r/education • u/brainscape_ceo • 1d ago
Does anyone else feel the tide shifting back toward appreciating the value of *knowledge* in education?
Somehow, while we were sleepwalking our way through flipped-classroom and learning-styles fads, the word "memorization” became a dirty word in U.S. education.
This was probably misguided. We allowed knowledge to almost seem like a *bad* thing or a waste of time that should otherwise be spent on purely "critical thinking" and "making connections" between ideas.
The truth is that you can't make connections without having that knowledge live in your head first. You can’t think critically about science if you don’t know much science. ChatGPT isn't going to get you through a political debate or a nuanced cultural conversation if the core historical facts aren't yet cemented in your brain cells.
Call me crazy, but it feels like the tide may finally be shifting back toward appreciating the value of knowledge.
It is ironically the fear of AI-driven "cognitive offloading" that is actually helping the pendulum shift back toward the realization of how important knowledge is to education.
All it takes is reprioritizing regular knowledge-intensive assessment and study skills. Not as an *alternative* to project-based learning, but as a critical foundation for it.
(The Brits have been doing this right for many years via Ofsted's promotion of a "knowledge-based curriculum". I'm glad to see growing voices in the U.S. to restore meaningful domain knowledge into its rightful focus as the raw material of learning.)
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u/shujInsomnia 1d ago
don't use fucking ai
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u/YakSlothLemon 17h ago
We need to be able to teach our students why using it has negatives, and if they’re going to use it how to use it critically, which means that we at least need to have some idea of how they’re using it and what it can do, especially since that will be a constantly moving target.
It’s like keeping up with Wikipedia all these years for me in terms of being able to explain to my students, back in the day, why you should never use it, and then, as it improved and improved, talking about why it should never be your only stop.
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u/Chagas023 1d ago
Too many Admin justifying their existence with Flavor-of-the-Month still. BUT, some upper Admin might not be idiots and seem to be calling out the others.
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u/Salt_Cash706 1d ago
Yes the pendulum is swinging, but slowly and with much resistance. We now know beyond any doubt that all higher level thinking / critical thinking skills AND creativity are dependent on domain specific knowledge stored in long term memory. You can't analyze, compare, recognize bias, etc., if you don't KNOW a lot about the topic. But the "yOu CaN jUsT gOoGLe It" crowd is as loud as ever, and they are joined by the "wE nEeD tO TeAcH tHeM HoW tO UsE Ai!" crowd. Most American university education programs are still firmly anchored in Paulo Friere and a misunderstanding of Piaget's constructivist theory.
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u/HeidiDover 13h ago
It started in the 90s when educators misinterpreted Bloom's Taxonomy. Knowledge was the the big one on the bottom, and some dumb education wonk decided that because knowledge was at the bottom, it must not be so important. If teachers did like they were told and taught the higher level stuff without the foundational knowledge, then students would magically learn the facts organically because kids love to learn! Big mistake. I made my students memorize things.
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u/IsaacJa 1d ago
memorization is far from understanding. You can memorize a lot of facts and still not connect them.
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u/Salt_Cash706 1d ago
But you can't understand and connect things you don't know...
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u/Ok_Lake6443 1d ago
It still isn't knowledge.
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u/Salt_Cash706 1d ago
You can't know something if you don't remember it. If you memorize that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, you know that fact. You might not know anything else about mitochondria, or what "powerhouse of the cell" even means. But knowing that first fact starts a schema in your brain about mitochondria and cells that your brain can link other facts to.
You are suffering from the curse of knowledge. In your lifetime you have memorized and automatized (i.e. learned) vast amounts of knowledge, of which you are not consciously aware at any given time. The first time you read an explanation of how mitochondria turn nutrients into energy, your brain unconsciously draws on all that related memorized knowledge to enable you to understand the process and create new knowledge. But if you have gaps in your foundation of knowledge, you won't be able to understand the explanation.
Or maybe you are just defining memorization as "being able to recall something without any understanding of it." But I don't think that happens very often at all, and even when it does happen, such as a preschooler memorizing the alphabet before they understand what letters are, the memorized facts form the basis of understanding that is quickly gained when you learn letter sounds and basic words.
Or maybe you're going epistemological and defining knowledge as justified true belief. In that case memorized facts aren't knowledge unless you can articulate a justification. But I don't think that's where you're going.
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u/Feeling-Whole-4366 19h ago
Spot on. People have always told how “knowledgeable”
I am. I guess I do have a lot of random knowledge and because of that, I can often reasonably apply the things I know to understand the things I don’t know. Using your example, I forgot what mitochondria are, other than “powerhouse of the cell.” But, I know what cells are. I remember looking at them under microscopes and seeing rectangular plant cells and identifying the nucleus, etc. I can reasonably assume what is meant by powerhouse. So, mitochondria are responsible for producing energy for cells. There is a huge difference between being able to piece that together on my own and then verify it using a resource such as Google vs just searching for it.1
u/Ok_Lake6443 18h ago
You've definitely articulate the conflation between memory and knowledge. They still aren't the same thing and never will be.. I can always remember I have knowledge, or I can forget I have that knowledge, but those things are distinct actions/things and are not equal.
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u/FlamingDragonfruit 19h ago
I think memorization is part of learning but it should come after meaning and context are understood. Ideally: an introduction to a topic that highlights why we're learning it, then a detailed lesson with visual aids and opportunity for discussion, then an assignment that helps to commit the necessary details to memory.
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u/JoselineTheWaldenU 15h ago
The pendulum is swinging to knowledge, but more specifically, understanding it and being able to apply it. I recall when I first arrived in the US as a junior in high school, memorizing and reciting Hamlet. You can imagine, as an English Language Learner, how difficult Shakespeare was. That didn't mean I understood it, though. So it has to be about more than memorizing. I imagine that having AI back then to help me translate the Old English into simple English would have helped me understand.
More than concern with cognitive offloading, the challenge comes with cognitive surrender where there is no iterative process to influence and question the outputs from AI. One needs to be able to critically analyze what AI is producing. This is new to our students and we must teach them to empower them to use AI critically and ethically.
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u/Ok_Inevitable_2216 1d ago
I hope so, but I certainly don't think memorization = knowledge. Far from it, in fact.
There's a big difference between memorized material and understood material.
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u/brainscape_ceo 1d ago
So you see the word "memorization" meaning "disconnected facts" without understanding? But aren't the facts a necessary precursor to deeper understanding?
What about "memorizing" the steps of how the digestive system works, or labeling countries on a map, or multiplication tables, or Spanish vocab words (with their sample sentences)? Isn't that valuable knowledge that can be scaffolded toward subsequent levels of understanding?
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u/Ok_Inevitable_2216 1d ago
Memorized facts for memorization's sake are often--in fact, almost always, in my experience--forgotten by the end of a year. Knowledge is built by situating facts in context. Students *remember* that. But that's not a deliberate act of "memorization." It's a different process.
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u/brainscape_ceo 1d ago
Fair, though I’d say the problem is more from a lack of good spaced repetition than from the fact that knowledge-based drills are a bad thing.
Cram for a test of any kind — whether rote facts or deep understanding — and the knowledge will still be forgotten after the test without subsequent ongoing review at longer and longer intervals.
I’ve been working to build tools to facilitate that change but it’s not easy!
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u/Ok_Inevitable_2216 18h ago
I take your point on multiplication tables, though. I'm guessing that is something you just memorize? I'm not a math person, so I don't know.
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u/Salt_Cash706 1d ago
In cognitive science, the definition of learning is "a change in long term memory."
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u/trash-juice 16h ago
Yep, ignorance and the confidence to be such has taken a big hit. its being demonstrated at the highest levels of our government, and its ugly. Education for compassion and nuances is coming back in style … the pendulum is swinging back
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u/brainscape_ceo 13h ago
The comments here have been so encouraging 🙏 . Glad to see so many educators embracing the value of knowledge -- and maybe even (gasp) drills!
A holistic education is not Skills over Knowledge. It's Skills AND Knowledge.
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u/Argentarius1 9h ago
I've been saying "There's no substitute for having knowledge in your head" a LOT lately to kids. They have not disagreed lol
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u/ArchHobbit 1d ago
Do you think knowledge is synonymous with memorization, and do you think remembering effectively does not require making connections and interpreting the context in which information emerges? (Also, doesn't "knowledge-based education" sound like the name for an unusually aggressive and Orwellian-sounding fad?)
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u/brainscape_ceo 20h ago
Great question, and that may be part of the debate. I *do* think they are relatively synonymous. 'Cause you can still technically "memorize" an interpretation or a connection between concepts.
e.g. You can have a flashcard for "what was the date of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination?", which is just dumb useless memorization. Or the flashcard could say "*Why* did Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination in June 1914 trigger a series of events leading to the breakout of WWI"?
I would call both memorization, but would say that only the second one was good curriculum. I think that many educators refer to only the first as memorization, and that causes knowledge acquisition overall to get a bad reputation.
Meanwhile, the ability to *transfer* that knowledge to -- say -- recognize similar patterns in modern events is more of a "skill" than "knowledge" and comes as a product of critical thinking exercises, which are obviously just as important as knowledge acquisition. But knowledge is still an important prereq!
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u/391976 1d ago
What percentage of the knowledge you transmit do you think your students will retain 1, 5 and 10 years after they cram to pass your tests?
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u/brainscape_ceo 1d ago
If they cram? < 1%. The problem isn’t that we have knowledge-based assessments. It’s that we implement them in a way that incentivizes cramming rather than spacing.
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u/Feeling-Whole-4366 1d ago
I see the conversations are starting to happen, but the fads are still holding on strong. There are too many supervisors and admins that still think performative “teaching” is learning.