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What are facts, and how many of them do you really need to know?

Posted By Scott Warnock On In education,virtual children by Scott Warnock | 9 Comments

We have a peculiar relationship to facts. Dickens’ Prof. Gradgrind and his love of facts. Star Trek characters Spock, Data. “Just the facts ma’am.” We like facts. We’re nervous about facts. We believe in facts.

What should children know when they finish school? How will we know what they know? Some people think that knowing the facts is not only not that important, but, gasp, could be a waste of educational time.

This brief recent Washington Post blog [1] questions just how much time we should spend on facts. It takes a little digesting, because it serves as a response to a response, but the part I’m linking you to, by Edward Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, raises questions about just how we should be educating children, questions that have come up a lot lately, especially with the rise of the Common Core.

(If you don’t know what the Common Core is and have children, you should stop wasting your time reading this column and check this out: http://www.corestandards.org/ [2].)

In our Google age, the idea of a collective “hive mind” of knowledge has grown, especially in the richer parts of the U.S., places that have reliable Internet access. People, networked, do have tremendous knowledge leveraging power for facts and information. So perhaps we could forget about shoving facts at students and use school to develop critical understanding.

After all, learning in school is a kind of zero-sum game. Time you use in one way you don’t get to use in another. So if you spend time in class going through the dates of (all things) wars, you don’t get to spend as much time thinking what caused those wars (perhaps even exploring the quixotic possibility of preventing other such wars).

There is danger when education bends too far away from how toward what. Because you can do some precise work based on “an assignment” that would get an A but is still flawed – and maybe horrific. Those who teach technical writing often make this point by looking at the Nazi’s Wannsee Conference [3], their final, pathetically bureaucratic planning of the Holocaust. The documents from that conference are efficient and clear, but you, of course, cannot just think about them as technical documents; you must consider just what they planned on moving around on those trains: People.

Education is about hard thinking. Miller and Nancy Carlsson-Paige quote Plutarch, who said, “The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.” Educator Paulo Freire [4] talked about resisting the banking concept of education, the idea of depositing ideas into students’ minds. I’m struck by how many of my college students become angry when they read Freire and then think about their own educations; they feel cheated.

Facts. We have, no matter what the educational level, just a little bit of time. Could that time be better spent if we assume that most of the facts are easily accessible, almost literally at our fingertips, and our educational job is to make sense, make connections, question?

Many teachers and other educators are already taking these types of approaches. Technology can help. Education circles are buzzing with ideas like flipped classrooms [5], in which teachers have students process information out of class so that in-class time is spent interacting. Let them use the space when we’re together to talk. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is an internal medicine specialist and medical educator. He told me how medical education was moving in this direction, toward inquiry, problem solving, ethics. Students will always have ready access to anatomical and physiological facts, he said; they need to understand patients.

To continue to question fact-based teaching, we’d need more wide-ranging dialogue about what teaching and learning are, and a lot less focus on standardized tests. Are those making high-level education decisions ready for those types of conversations? Perhaps they are afraid they have no easy way to measure the outcomes.

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Scott Warnock [9]

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.
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