Here is a quick quiz, put these in order from most to least important for students to be focused on in school:
- collaboration
- critical thinking
- creativity
- problem solving
- knowledge
- communication
- flexibility
- leadership
This is a quiz I was given recently in a room full of Superintendents. We started with our #1 answer. I selected creativity. It was a popular choice, but so was critical thinking and problem solving. We were then asked to give our last place answer. As we went around the room, everyone was saying knowledge, until it came to me. I said flexibility. I had knowledge in 4th of the 8. Basically everyone else had it in 8th.
Two thoughts. One – this is a terrible quiz. You cannot take any of these items in isolation, their power is how they work and connect together. Two – knowledge is unfairly getting a bad name.
The quiz bugged me.
I appreciate the sentiment that goes into activities like this. The goal is for everyone to say “knowledge” is the least important and to think about if this is true, is it reflective of the systems they are leading.
There is a version of this 21st century learning talk I have given before. It goes something like this , “Particularly with changes in technology, we all have access to facts at our finger tips, so school becomes less about the transmitting of facts, and more about the making sense of them.” This has been some of the exciting shifts in schooling over the last couple decades. We no longer need to spend classes recording notes in our binders off the overhead, instead we can engage in activities that allow us to work with the facts that we all have access to and go deeper with notions of collaboration, creativity, problem solving and the others attributes that are on the list above. The growth and value given to core competencies in British Columbia is part of this positive trend.
That said, knowing stuff is still important. And while Jeopardy-style knowledge may be less important now and schools should rightly spend less time on memorizing dates and reciting poems from memory than when I was a high school student, you cannot do all the other things on the list without knowledge. The amazing growth in inquiry-based learning has been a phenomenal development in schools – but inquiry is nothing without knowledge.
I have become particularly attune to this lately, with the craziness over fake news, and the like, which is mostly coming from the United States, but also in pockets here in Canada and other places around the world. I still think it is important to know stuff. When my kids read the paper or watch the news, I want them to have the knowledge of what has happened in the past, so they can be critical of what is happening today.
I am definitely not advocating we go back to our system of events 20 years ago. The progress of schooling has been great. I am wanting to be sure as we rightly shine a light on the range of talents we want for our children we don’t diminish the value of knowledge. Knowing stuff is still cool.
cultureofyes.ca 
Knowing needs no defence. Facts matter. With no fact base, kids (and kids who think they are adults) live in a world of “facts are what I say they are”. Good for you for defending knowing stuff. The fact that knowledge needs defending is a sad commentary on how our education system has bought into a “you don’t have to know anything because Google or Wikipedia does” way of thinking.
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We always have trouble striking the right balance, or maybe that is just the tension our system continually needs. We do tend to swing from view to view looking for the “answer” but whether it is the role of content or knowledge or a host of other topics, the “right” answer is far more grey.
I agree, knowing stuff is important and cool and, knowledge does have a bad rep. Have you read Ed Hirsch’s “Knowledge Matters”?.
Your thoughts on the matter of knowledge take me back to Parker Palmer’s “courage to teach” and his phrase “the grace of great things” – there are many great ‘things’ in each discipline, knowledge that enriches and informs our lives. Gathering around life-worthy topics (e.g. ‘tragic love’ in Romeo and Juliet)
Take Palmer’s thinking a step further, to David Jardine who sees curriculum/disciplines as our children’s inheritance; schooling (working hand in hand with life) are our children’s opportunities to add to, edit the knowledge in the disciplines – create new knowledge. Jardine’s phrase is “abundance in curriculum”.
On a less etherial note,
* As you note, that is a silly test because the power in anything is its combination with other ‘things’. For example, what are skills if they do not have knowledge to work on (like have a saw and hammer and no wood) and what is knowledge without the skills to dig deep, make connections etc? (like having blueprint but no tools to bring it to life).
This is cool. And knowledge is critical if, and heaven forbid, you are left without a device, battery died or can not detect a signal!
Thanks Cindy. And yes, we need to be able to survive in a world where we might not always have a device.
Knowledge is important. An Organic Chen prof at SFU convinced me of this. He gives students chemicals that have the ability to kill when mixed in the wrong combinations. You can’t google all the knowledge you need to be safe in his lab. You’d not have the working memory to hold it in your head and human nature would intervene – people can google it, but they often won’t bother. And so he requires students actually know their stuff.
The analogy I use that echoes your point is this: It’s like having a full understanding of the grammar of a language but no vocabulary and then trying to write literature in that language. You could have all the literary instincts in the world and be a gifted, experienced storyteller, but using a dictionary to translate each word means the task will be horrendously tedious and the result likely won’t be worth reading.
Reminds me of this post as well. https://medium.com/@berniebleske/school-has-a-content-problem-b7b299461f15
Thanks Dean – good stuff, I hadn’t seen this.
Knowledge would have been #1 for me. Without the knowledge the creativity etc wont happen. You can’t think about something you know nothing about. We keep hearing that knowledge isn’t being devalued, but clearly it is. This is also very obvious in our schools in Aust. The 21st C speak is a myth. Everyone should read Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths of Ed.”
Thanks Tempe for taking the time to read and respond. While knowledge is not my #1, I appreciate the view you have that puts it at the top of the list.
An interesting post. I too believe in the power of knowledge. We cannot call ourselves educators or scholars without respecting knowledge and its acquisition. We are doing our students a great disservice if we do not give them any “facts”. Of course we have the technology to access information but our world would work at a pretty slow pace if we had to look up every piece of knowledge that we needed at any given time. As for poetry, well memorizing poetry (and learning to value it) has tremendous benefits for young learners and brain development. It creates flexibility, frame of reference, background knowledge for other literature forms. It teaches, diction, pronunciation and public speaking.
Another school year draws to an end. Whew!
Have a great summer. See you in September.
Margot Segers
Thanks Margot – great thoughts. I really appreciate your engagement with this topic. I think the issue of “facts” and “content” also needs to be seen in the context of the age of the learners. Generally, more personalization and choice in what students learn seems more appropriate as they get older.