Are We Still Trying to Stand on the Shoulders of Giants?

I read an article the other day about what education should be today. There was a lot about the importance of technology, and also about the need to make sure our kids understand other societies to develop a more global perspective. It is not that I disagree with either of these goals, and in fact I focused a great deal on the tech programs in high schools as we went through the application process last year for my youngest son. Having an international family, the global perspective is part of our DNA.

My concern in the article was that there was no mention at all about the importance of history, or the learning of established knowledge. I don’t think this was an oversight. I have heard educators talk about why it is no longer necessary to teach “facts”. Years ago, when we moved back to the US and we were once again going through the school application process, I visited one of New York City’s fancy private schools. The headmaster of this school held up a smart phone and declared that there was more information accessible in that devise than in the entire Yale library- and because of that, teaching “facts” was now obsolete. What they teach kids is “how to think”.

I wondered then- and still wonder- what exactly are these kids thinking about if they have no knowledge? I am not at all opposed to learning “how to think”- many educators today may be surprised to know that this pursuit of deep thinking is certainly not a recent phenomenon, Socrates and others had quite a lot to say about it. What is new is this idea that people, left to their own devises, will come up with the knowledge that has taken centuries for the human race to figure out. Just let little Johnny alone, and he will come up with theoretical physics? No, he won’t.

The idea in the past was that we can build on the work that had been done by others- but to build on it, you have to know about it. In addition, there had been the notion that the human race would be doomed to make the same mistakes if they were ignorant of history. It seems that we are now intentionally ignoring history- which makes me wonder how many generations it will take before we end up once again living in caves? If we are concerned about a chasm growing between the haves and have nots, I have to worry that the lack of grounding in facts, history and knowledge among most students will only continue to increase this divide, as there will always be some who will, by accident or design, get a deeper education.

I am truly all for technology and learning what is new. I just don’t think we can afford to ignore the foundational knowledge that the human race has spent thousands of years building — or we do it at our own peril.