SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The facts of the matter

Larry Summers has an op-ed piece in the New York Times talking about how the knowledge explosion should lead to changes in how kids are educated. His first point is that the increasingly easy access to facts (“the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalogue”) means that “factual mastery will become less and less important”.

Dr. Summers, however, has failed to take into consideration that, while much has changed in the outside world, the physiology of the human brain has remained the same for millennia (see yesterday’s blog), and our ability to apply information is still constrained by our very limited working memory storage capacity. Here’s an excellent posting from Kitchen Table Math on this topic. 

The bottom line: students still need to learn facts and students still need to learn basic skills to automaticity.