The education sector is prone to fads. A great example is the theory of learning styles. The idea that different people are aural, visual, verbal or kinaesthetic learners who learn best if ideas are presented in their preferred mode was promoted by many professionals and gained widespread acceptance. Despite thorough debunking by robust research this theory has been slow to die, and it is still common to hear people describe themselves as ‘auditory learners’ or ‘kinaesthetic learners’.
Another currently popular misconception is the idea that learning facts is, at best, inefficient in the age of Google and, at worst, a travesty of true education which should ‘teach children how to think not what to think’. Since we can look everything up quickly, the argument goes, a quality education (sometimes called a ‘21st century education’) should concentrate on teaching skills not knowledge. These ideas have had a profound impact on curricula in Australia and beyond, largely to the detriment of real learning. Let me illustrate the problem using the work I was doing this week with a delightful class of Year 7s.
In order to add two fractions (eg 1/6 and 1/8) they must be given a common denominator, which means identifying the lowest number which both 6 and 8 will go into. (Congratulations if you already know it’s 24!) The difficulty for many children is they don’t know their times tables. Given time, they can figure out that the number they need is 24 (although many detour via the number 48). But in the meantime they’ve forgotten the rest of the question – why they are finding the number, whether it goes on the top or the bottom, and what comes next. Meanwhile, those who know their tables barely have to think about this step and move smoothly through the rest of the process before it slips out of their grasp.
The issue here is working memory: in order to process anything complicated we have to hold several different things in our minds simultaneously. If all of the brain’s working memory is taken up with calculating whether the right number is 36 or 24 or 48, there’s no processing power left to do the rest of the question. To reduce the cognitive load, you want as much as possible of the necessary information to be held not in working memory but in long-term memory. Thus, complex thinking requires you to know a lot of things beforehand.
I have described this problem in non-technical terms, but the neuroscience and evidence about cognition is crystal clear: children who have not committed relevant information to long-term memory do not learn as effectively as those who have.
Over the years, however, educational policy has increasingly moved away from the acquisition of knowledge. Rote learning, in particular, is often dismissed as pointless or superficial although it is a highly efficient way of moving information from working memory to long-term memory. There is no point, it is said, in simply regurgitating facts: the key is the child’s understanding – as if facts and understanding were not inextricably bound together. Hence, reciting tables is dismissed as inadequate, and the curriculum focuses almost exclusively on numerous strategies for ‘repeated addition’. This is, of course, a false dichotomy: a girl who can chant her tables but has no understanding of the concept of multiplication is just as badly served as one who has half a dozen strategies to calculate 6 x 8 but needs ten minutes every time to do it.
Unfortunately, the push against memorisation has been so strong that teachers are almost embarrassed to insist that children should learn anything by rote. As a consequence Maths teachers across the country will tell you that children simply do not know basic number facts as they used to. This has a profound effect on later learning of mathematics – and this at a time when we are scratching our heads about how to make Maths more enjoyable and increase the numbers studying it.
I have illustrated this with a mathematical example, but the research shows it applies in any intellectual discipline. If you do not have thorough prior knowledge of Communism, the Cold War, WWII or French colonialism, how good can your analysis of the causes of the Vietnam War be? It is pointless asking willing but ignorant students to think critically if they don’t know anything first.
The idea that we should promote the learning of skills over the learning of facts is appealing - and wrong. Our brains don’t work that way. You can’t practise thinking skills without thinking about something. Since working memory is so limited, complex thinking is impossible without a well-stocked long-term memory: you simply have to know a lot of stuff very well.
The various fads that wash across education always have a grain of truth in them. It is right to value critical thinking, rigorous analysis, problem-solving; and an education must be more than a bank of unrelated facts. It is a fantasy, however, to believe we can think at a high level without first developing deep knowledge of the relevant facts and concepts. There is no escaping the hard work of acquiring knowledge and, yes, even memorising some of the essentials. It is not old-fashioned. It is the only way.
Ms Elizabeth Stone
Principal