176 Teaching Minds

176 Teaching Minds Theory is a subject. Practice in a field means exercising the twelve cognitive processes we have been referring to, and because of that, progress is much harder to ascertain. You can test theory. It is harder to test practice. One can gain a lot of knowledge about what doesn’t work while practicing and still produce nothing worthwhile. The les- sons learned are harder to assess. Teaching theory makes all teachers more comfortable. Of course, theory means there is no doing, so no one really learns much. After they pass the test, they can forget what they learned with no consequences. There is a big difference between knowing that and knowing how. Schools have always emphasized knowing that. The primary reason for this is that the stuff you can say you know is testable. But knowing how is much more important. So we worry that students don’t know that George Washington was president, without asking what the use of that knowledge is. There may be a use for that knowledge. It is doesn’t come to me immediately what that use would be, but let’s assume there is some use for that knowledge for your average student. If so, that knowledge should be taught within the context in which it might be used. There is, for example, a use of that knowledge for construct- ing a history paper about the origins of the United States. Of course, that itself may not be a useful exercise. In the context of doing that exercise, assuming there was good justification for it, that knowledge would be naturally learned. Natural learning of factual knowledge, learning it when it comes up, is fine, as long as it isn’t being learned so that it can be tested. It is much more useful to learn knowledge when that knowledge enables you to do something, however. There are endless books about what every 3rd-grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don’t un- derstand what they are about. But it does not follow from that, that the solution is to ram that knowledge down kids’ throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them. In that case, the learning is in context and thus more natural. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023922