i.e., I don’t think all students need to take chemistry in college if they’ve seen it before. Then again, the students who take college chemistry (at my institution) have mostly seen some chemistry (albeit at a more rudimentary level). Those that didn’t see any in secondary school are unlikely to take it in college. The Matthew Effect again.

 

Having a knowledge base allows you to appreciate things that would otherwise seem opaque. I’m currently reading some short stories by William Gibson in a genre classified as cyberpunk. It’s not a genre I’m familiar with, and I don’t read much fiction in general or sci-fi in particular. Gibson throws you right into the action, and if you don’t have the vocabulary or various knowledge touchstones, you simply can’t follow the story. There’s no way I would have understood Gibson’s work when I was a teenager. (Back then, I made one attempt to read Asimov’s Foundation and understood very little.) But now, with a knowledge base or more depth and breadth, I thoroughly enjoyed Hinterlands. It’s a superb piece of storytelling that stretches the mind while it immerses you in the feeling of the main protagonist. And it helped that I knew what cargo cult meant. Being able to enjoy things outside of my domain is why I occasionally read about art or poetry. There is no way I could have known how much I could appreciate without acquiring the knowledge base.