Knowledge Deserves More Credit — Skills Instruction Is Overrated

Is knowledge obsolete?

There is a major misconception going around right now that students don't actually need to know anything in the way of facts because they can look anything up, right?

We have Google, we have smartphones in our pockets, we can just look up anything that we need to.

And I even saw a book published on this recently that was kind of arguing that students need an education in skills rather than knowledge.

But here's why that's wrong.

Cognitive science has found, and the best book on this is Natalie Wexler's The Knowledge Gap.

It gets very deep into the science.

Cognitive science has found that knowledge is what we think with.

It's the operation, like it's what we perform our mental operations on.

And if we don't have knowledge, if we don't have information in our heads to think on, we can't do any thinking.

So this idea...

that we can build education around skills does not work.

It simply is not possible to just teach in terms of skills.

The other piece of Wechsler's argument that I find really interesting is that a lot of the supposed skills we try to teach in school don't seem to actually exist when researchers try to discover stable skills like finding the main idea in reading comprehension or discovering the author's intent it turns out that those aren't actually really skills and a lot of what people are talking about teaching in terms of skills aren't really skills that exist they're simply things that you can do if you have knowledge and things that you can't do if you don't have knowledge So I think as educators, we have to be quick to push back against this skills push and this push away from knowledge and this idea that you can just Google anything that you need to, you don't actually need to know anything.

And I want to be very clear about my own standpoint on this in my own practice with my own kids, because I think This is one of those cases where there's a huge amount of elite hypocrisy, where we're teaching our own kids real stuff, and we're advocating skills instruction, content-free skills instruction for other people's kids.

I am very diligent about teaching my own kids knowledge about the way the world works, about facts about the world.

Anytime I have the opportunity to reinforce for my own kids...

The structure of the world, the knowledge that exists in it, you know, I'm even starting to think about AP exams and the knowledge that students need to build on.

Like the whole idea here is that knowledge sticks to knowledge, right?

That when you learn new stuff, you have to have some sort of Velcro for that to stick to, right?

You have to have some sort of schema that that new information can plug into.

and it's like a snowball right the the more knowledge you have the more understanding of the world you have the more conceptual depth you have the more new knowledge can stick right a new a bigger snowball gets bigger faster than a smaller snowball and i think one of the reasons we have the gaps we do in education is that there's not really any way to catch up, right?

If we don't start early building students' knowledge, they're always going to be learning at a slower rate because the more knowledge you have, the faster you can learn new stuff.

So like that is always the approach I've taken with my own kids.

And I think that's the approach we need to be advocating for, for everybody as educators.

Let me know what you think.