I will always be grateful to Mr Denton. He taught me Maths
in Year 6, and came with a reputation of being strict, demanding hard work, and
having a fiery temper. I never saw any evidence, as far as I remember of the
last of these, but we worked hard in his lessons. In particular, I remember his insistence
that we take mental maths seriously, and so every lesson started with a quick
fire test demanding that we work out increasingly complex numbers without even
using our fingers: he would deliver half a dozen questions, pause, and then ask
for all the answers after 30 seconds or so. How well I remember getting 9
cubed, calculated in my head, wrong. It still pains me.
The reason, we were told, that this was so important is that
it allowed us to see when we had made a mistake in a question. Some simple
mental maths, and some estimation, allowed me to see so many mistakes during the
arithmetical part of exams for the rest of my time at school, and at university. This is obvious: part of the function of knowledge is that it forms the framework by which we
analyse new information. When we receive a new piece of data, we evaluate its
accuracy, its value and its use from other pieces of similar data.
Daniel Kahneman shows in Thinking, Fast and Slow, this
results in poor decisions when we don’t realise that we are doing it. But it
doesn’t result in decisions as poor as would be the case if we had no ‘anchoring’
information at all - information which we can use to place the new piece of truth in the magnificently
complex matrix we all build up during our lifetimes. It is this process of putting information into a framework of knowledge which we call 'learning'.
Teaching unions and Mr Gove are currently engaged in a fight
over whether school curricula should include facts or skills. Of course the
answer has to be both. Mr Gove is wrong to suggest that all teaching is based
on learned information, that is what Google, and Wikipedia are for – and they
are assuredly here to stay. The availability of information is increasing, and
the cost of its digital storage is reducing, logarithmically, and Mr Gove appears to ignore this.
However, the
teaching unions are also wrong, and where they are wrong is exactly where
Mr Denton was right: we would be foolish to rely only on an external store of information.
If we were to do so, how would we know whether Wikipedia were right? How would
we ascribe value to any ‘fact’? How would we spot when we were being sold
information which was actually fact-horsemeat purporting to be minced steak.
Preparation for life (rather than simply working out what
can be taught and tested in schools) involves both the acquisition of skills of
information (ie fact) collection, analysis, synthesis, evaluation and communication,
and the means by which to relate this to what we already know. Facts – even Mr
Gove’s facts – are mere noise without context, and of course, the context does
need to be understood, and be memorised.
