Ok, I’ve been wrong before, and it appears I am again. I rail against pure knowledge, and felt Ed Hirsch was making that argument. Yet, Paul Kirschner and co-conspirators have him writing the intro to their latest work, The Case for Knowledge. In it, they make the case for the necessity of knowledge as a necessary precursor for critical thinking skills. And, Paul’s been on the side of Sweller in arguing against critical thinking skills. Yet, there’s also recently been shown that you can make valuable headway with teaching skills. How do we reconcile all this? Is it knowledge or skills that matters?
So, I took Ed Hirsch’s book Cultural Literacy, well, literally. That is, I heard him arguing that folks needed a common basis of facts. And, of course, I agree. I do think we need to all understand what 1492 means. But, to me, it was more. It doesn’t do anything to know that and not know in what context that makes sense: that it was the first western European path opened up to the lands of the Americas. Yes, it’d been done before, and yes, the resulting rapaciousness wasn’t beneficial, but it was the first opening of that particular corridor.
What I thought I saw (and consequently must have been wrong about), was that Hirsch stopped at the knowledge. Because Kirschner and co-authors of the recent work make an eloquent case for the need for knowledge. They’ve argued that critical thinking skills are specifically domain-dependent. That is, you need the knowledge of the domain to know how to adequately use that knowledge to make determinations.
Now, I’ve had mixed thoughts about this. For one, I do think we need these skills. Further, I have also believed that to teach them, you can’t do it without specific domains. On the other hand, I improved analogical reasoning skills (across problems) in my Ph.D. thesis, and succeeded. (At least, in the moment, I wasn’t shooting for persistent improvement.) Further, Micki Chi found self-explanation was a useful approach for understanding examples, and Kate Bielaczyc successfully tutored folks on those skills. More recently, I came across a paper from Bernacki, et al, that improved disadvantaged learners success by teaching learning to learn strategies. How do we reconcile this?
Of course, it’s knowledge and skills. I’d heard it said before, and am inclined to agree, that you get more impact with domain-specific skills. But, good approaches across domains should at least have some impact. I know Valerie Shute and Jeffrey Bonar wrote tutors that focused on experimentation skills across domains: geometric optics, economics, and electrical circuits. Of course, I don’t know whether they yielded impacts! Yet with the results mentioned, it seems like there’s measurable benefit to learning to learn skills.
What is clear, however, is that teaching to pass tests isn’t leading to the ability to think critically. I also recently read that teachers have to teach to the test and haven’t time to teach critical thinking skill. Certainly, from an organizational perspective, you can’t count on your employees knowing how to learn on their own. You might be in a situation where you can hire for such skills, but that’s not going to be all orgs. Further, I’ve argued before with the late Jay Cross that it might be the best investment to train same. Look, the answer to knowledge or skills is yes! You can’t do just one, yet there seems to be too much focus on the former, and not the latter. Don’t trust to folks having the thinking and learning skills you need, develop them. Please!
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