Why knowledge matters

The other day, I was remembering Bloom’s taxonomy. You usually find it presented as a diagram of a pyramid with six levels. ‘Remembering’ is at Level 1 of the pyramid, the lowest level, with cognitive complexity increasing above it through ‘Understanding’, ‘Applying’, ‘Analysing’ and ‘Evaluating’ before it reaches the highest level, ‘Creating’. In Bloom’s taxonomy, knowing things is apparently less important than creating things, so teachers may feel they ought to quick-march their students through those ‘lower’ levels of learning so they can get them to the higher-level stuff as soon as possible. I think that would be a mistake.

My son James was given a homework project to do over a holiday period in Year 8, that involved him ‘Evaluating’ work related to ‘Renaissance Man’ – a whopping level 5 task in Bloom – whilst some other students in his class chose a different title that involved them finding out key basic information about Renaissance Man – a lowly Level 1 task. There was clearly a taxonomy at work in the creation of the homework project set for James’ class, and I remember giving him a huge amount of help so that he could tackle it, because his class hadn’t done any work at all on Renaissance Man before the holiday. The point here is that since James didn’t know a single thing about Renaissance Man when he sat down to tackle his project, surely he would have been better off doing the task that required him to learn key facts about Renaissance Man? Sad to say, he knew as little about Renaissance Man when he finished the project as he had known when he started it, because like many a holiday project up and down the land, the lion’s share of the work on it had been done by his parent!

Knowledge matters because it makes learning easier. It is both cumulative and it grows exponentially – by which I mean that those students who have a rich base of factual knowledge find it easier to learn more; this is the biblical ‘Matthew Effect’ where to those who have, more shall be given. Or put another way, the rich get richer.

A sound base of factual knowledge also enhances cognitive processes like problem-solving; the richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly those cognitive processes will operate. And, in fact, it is very hard to solve problems without a good base of knowledge in a subject, because if we don’t have sufficient background knowledge, just trying to understand the problem can consume most of our working memory resources, leaving us very little if any space to consider solutions to the problem. This is why people can zealously throw themselves into problem-solving activities from dawn till dusk and learn almost nothing from them.

Knowledge also matters because most of the knowledge we have is ‘tacit’; it sits silently in the background, behind the scenes, where it makes up the stuff that we think with. And when we take in new information, for example by listening or reading, it is that reserve of tacit background knowledge that we draw on in order to make inferences. ‘The ability to read a text and make correct inferences depends heavily on our background knowledge; if you know more, you’re a better reader’ (Daniel Willingham).

Perhaps most of all, knowledge helps us remember new information, because we learn by fixing that new information to the knowledge schemas that we already have in our long-term memory (a largely unconscious process, but a crucial one). It explains why I, a long-in-the-tooth Headteacher, can read an educational research book and remember a fair bit of it, whereas when I tried to read Professor Stephen Hawking’s ‘Brief History of Time’ book some years ago, I can honestly say that I understood very little of it and when I finished it, I remembered – quite literally – nothing but the title.

We know in schools that there is a large and stubborn gap between the attainment of ‘Disadvantaged’ young people and those who are not, for example at GCSE, and I am entirely persuaded by these words from E.D. Hirsch: ‘Breadth of knowledge is the single factor within human control that contributes most to academic achievement and general cognitive competence…The positive correlation between academic ability and socioeconomic status is only half the correlation between academic ability and the possession of general information. That is to say, being ‘smart’ is more dependent on possessing general knowledge than on family background. Imparting broad knowledge to all children is the single most effective way to narrow the gap between demographic groups through schooling’.

Back to Bloom’s taxonomy: I am not saying that applying and analysing and evaluating and creating don’t matter, but they all depend, crucially, on what we know, and the more we know, the ‘smarter’ we are. That’s why knowledge matters.