Dead facts or really powerful knowledge?

Terry Wrigley

The word knowledge is rich in meaning. In English we use the same word for knowing facts and knowing people and places. One of the great European pioneers of progressive teaching Johann Pestalozzi called for ‘learning by head, and and heart’, yet it is easy to revert to a narrower and drier sense of knowledge as a body of facts. Knowledge also stretches between bodies of accumulated content and the process of coming to know; we can store knowledge in libraries but also grow in knowledge through travel.

THE STRUGGLE between drier and more experiential versions of knowledge has been pursued for several centuries. Alongside the grammar schools with their emphasis on Latin and Greek, a parallel tradition of ‘dissenting academies’ was developed after the Civil War by religious non-conformists who were alive to scientific discovery and growing political revolt. The poet John Keats was educated at one of them, led by John Ryland, and we find these wonderful illustrations in a biography
of the poet:¹

One autumn morning, John Ryland called up the whole school to see the departure of the swallows, which had clustered in surprising numbers on the roof of the building (p29)

Ryland believed in educating his pupils ‘by recreation’. He used to demonstrate the movements of the solar system by simulating it in the school yard. Each pupil was given a card with information about a particular planet or moon and together they played out the movement of the solar system (p36).

The struggle between two forms of learning – two types of knowledge – continues into our own time. Despite excessively large classes and a damaging inspection system which encouraged formal rote-learning methods in the late 19th Century, many teachers continued to experiment, using ‘object lessons’ to encourage pupils to observe and interpret a natural phenomenon or artefact. The resurgence of more experiential learning in England around the 1970s was regarded as dangerous by Margaret Thatcher’s government, and increasingly suppressed by succeeding versions of the National Curriculum, high-stakes testing and fear of Ofsted.

Abstraction and experience

Because of the high status it is afforded, knowledge which is codified and condensed into abstract language and formulae easily becomes detached from its roots in experience. It is important, therefore, to hold onto the dialectic between abstraction and experience as a key to understanding learning. Etienne Wenger illustrates this through a Zen problem:²

‘What does a flower know about being a flower?’ His answer is: in one sense, everything – in another, nothing at all. Being a flower is to no one as transparent, immediately obvious, fully internalized, and natural as it is to a flower: spreading those leaves, absorbing that specific spectrum of light from the sun, taking the energy in, building protein, sucking nutrients from its roots, growing, budding, blooming, being visited by a bee… But ask the flower to teach a botany class, and it will just stand there, knowing nothing about being a flower, not the first thing.’ (p134)

He follows this with the opposite question, ‘What does a computer know about being a flower? ’Again, his answer is everything and nothing – but the opposite way round. The computer can handle all kinds of data about flowers but experientially it has no understanding at all about being a flower. Type ‘photosynthesis’, ‘petal’, ‘stem’, and so on: perfect answers. The knowledge is all there… But if … you buy your computer a half-dozen roses, then the computer will sit there, awaiting some input. It knows nothing. (p135)

Human learning involves both experience and symbolic representation – a lesson which Michael Gove and his advisers refused. Abstract concepts and theories are immensely powerful, but are meaningless unless we can connect them to material reality and lived experience. A parallel argument comes from philosopher Gilbert Ryle³ discussing the relationship between initiation into an activity and learning the rules. Here Ryle mocks the traditionalist view that abstract knowledge is primary:

The chef must recite his recipes to himself before he can cook according to them; the hero must lend his inner ear to some appropriate moral imperative before swimming out to save the drowning man; the chess-player must run over in his head all the relevant rules and tactical maxims of the game before he can make correct and skilful moves. (p31)

Ryle concedes that thinking helps steer our actions, and that chess players pause to plan their strategy. However, activity, rather than rules, plays the primary role. ‘Efficient practice precedes the theory of it.’(p32)

Although England’s national curriculum was supposedly derived from the highest achieving education systems in the world, we find a greater experiential emphasis in many of the global high achievers. Finnish seven year olds spend time cutting cakes into halves and quarters before attempting the addition and subtraction of fractions – as our children used to do but now there’s too much hurry. Much of the mystique of Singapore Maths is actually only a recognition that pupils need the time to move backwards and forwards between experience and abstraction.

The government-mandated ‘synthetic phonics’ approach to literacy suffers from the same deep error: a divorce between rule-driven patterns of letter-sound correspondence on the one hand, and the activity of meaning-making on the other. As Michael Rosen⁴ joked:

We at Ruth Miskin Academy are pioneering Miskin Kick Score Incorporated where in the first year you play Un-Football, by playing without the ball.

Rival theories

Not surprisingly these conflicting views of knowledge and learning are underpinned by different theoretical perspectives. Early 20th Century attempts to provide a ‘scientific’ understanding of human knowledge were based on experiments with caged animals. An artificial stimulus (eg ringing a bell) was repeatedly associated with food, and eventually the animal was conditioned into salivating at the sound of a bell. Although this looked like ‘science’, it cut out key aspects of learning such as curiosity, and only worked for simple behaviours.

This restricted paradigm became dominant in the early Soviet republic, partly because it was mistakenly believed to accord with materialist Marxist philosophy. However Vygotsky⁵ quickly challenged this inadequate approach for

failing to distinguish between human and animal behaviour;
inappropriately using physiology to explain psychology;
refusing to think about consciousness or language;
assuming that observable behaviours are sufficient for building a theory;
neglecting historical and social dimensions.

Far from aligning with Marxism, this reductionist version of materialism lacks its emancipatory potential. As Vygotsky points out, the reflexologists fail to grasp the most basic difference between human beings and animals:

Whereas animals passively adapt to the environment, man actively adapts the environment to himself… The spider that weaves his web and the bee that builds his cell out of wax do this out of instinct, mechanically, always in the same way, and in doing so they never display any more activity than in any other adaptive reactions. But the situation is different with a weaver or an architect. As Marx said, they first built their works in their heads; the result of their labours existed before this labour in ideal form.

There is no room for imagination and creativity in the behaviourist vision of human learning. It is, as Marx suggests, this doubling of physical activity in the imagination that enables human beings to shape their social as well as their physical world. Reductionist psychology not only results in very limited understanding, it debases our humanity. Andy Blunden⁶ concludes that this reductionist psychology is all about social control:

The aim of controlling human behavior answers to the needs of capitalist, prison guard, interrogator, marketer, politician and bureaucrat, but an emancipatory psychology aims to free people from manipulation so that they can have voluntary control over their own behaviour. (p127)

Vygotsky went on to explore much richer and more realistic forms of mediation than Pavlovian stimuli. Rather than simple sensory triggers, our perception and understanding of the world is mediated through many different kinds of ‘cultural tool’ and especially language.

Knowledge is not an accumulation of discrete facts but functions actively like a lens or a lever in the formation of more knowledge, and in the formation of people in the process of becoming knowledgeable.

‘This endless drizzle of inert facts is merely the shadow of knowledge, crumbs falling off the table of high culture.’

Vygotsky insisted on the connectedness of the individual mind with culture, history and society, and the pivotal importance of active meaning-making through speech and other sign systems. This theoretical development underpins a wide array of pedagogies which are not limited to the acquisition of pre-established facts: dialogic, place-based, investigative, dramatic, problem-solving, and so on.

Sadly behaviourism became even more dominant in the Soviet Union under Stalin, creating an efficient but uncritical school system. At the same time, US behaviourists such as Watkins and Skinner provided a limited pedagogical vision which, accompanied by Taylorist views of ‘administration’ (management), led to an equally debased view of knowledge and learning. This was eventually adopted by Conservative and New Labour modernisers in England.

E D Hirsch: core knowledge for cultural literacy

Hirsch’s emphasis on ‘core knowledge’ originated from a deep concern that children from the poorest communities were receiving a limited ‘basis skills’ education, but his solution provides only a spurious answer. His argument is that the lack of factual knowledge consigns lower class students to educational failure: they simply don’t have the reference points to understand key texts. His answer has been to compile comprehensive lists of essential knowledge, mostly presented as fragmented facts.

His interminable lists of skeletal facts lend themselves to memorisation and rote-learning. There is a real danger that if Ofsted adopts a Hirschian form of ‘knowledge-based curriculum’ and starts to police its transmission, young people in schools which feel most vulnerable to Ofsted (i.e. those serving the poorest neighbourhoods) will receive not ‘core knowledge’ but the crumbs falling from the rich man’s table.

The Inca:

ruled an empire stretching along the Pacific coast of South America
built great cities (Machu Picchu, Cuzco) high in the Andes, connected by a system of roads

Spanish Conquerors:

Conquistadors: Cortés and Pizzaro

Advantage of Spanish weapons (guns, cannons)
Diseases devastate native peoples

The obvious danger is memorisation with only superficial understanding. It is difficult to see how knowledge in this form can support long-term intellectual or social development. Hirsch has repeatedly been accused of an Anglo- or Eurocentric selection. Here we see something worse: these ‘facts’ strip indigenous cultures to a few physical markers, whilst obscuring the vicious cruelty of the European conquest. Imperial history is reduced to a list of neutral facts, for example:

slavery (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica).

The Reformation is summed up as ‘Martin Luther and the 20 Theses; John Calvin’. This endless drizzle of inert facts is merely the shadow of knowledge, crumbs falling off the table of high culture. While pupils in advantaged schools learn the cello and trombone, working class kids label pictures of musical instruments on worksheets.

Hirsch’s view of knowledge was a major influence on Gove in his National Curriculum reform. We are already too familiar with factual overload through the interminable lists of spellings and grammatical terms. Many readers will also remember Gove’s primary history curriculum before it hit the rocks. As Simon Schama⁷ pointed out, the amount of content would make it impossible to engage learners seriously:

vroom, there was Disraeli, – vroom – there was Gladstone… the French Revolution, maybe if it’s lucky, gets a drive-by ten minutes at this rate.

Schama described cramming children with so many facts as Gradgrindian, and ridiculed the arbitrary selection of detail:

There are no ‘key developments’ in the reign of Aethelstan, because it’s stupid really! In a recent conference presentation, schools minister Nick Gibb⁸ quoted Hirsch with admiration:

Those children who possess the intellectual capital when they first arrive at school have the mental scaffolding and Velcro to gain still more knowledge.

Whilst there is truth in the claim that subject-specific knowledge provides a scaffold for building understanding, the Cultural Literacy lists of ‘core knowledge’ place too much emphasis on factual detail, and not enough on concepts and explanations.

The Hirschian approach is also espoused by populist teacher-experts such as Daisy Christodoulou, closely associated with Ofsted’s chief inspector through the ARK academies trust. In her best-selling Seven Myths about Education⁹ , she argues against imaginary enemies of ‘knowledge’:

Learning the dates of 150 historical events from 3000BC to the present day and learning a couple of key facts about why each event was important will be of immense use, because it will form the fundamental chronological schema that is the basis of all historical understanding. (p20)

This is doubly incorrect. Firstly, a clearer sense of chronology might be gained from a deeper understanding of just 15 or 20 key nodal points. Secondly, a sense of chronology does not just involve a sequence but requires an appreciation of what characterised successive eras in human history, for example European feudalism or the Industrial Revolution, combining strands such as work, power structures, architecture and culture. Christodoulou’s superficiality shows through time after time:

Just learning that 4 x 4 is16 will be of limited use. But learning all of the 12 times tables, and learning them all so securely that we can hardly not think of the answer when the problem is presented, is the basis of mathematical understanding. If we want pupils to have good conceptual understanding, they need more facts, not fewer. (p20)

Arguably, understanding 42 marks a far more significant breakthrough in mathematical understanding than memorising the 12 times table. Christodoulou is right to argue that there is no contradiction between facts and skills (unlike those Conservative politicians who barred officials at the DfE from using the word ‘skill’in official documents). She is also correct in opposing the fashionable notion that facts are unnecessary in the Google age, and that a ‘21st Century Curriculum’for a supposedly post-industrial world requires only skills of knowledge retrieval. Unfortunately the author of Seven Myths about Education exposes herself as a populist myth-maker with limited depth of understanding by repeatedly claiming that ‘Rousseau, Dewey and Freire’ regarded facts as ‘the enemy of understanding’. Her espousal of Hirsch’s ‘cultural literacy’ curriculum as the route to deeper knowledge and understanding is intellectually shallow.

A curriculum built on lists of facts which pays no heed to the pace of children’s development will quickly lead to overload. Here is a small sample of key knowledge from the Civitas¹⁰ attempt to adapt Hirsch for English schools:

Rejkjavik, Brussels, Copenhagen, Amenhotep, Hatshepsus, Nefertiti, Eboracum, Mercia, Dal Riata, Aidan, Bede, Odo, Monet, Hockney, Hogarth, Edison, Jenner, Pasteur…

and this is only Year 2! Perhaps the Year 2 pupils won’t find it too difficult, because in Year 1 they have already learnt all seven continents, Simon de Montfort, Robert Walpole, Breughel, Miro, Hepworth, Pugin and Jane Goodall.

These young Einsteins will understand that

‘The Glorious Revolution of 1688 took place when James II was forced to flee after his failed attempt to overrule parliament.’
‘Robert Walpole achieved influence with George II and with the House of Commons. He became the most important minister in the Cabinet: the first Prime Minister.’

They will have been enriched by looking at the parts of the Palace of Westminster designed by Charles Barry and August Pugin … among a few thousand other things. The details are endless, unappealing, and in many respects arbitrary. They certainly confirm the suspicions of a culturally biased and exclusive curriculum. Whatever all this adds up to, it isn’t knowledge, or rather it is knowledge only in a very restricted sense.

MichaelYoung and‘powerful knowledge’

Another influential appeal for more knowledge, with rather better foundation, comes from Michael Young and his followers who call themselves ‘social realists’. Young shares Hirsch’s view that working class pupils are entitled to knowledge – an important principle to uphold, given the Blairite decision (2006 Schools and Inspection Act) to divert roughly half of 14 year olds into low-level vocational courses with no entitlement to history, geography, languages, creative arts, or design and technology. Young’s emphasis is on academic disciplines rather than fragmentary lists of factual knowledge, and this has value in initiating young people into strong ways of knowing the world. However he makes several key mistakes:

he regards disciplinary knowledge as intrinsically ‘powerful’, neglecting the need for critical thinking, and with no thought about the distribution of economic and social power
he makes no distinction between the relatively strong consensus of natural sciences and the disputes which are fundamental to history or sociology
he regards the divorce of formal knowledge from personal experience as crucial, indeed ‘emancipatory’.

The last point is illustrated by his argument that ‘the curriculum should exclude the everyday knowledge of students’ and that ‘if education is to be emancipatory… it has to be based on a break with experience’.¹¹ In a lecture in New Zealand he argued that pupils must not confuse the Auckland that the geography teacher talks about with the Auckland in which they live… The Auckland where they live is ‘a place of experience’.

Auckland as an example of a city is ‘an object of thought’ or a ‘concept’… For example, the teacher might ask her class what the functions of the city of Auckland are. This requires that the pupils think of the city in its role in government and business and not just describe how they, their parents, and their friends, experience living in the city.¹² (p25-6)

This is most revealing: instead of using concepts to shed light on the cities of our everyday experience, and to understand the forces which shape our lives, the ‘Social Realist’ call is for abstract concepts to replace rich experience. Instead of using abstract concepts as a means of comparing and understanding places, the diversity and specificity is hidden. There is also a social bias in favouring certain spheres of activity (government, business) over others. Young is right to insist that experience alone does not grasp important points about urban geography and build a deep theoretical knowledge, but wrong to be dismissive. His only concession is that teachers might use real-life examples as a device, but that is not the same as a curriculum which enables students to build their knowledge by linking and moving between personal experience and established concepts and theories.

What does really powerful knowledge look like?

There are many valuable examples of curricula which build on students’ everyday lives and concerns, and which develop a considered and theory-informed understanding out of key personal and social issues. Nel Noddings’ book Critical lessons¹³ shows how an intellectually challenging and socially critical curriculum can be constructed on themes such as parenting, making a living, advertising and propaganda, and the psychology of war. Chicago teacher Eric ‘Rico’ Gutstein¹⁴ applies maths to young people’s concerns about housing and other urban issues. In such ‘citizenship mathematics’, the focus on housing is not just a pedagogical hook, a motivating illustration ancillary to the main purpose of teaching a corpus of mathematical skills and knowledge. Housing is important in its own right: the curriculum is both mathematics and citizenship, each strengthening and mediating the other. In England, we can think back to the work of Harold Rosen¹⁵ in English, or Stenhouse and Rudduck in the Humanities Curriculum Project¹⁶.

We need a far richer understanding of knowledge than Hirsch’s or Young’s to underpin emancipatory learning. This will involve:

a breadth of human purpose, including personal development and healthy living, culture in its broadest sense, care for the environment and concern for our planetary future, democratic citizenship nationally and internationally
some space for young people to pursue their own enquiries l learning which is more than a drizzle of inert facts, with knowledge that is both situated and critical
a respect for community knowledge whilst at the same time giving access to science and culture which opens new perspectives and experiences.

We need really powerful knowledge. Knowledge is powerful, but not as Hirsch and Young conceive it. Education for liberation doesn’t separate official learning from real-life concerns: it puts them into dialectical relationship, using theory to shed light on everyday situations and using the standpoint of students’social experience to look at traditional knowledge from new perspectives. Our position in the world gives us new ways of ‘reading the word’(Freire) whilst reading the word provides us with powerful tools for understanding and acting in the world.

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Nicholas Roe (1997) John Keats and the culture of dissent(Oxford).
Etienne Wenger (1998) Communities of practice (Cambridge).
Gilbert Ryle (1949) The concept of mind (Penguin).
Michael Rosen (2012) Dear Mr Gove (Marxism conference, London, July).
Lev Vygotsky (1925) Consciousness as a problem of the psychology of behaviour.https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/consciousness.htm.
Andy Blunden (2012) An interdisciplinary theory of activity(Brill).
Simon Schama (2013) speech at Hay Book Festival www.hayfestival.com/p-6108-simon-schama-and-teachers.aspx.
Nick Gibb (2015) How E D Hirsch came to shape UK Government policy. In Knowledge and the Curriculum (Policy Exchange).
Daisy Christodoulou (2014) Seven myths about education (Routledge).
http://www.coreknowledge.org.uk/sequencetable.php.
Michael Young et al (2014) Knowledge and the future school (Bloomsbury).
Michael Young (2010) Why educators must differentiate knowledge from experience. Pacidic Asian Education 22(1).
Nel Noddings (2006) Critical lessons: what our schools should teach (Cambridge).
Eric Gutstein (2006) Reading and writing the world with mathematics (Routledge).
Harold Rosen (2017) Writings on life, language and learning 1958-2008 (UCL IoE).
http://www.nufdieldfoundation.org/nufdield-humanities-curriculum-project http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/jcs/jcs_1988fall_rudd.