Critical thinking? You need knowledge. | Hacker News Reader

Critical thinking? You need knowledge.

boston.com

28 pointsrobg12 comments

Obviously learning facts is important but the facts that I learned in secondary school are mostly uninteresting to me now. I remember learning a lot about how frogs reproduce or about what happens when you cut a worm into pieces at certain spots. Right now I spend most of my time reasoning about how to best raise my daughter and solve programming problems at work. I'm not sure a knowledge only education would have served me well for where I'm at right now in my life.

When I attended my first college level literature class I was amazed that no one in my class understood how to compare and contrast the arguments made in two essays whose styles were very direct and forceful. I always considered those reasoning skills to be necessary to process the information you are given. Knowledge is great but so is learning the skill of processing what you're told.

> Obviously learning facts is important but

Not just facts but knowledge - the conceptual systems in which facts interrelate with each other and produce a richer sense of the world.

"Knowledge is great but so is learning the skill of processing what you're told."

Did you know that horoscopes really work? Wait, you don't believe me? Is that because you've learned a lot of examples of cause and effect and can deduce that there's no connection here?

Knowing some things that ARE true is very helpful in deciding what MIGHT be true.

The problem is that every few years a fad sweeps education whose substance is, "We need to teach (critical thinking, learning, etc), not facts." And then they try to teach that without teaching facts. And it doesn't work.

The reason it doesn't work is that learning a body of facts is a necessary prerequisite of learning to think. Obviously it isn't sufficient to learn facts, but it is necessary.

Now which facts you learn is somewhat arbitrary. For instance if you're reading something about history and it mentions a date in the early 1600s, it will be easier to gain perspective if you have some context for what was going on around then. It doesn't matter whether that context is the founding of Jamestown or the 30 years war, as long as you have some context.

For another example, I have absolutely no need to know that the lines, "'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark" is an allusion to the Garden of Eden. But the act of having figured it out, and then seeing how that original sin causes all of the others in Hamlet helped improve my thinking skills.

So yes critical thinking. Yes learning. However any attempt to teach those without also teaching a bunch of facts (most of which will be irrelevant to the future of most of your students) is bound to fail.

Yes. But since which facts you choose is basically irrelevant, you can choose an area that your students like.

One problem is that this could end up to be a very limited area. Another problem is that students might not like the same things.

The facts are not irrelevant. The kind of critical thinking you will gain after learning about medical experimental protocols is not the same critical thinking you will learn by doing needlework.

Yes. I should have said that it is not clear which area is 'better' than another.

The teaching of critical thinking is not the only value we have. As a society we value having well-rounded children. Personally at a minimum I would like the education system to teach all of the following to students: enough history to understand the broad scope of civilization, the political system and recent history of their region and country, geography, their primary language, the basics of a secondary language, basic first aid, math and science. Note that this is a minimum, and I hope that students learn more than this.

This leaves a lot of latitude. Within each area you have choices to make. But no matter what you're going to be teaching kids about a lot of things that they don't necessarily have an interest in.

I find her final thesis statement interesting though completely unrelated to her argument in the rest of the article:

"Until we teach both teachers and students to value knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well."

Nowhere in her article does she mention that students need to value knowledge and love learning. She talks about possessing knowledge - these two things are VERY different. I believe the methods to teach a kid to love learning, and the method to spoon-feed knowledge down a kid's throat, are two completely separate things. A child won't gain knowledge unless he/she has the DESIRE to do so. Finding that desire is then key.

A second thing, she argues that knowledge helps a person think of better alternatives to a situation. This is not necessarily true. Often, solutions are found by those who are not clouded by a million existing alternatives, but are able to use their own reasoning to come up with a superior solution.

If you teach critical thinking, the how of thinking, the how to approach problems, the whys of things known, then knowledge comes easy and remains accessible for life. If you teach many facts, then there is little progress of critical thinking. It's like data without a processor. Data is not so hard to find these days, how to process remains mysticism for many.

I know many people who are good at critical thinking. Every one that I have had this conversation with believes that you can't learn critical thinking without practice, and you can't practice critical thinking without learning lots of facts. Therefore you can't teach critical thinking without teaching many facts.

This does not, of course, imply that teaching facts teaches critical thinking. It doesn't. But it is a key part of the process.

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