The first group argues that students will forget most of the factual information they are taught, so that what they need is not a well-filled memory but the ability to find information when they need it. In their view, students are not empty driveway gates, but computers. They need to be, not filled up, but programmed with the necessary skills of critical thinking, data gathering and problem-solving.
The second group is not so ready to dismiss factual knowledge and memory. They point out we still need a well-filled store of general knowledge to make sense of the world, to understand what is happening around us and to exercise our imagination. We cannot always be rushing off to find information when we need it. Rather, we need some basic knowledge of history and geography, of mathematics and science, of literature and the arts. If we have never been taught about, say, Leonardo da Vinci or Joan of Arc, Confucius or Cleopatra, if we don’t know how electricity works or what influences the weather, we will never know how much we don’t know, and our lives will be that much the poorer.
The argument is, in effect, between two views of learning. The first emphasizes “knowing how” and values skills. The second emphasizes “knowing that,” and values factual knowledge. The problem is that, as is so often the case in education, the two views are frequently seen as mutually exclusive, with the skills people dismissing facts as unimportant, or at best as simply means to an end, and the facts people seeing skills as empty and without value. In reality, of course, both facts and skills are important. The trick is to find ways of doing justice to them both.
This is where the view of learning as an active process comes in. We know that even very young children are not simply empty bundles of sensation waiting for the world to act on them. As things happen to them, they try to explain them. They also try to influence the world around them, as they discover that their actions can often provoke certain responses. Crying might bring food or a cuddle. Teasing the cat might bring a scratch or a little lecture on how to treat animals. In either case, children realize that by doing something they can cause the world to react to them. And so, bit by bit, children collect experiences, ideas and facts, which they use as the foundation on which they build further explanations. By the time they reach their teens, they begin to think using logic and reason.
