Why Cramming Facts Isn’t the Enemy

One of my favourite quotes dates back thousands of years. It’s by Plutarch - a pupil of Plato's works. And it was this: "the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a furnace to be fired". 

If we had a motto at The Park that would probably be it.

But does that mean that I don’t think kids should learn stuff too?  Do I think we’re crazy to be sending kids to school where they cram all these facts, figures and dates?

No I don’t.

Professor Wegerif from Cambridge University who has spent much of his career thinking about how to teach thinking, points out that thinking is always "thinking about something”. The more stuff you are exposed to, the greater the landscape on which you can pad about, question and probe. 

Consider this: if every Nobel Laureate had spent their childhood locked away from all prior knowledge - if they'd had to work out or discover all that had gone before them and then build on top - I doubt they'd have climbed very high.

Far better to stand on the shoulders of giants. Which means…learning stuff.

But the way we present this stuff is important. Prof. Wegerif says it should be framed as "the best understanding of the world that we have so far". The learning process is an invitation to kids to pick up where we leave off and to take it from there. 

Instead of a set of immutable facts, we share all of this ‘stuff’ to start a dialogue.  

Kids need “the story so far” and they need to be equipped with the skills and the confidence to question it, invert it and to take it from there.