The below quote comes from an article written by Yuval Noah Harari. It's a traditional attempt to distance the so-called "industrial" model of education from something altogether more exciting. He talks about generic competencies that will help kids navigate an increasingly complex world. Does this sound familiar? It should. It's a trope that smart people have been kicking around since Rosseau.
In the article, thinking, communicating and creating are hindered by the stale information transmission suffered by bored students in boring schools being taught by boring teachers. However, recent progress in cognitive science makes it clear that making sense of information, distinguishing important from unimportant information and creating new information depends upon... more information. Language, the number system and culture are cognitive tools made of the information that is taught in schools. We acquire this information and store it in long term memory so that we can understand the world. The supposed dichotomy presented is completely false. There is no doubt that we want students to create rich, conceptual maps that last far beyond the test but in order to achieve this, we need to explicitly teach the details of those maps and take every measure to ensure they are deeply embedded. Once this is achieved, connections, reflections and applications occur without effort.
Apparently, because of algorithms, bio-hacking and fake news, we need to develop an empowered, independent view of the world arrived at through thinking. The issue is that we cannot become better at thinking without more of the information taught in school. We cannot become better at critical thinking unless we have information with which to think. We require an extensive raw store of vocabulary, concepts and disciplinary skill to create things of beauty, meaning and importance. Teachers are the ones who produce this understanding and skill; they do it through explanations and students acquire it through practice. An informed view of the world is an empowered, independent view of the world. Learning to write powerful sentences, to express thoughts with verve and vigour, elegance and conviction, this is all about information. I will try to teach students the information required to do it well. The more information they learn, the more competent communicators they will become.
Our mind doesn't have a centralised, unitary, homuncular quality. Cognition is an embodied system that escapes centralised control; it is more like a flock of geese or a swarm of bees than a father figure or the fat controller from the Railway Series. Consciousness is an emergent property; there is just information, processing and awareness. We can direct our awareness and draw from memory to make inferences and draw conclusions but we can only indirectly speed up that raw processing system. Logic, language, history and maths are systems designed to build upon our more elemental, evolutionarily determined powers of thought. The information we acquire attaches itself to our thinking and strengthens it. The popular view of education as being about "banking" information could be replaced by the idea of a deepening expansion of conceptual frameworks with which we think and construct ideas. The information we learn does not clog us up; it expands us. There is no "I" pulling together thoughts and shaping them but rather awareness is the space within which our information processing occurs and is projected.
The title of the post concerns useless information. Because we don't know what the future holds it's even more important to teach what we currently do know without worrying about its future utility. I am a literature and philosophy teacher, I teach children about literature and philosophy because I believe it will enhance their human experience and give them a richer and deeper understanding of themselves and others, it's not about a future job market. The disciplines are organised around discreet, important elements of culture and cognition. Students need an enriched understanding of the world they live in today, not some guesswork about what they might need in the future. Who knows when it might be useful to know about cells or the solar system or monetary exchange rates? Maybe never. That doesn't mean I shouldn't teach it. I cannot predict what will be useful for me tomorrow let alone what will be "useful" to my children in ten years time. What I do know is that humanity has given us a rich system of numbers and letters and my job is to pass on the psychological-armoury of an information-rich education.
We have the capacity to process information, draw inferences and make predictions but we are not really aware of how that happens. The contents matter more than the more unknown processes that click and snap the information together. Imagine somebody who doesn't go to school at all, are they able to infer? Yes. Are they able to reason and communicate? Of course. Are they able to solve problems? Surely. However, we also know that going to school increases your IQ and life chances, it's the reason so much time and energy is spent getting people into school and learning. There will always be aspects of cognition that develop through our natural human interactions and experiences but there is also a whole bunch of information essential for our flourishing as human beings that we require in order to be successful. Some elements of cognition undoubtedly occur through experiences, however, schools are designed to teach the specialist types of knowledge that cannot be acquired in this way. This is why so-called "experiential learning" is so flawed.
Think about it for a moment. You might be reading this and thinking, "he doesn't get it". Where do you think that thought you are having about this article comes from? Your "critical thinking" capacities? No, it's coming from the information you have learned about how human cognition works. Those ideas popping into your head? That deconstruction of this argument? Notice how concepts float up from within you and form into coherent thoughts in your mind. Where does the information come from? The answer is long-term memory combined into thought and presented in awareness. To say that excessive information in our minds will somehow prevent people from thinking is completely bogus. More information, of high quality, taught rigorously, boosts our ability to think deeply and successfully about everything.
Tell the Wright brothers or Mozart or Michelangelo or various Noel Prize winners that the expanse of information they obtained through study prevented them from reinventing the world. There is room for some creative problem-solving in school but that is very different from the accusation that the information itself is unnecessary or inhibitive to this. Yuhal talks about fake news on the internet and unscrupulous advertisers targeting unsuspecting children. Reading, it is now known, is not a generic skill but depends on the information in your memory. The information you have in memory is what will enable you to tell if what you are reading is spurious or not. The more information you have about a topic, the more likely you are to tell if you are being hoodwinked. This is where the "useless" part comes in again, arguing the future is unknown is an argument for more information, not less! Updated subject specialists and decent textbooks are essential here.
For all intents and purpose, our long-term memory is infinite. Working memory is pretty much fixed. Games that claim to expand or extend working memory are fake news and bad science. The only thing a brain training game does is make you better at brain training games. Therefore, we need to support the capacity of working memory - the site of reason and thinking - by providing the broadest and richest possible reservoir of information in long-term memory. Take the example of the words "evaluation" and "analysis". I can evaluate a book I know something about, discriminate between dogs I have information on and compare historical periods I know something about. The more I know, the better the quality of my evaluation, analysis and synthesis.
Some will be thinking, "what" information, isn't there just too much?
When you are unsure what clothes to put on, do you go outside naked?
In traditional progressive thinking, information is unimportant so the school does not have to decide the details of what children need. Instead, they are given "choice and voice" over what they learn. There is a rank irony to the idea that the solution to fake news, dangerous ideology, biased editorials and spurious science is more uninformed playtime in this space. This is a direct result of postmodernism where "truth" and "facts" are expressions of oppressive patriarchy. Not all information is equal but don't let that fool you into thinking white-male history is all that matters. Students need to see post-colonial literature, multiple views on historical events, and philosophy from different traditions. They need more information from compassionate experts, not just what they are inclined to search for on the internet. The teacher will make that choice for them because they don't have the information to do it themselves yet. It's just more efficient like that, and I can be sure they aren't reading rubbish. There is nothing more disempowering than being told to go out and "find" the information you need when you don't have the information required to understand what is in front of you. The whole of human history is based upon the older generations handing down their wisdom to the younger ones. If you simply say "the older generations no longer have anything to say to you" then that information will have to come from the other sources you are worried about them being indoctrinated by. As King Lear says, nothing will come from nothing; information will come from the amoral algorithms and advertisers that Yuval spuriously claims more learning more prohibits us from resisting.
When you are unsure what clothes to put on, do you go outside naked?
In traditional progressive thinking, information is unimportant so the school does not have to decide the details of what children need. Instead, they are given "choice and voice" over what they learn. There is a rank irony to the idea that the solution to fake news, dangerous ideology, biased editorials and spurious science is more uninformed playtime in this space. This is a direct result of postmodernism where "truth" and "facts" are expressions of oppressive patriarchy. Not all information is equal but don't let that fool you into thinking white-male history is all that matters. Students need to see post-colonial literature, multiple views on historical events, and philosophy from different traditions. They need more information from compassionate experts, not just what they are inclined to search for on the internet. The teacher will make that choice for them because they don't have the information to do it themselves yet. It's just more efficient like that, and I can be sure they aren't reading rubbish. There is nothing more disempowering than being told to go out and "find" the information you need when you don't have the information required to understand what is in front of you. The whole of human history is based upon the older generations handing down their wisdom to the younger ones. If you simply say "the older generations no longer have anything to say to you" then that information will have to come from the other sources you are worried about them being indoctrinated by. As King Lear says, nothing will come from nothing; information will come from the amoral algorithms and advertisers that Yuval spuriously claims more learning more prohibits us from resisting.
Children are doomed to think for themselves, show autonomy and make choices. To paraphrase the existentialists, we are paralysed by an infinity of possibilities. We cannot help but think and choose. To make intelligent choices, analyse alternatives and produce wonderful work in a world of complexity, requires a richer store of information. The dispositions we seek are powered by information. Recent work on "metacognition", goal-setting and self-regulation aren't thinking detached from content, they are strategies to retain information over the long term. It's certainly not necessary to have children sitting in a circle or looking stuff up on the internet to "learn how to learn". In fact, this is more information that can be explicitly taught. If we tell children to consider "where they have seen this type of problem before" then they are likely to do that if we don't, they will not. Parroting the trivial "information is bad" argument is not only insulting to teachers who spend all day teaching information, but it is also demonstrably wrong and based on an outdated model of how the human mind actually works. Keep doing your thing teachers!
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