As a university (music theory) teacher this is very interesting. As someone has already said in the comments, I think a lot of the rationale for teaching "general skills" was a reaction against poor pedagogy, when students were often only expected to memorize "mere facts" without putting them into cultural context, discussing what they mean, or thinking about them broadly in relation to other facts. I think what Hirsch and you are pointing to is maybe most teachers have gone too far in the other direction now. I think students need to be taught lots of facts, but also general skills like reading, writing, and "critical thinking" (contextualizing and discussing things as you explained you can do with your knowledge of Canadian politics). In my own teaching I try to teach the "facts" (which are actually widely-held theories about how music works and can be represented) and do lots of simple drill exercises so students get comfortable with the basics of our Western musical system, but then also zoom out and show them how to critically think about music and how we're learning about it. Achieving a good balance is easier said than done. Keep up the good work J.J.!
This is why Ms. Frizzle was the best teacher, and The Magic School Bus was a balanced mix of these. You learned facts, but in their context. My favorite teacher in younger grades did things like coming in to class with full bubonic plague makeup when learning about The Plague, or a "final exam" that was basically The Amazing Race (the show of the time!) with challenges applying everything we learned that semester. We learned a lot of facts, and how to think critically in the process. Shout out to all the wonderful teachers out there!
You don't want them talk critical thinking that's why they all learn critical race Theory even though it wasn't taught in school. Did you sincerely think that kids haven't been using critical thinking skills and that's why they agree with human rights for lgbtq+ people and Indigenous people and people of color and black people.. did you guys seriously not know that kids are already practicing critical thinking skills that's why they're getting into drag and that's why they're quitting school and that's why they don't give a shit about playing the corrupt politics game. You sincerely think that they're learning critical race theory in school that's fucking Beyond hilarious they're not learning that in school they choose to learn that themselves online
@JamesMacPherson theoretically uninterested in performing the same mistakes as the past including white hegemony you're all just extremely white supremacist and don't even realize it so you're mad at kids because they understand critical race Theory it's laughable that you guys are this prejudiced against kids
@@Tazallax JJ McCullough said that English wasn't used to oppress indigenous people but that's culturally contextually incorrect because if we didn't speak English in residential schools we were beaten raped and sometimes killed. Listening to JJ McCullough about history is like listening to a racist teach you how to be racist.
I have to commend you for the fact that your channel is probably the only one in my feed that will present me with a title and thumbnail I generally disagree with but still get me to watch the whole thing, and I think you make a really strong point for fact-based learning. I wonder in this case if "general skills" doesn't necessarily map onto "general intelligence" but perhaps more onto methodology. It's true I couldn't apply critical thinking skills to Nepalese politics without knowing any facts about Nepal, but I can testify to having learned skills like how to iterate and improve upon a first draft of "finished" work, or how to provide creative feedback, that rely more on applying certain methods than knowing specific information. More challenging, though, is how to effectively test for knowledge that will be retained in long term memory, and more importantly, how as a society to decide which facts are taught.
Hey man, i agree with ya on this, I wholly disagree with the thumbnail and so far the argument isnt convincing me as much as I thought it would. I say this with my own anecdote about mathematics, my way of mathematics was very different than that of my peers, I sought to actually understand the stuff I was given, took me s ome time to notice the equal sign really meant EQUAL and thus you could do shite to both sides but just understanding that brought me far far ahead of my peers. Or perhaps multiplication where I skipped out on memorisation and naturally started remembering them, while it rendered me slower in calculations, it also demonstrated to my head what multiplication means. Or even another anecdote I have on quadratic equations which immediately opened up to me(except for cometing the square, still looks like magic to me) once I noticed the whole x thing=y=0, understood fully the gravity of factorisation and the graph, in fact quadratic equations helped me understand the cartesian graph.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw I was exactly like you and I was certainly ahead of my peers bc of that - in physics I never bothered to memorize formulas, I just tried to understand what was the principle at play and would often derivate the formula from simpler, more fundamental ones - and when I realized you could use the units to figure out the formula, what I later discovered is called dimensional analysis, then it all became even simpler. I think what I'm trying to say with this is that although I agree with OP that I generally disagree with the thumnail and he presents a... interesting case, I do think he is basically saying that the solution to the problem caused by our last solution to the educational system is simply to go back to how things were - but there's a reason we abandoned that. Like you somewhat implied I think of the main things is actually understanding and being able to play with the form and the ideas and still be able to work with that. So neither a purely "factual" nor a purely "skill-based" teaching method make that much sense bc it is all about context - learning is a dynamic process and we should focus less on how to make a kid learn everything they need on school and more about how to allow us, as a society, to be ever able to recontextuallize things, use prior knowledge AND skills to come to a better understanding while still having the practical knowledge of how to deal with it all. We should teach them "basic knowledge" but also give them the tools to "critically analyze" it, or, in other words, play with it and know inside and out, know its limitations, its pitifalls, how one might improve upon it and then repeat the process, approaching the "same" things but with a more nuanced and more detailed manner, giving them the tools (but also the resources) to apply that to acquire and intutively actually understand new knowledge, not only "knowing" but comprehending it, and being able to go beyond what is in the page.
@@hcxpl1 oh yeah I ddid learn to do what you call dimensional analysis and while I still know nothing about how to imagine things like energy or anything multiplied by kilogram, although I didn't use dimensional analysis quite as much and stuck to the formulas because while the simpler questions are dimenesional analysisable, the harder ones require formulas and logic and I wasn't not particularly good at derivating formulas.
I think the war on fact-based knowledge comes from a widespread hatred of memorization. If you learn a set of facts in school, a normal student will memorize them temporarily for a test, and then purge them thereafter to prepare for the following exam. Learning skills is easier to retain over a long period of time
@@JJMcCullough That does bring up another important discussion though, and that is the way that those discrete facts are taught, which is usually rote memorization. I recommend anyone to read "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer if you want to read about some alternative systems people have used :)
Definitely. I was taught fact-based knowledge and what bothered me in history textbooks is that facts didn't really form a good story. Just a bunch of spotlights on a timeline lazily tied together. Maybe it would take more time, but I would care more if it was more personal, so that I would unrestand the motivation of not only each historical person, but also what day to day life of a regular person was like. What worried them, what were they thinking? Basically criterias of a good movie also apply to a history book lol. Similar thing with math, you spend more time memorizing formulas to solve problems, not why and how these formulas were derived. Then you move on to learn new formulas to solve different kind of problems without forming deeper knowledge of how the math works, you're just a human calculator. There's little continuity in a lot of subjects taught on schools.
You don't necessarily forget the facts. I did European history from 1848 to 1945 for my secondary school exams at 18. I went to Hungary on holiday last week and immediately know who Kossuth was and why he was important in their history. That really improved my understanding of what was in front of me
Because most of the time people teach facts without context - Sure Napoleon write the civil code, but without explaining how strongly it changed the relationship between governments and citizens this code influences all of Europe (and far beyond) to this day this fact is just as useless as amount HP of Creeper in Minecraft.
History Teacher here, long time watcher, first time commenter - I am actually BLOWN AWAY. I have always been frustrated by how much high school kids struggle to do research, and (in what I always thought was me being lazy) resort to telling stories and facts of what happened - and the kids seem to prefer that, and I sure like to think that they know more at the end. I think this theory might be what I've been trending into all this time. I need to do a ton more research into this...using my background knowledge to explore successfully!
New high school teacher here. I’m becoming more convinced that our role as educators is to introduce kids to things so they know they exist and that will let them explore the world as adults better. If at 25 they can think: hey! That reminds me of something Ms. L said 10 years ago, let me look into it! That means that at least they know that something is a possibility . Yes, they also have to know how to search for the answers, but where to start when you have never heard that something is a possibility? I presently teach biology, I’m not expecting them to understand everything, I just want them to know the terms so when something happens to them or someone near them they vaguely know what the doctors are talking about and what kind of questions to ask. Or when I explain evolution. I know they won’t necessarily get it, but they know that it comes from a transcription error in your DNA that makes the difference between individual and species. If I don’t introduce the concept to them and hope they know how to research it, how can I ensure something so important isn’t missed?
My best grades were from a history class. the teacher made everything we were learning a story that we could remember, the facts and figures came with them. It almost impossible for me to remember knowledge for tests that hasnt grounded itself in my head in some of format than a list of numbers.
History teacher here as well, completely agree! I find research skills are lacking in most students (especially since Google), but telling stories seems to convey a lot more and you can see the understanding 'click' a lot quicker!
Story telling was the method of teaching history my grade school had and I absolutely loved it! I wasn't discouraged by the fact that i absolutely sucked at reading so I was able to focus on the actual lesson and take interest in it. The issue that I see is that story telling might have more of a bias built into it that would greatly impact what the students take away from the lessons. This obviously isn't limited to a story telling based lesson but at least with textbooks school boards can more effectively judge the "degree of accuracy/bias" a lesson has.
History teacher here as well. I agree with you. I personally hate when colleagues, administrators want us to move away from fact teaching and move towards researching. The kids struggle a lot. Yes, like this video says, if they don’t have the facts to make that research it going to be very difficult. I also teach the facts as a story and the students seem to enjoy that part of class the most. I do have them work in research here and there but once they have all the facts about a specific topic
The main problem with facts-based learning is that most teachers are terrible at conveying it in an engaging and entertaining way. It was only after youtube that I realized how cool subjects like social studies really are.
Very much this. Motivation is key. We can't expect most kids to have an internal motivation to learn a lot of facts and information, however valuable. I'd argue that Star Wars kid will benefit more from reading 100 Star Wars books than he will from being forced to read one history book he has no interest in.
@@ldsviking I was going to say this, too. He may not gain any actual knowledge about facts from those books, but he will get better and faster at reading in general. I read fantasy books a lot during my school years, and by high school, I was one of the fastest readers in the entire class. They leaned on me hard during popcorn reading XD
You need both. I personally had a general knowledge based education, and only actively started to remember facts from school later on, in university. But I learned facts by myself by reading books, magazines, newspapers and later internet articles. But one thing I noticed while being an exchange student in a fact based education system was that we had no time to reflect or discuss what we have learned, which really felt frustrating to me as I felt the knowledge never had a chance to develop or take root. It was literally just remembering what some guy said, instead of coming to some deeper insights that I need some discussion with others to reach. But you are right that its pointless to discuss a topic without any facts to base the discussion on, and only learning to question things because you do not yourself know about them is well... not conducive to moving the discussion forward. Educational systems are always criticized for not doing enough though. Might just be a matter of time and resources like most things.
I feel like a good middle ground between the two concepts is letting kids independently research pre-assigned topics in the form of Presentations and group projects
I think that's not a bad compromise. One of the most memorable projects I did in grade school was a report on the Wright Brothers, which I chose from a list of pre-approved inventors.
@@JJMcCullough this reminds me of a presentation project I did in highschool about the Gallipoli campaign. It was probably the only memorable exercise in learning I have from highschool level humanities. I remember being consistently frustrated with how unchallenging and superficial classes on history, politics, or English classes were. I think I could nearly recite that presentation by memory now, while I’d really struggle to remember any other assignment I did in school.
@@JJMcCullough Stuff like that also seems to me to leave a far better memory mark so to say. We had a project to do about legal drugs, such as coffein and diffrences between it in coffee to tea. But my pick was a report on nutmeg and I remember the stuff I read about it being used as a drug to this day whenever I pick up the spice.
I actually had a similar conversation with my teacher, as he would frequently make references to things my class didn't know, like TV shows or other media. He proposed a "American Pop Culture" or "Cultural Literacy" class where we would get that background and learn about influential media. The class I have with him is supposed to be about graphic design, but we have great conversations and debate that engage the class more than any other class I take since he lets us have long conversations and debates about current topics other teachers would cut off to "get back to the lesson". I feel I've learned a lot more about society and things I will use later in life in that class than my other classes which are extremely focused on specific skills.
I'm 57 years old. I recently set myself the task of doing something I'd never done in school (my education stretched from 1970 to the mid 80s). I decided to memorise all the monarchs of England and their dates. I then read about a variety of topics of English history and discovered that simply having the names and dates of the kings and queens allowed me to remember a whole lot more of the new stuff I was learning and to understand much more the context and the motives of the people involved. "I wish I'd been taught better!" I could cry, but the reality is 13-year old me would never have stuck to doing that memorisation. But I do find that those facts form a framework (or I like to think, a set of pigeonholes) that helps put new knowledge in place. I'm impressed with Hirsch and his still producing thoughtful stuff at the age of 92! Something for us all to aspire to even if we don't agree with him.
The last bit is important imo. I hear teenagers parrot older people all the time saying “i wish they taught me more life skills and less stuff that didn’t matter”….but the issue is that everything they claim to want to know is either required learning or is available as an elective….and it has been there since like the 1970s and exists in basically the same form….we were all just too busy talking.
@JamesMacPherson learning the times table opened up the door to many multiplication formulas for various areas of shapes and that led to a lot more knowledge about how multiplication works fundamentally. I don't think I would have gotten this far if I didn't have the base of memorized facts that I later understood fundamentally.
Loved your video, as always JJ. I'm a Math and Physics teacher (college level) and we have been pressured to embraced General Skills (re branded as Outcome-Based Education) and I remember one time with my colleges we were trying to do the changes to our courses that needed to be done to achieve this new standards and a lot of topics of Basic Physics had to be remove from the course because they were to fact oriented. The excuse given by our bosses was "if the student reached the outcome of self-learn they would be able to learn the missing topics" but of course, if there are no external pressure to learn something the former students will never learn all that topics. It's really frustrating for me, when I'm conducting a test, that my students ask me for the electrical charge of the proton (for example) that we literally use in every problem solved in class or in the homework.
Even within a specific subject like physics, it's really hard to strike the balance between general physics skills (of being able to conceptualise stuff and being able to make smart assumptions about the setup of the problem at hand) and knowing useful knowledge (like the parallel axis theorem, the moments of inertia of particular shapes and the Taylor series) and many schools and universities will prioritise different these things to different extents. I once had a physics teacher whose tendency to expect us to remember word for word dictionary definitions of things was infuriating, but the ability to mull over phrases like "potential difference is energy transferred per unit charge, energy transferred per unit charge" allowed me to finally get my head around what were initially very abstract concepts such as p.d.
I’m a first year social studies teacher. I’ve been very frustrated with the formulaic approach to topics such as history, literature, civics, etc… I have been trying to put my finger on the exact issue that I’ve had with this approach, and I think that you’ve hit on it. You can’t learn general skills without first having something to map them onto. You learn general skills during the pursuit of specific skills.
I hope your textbook is written in time and not in themes. I used to teach social studies, the themes made students think the themes occured at the same time.
Coming from a high school (2000-2004) that had a hard focus on fact-based rote knowledge (thanks to 'no child left behind'), I found things a little more challenging at university because there wasn't a foundation of "this is how you get knowledge and contextualize it" so much as "here is the knowledge you are required to have". I distinctly remember an 11th grade honors American history class being literal a list of facts without context or any meaningful links. It was pub trivia history and an astonishing amount of it was the "approved and sanitized" version at that. The general skills approach did enable 2 generations of "I did my research" Facebook commenters, but knowing the 27 nicknames for Andrew Jackson and the names of Columbus's ships did even less for the culture at large.
Most high school classes are taught by incompetents. Especially history. History in high school is taught as a 'survey': you get the high points and ignore the meaning. Who cares about the date of the Battle of Vicksburg? Context makes it meaningful. Grant ground out the Vicksburg campaign because he had to. Sherman advised Grant to fall back to Memphis to resupply and regroup. Grant told him that if they retreated from Vicksburg, the war was lost. The opposition in Congress would force negotiations with Jeff Davis and end the war. The Union would be broken. He was right. Jeff Davis and his cabinet knew the significance of Vicksburg. Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State in 1863 (he had been Secretary of War before that) wanted to send part of the Army of Northern Virginia to Mississippi to relieve Vicksburg. R E Lee opposed that. (I know many admire Lee. I say, "Lee lost." Lee fought for Virginia, not for the CSA.) Instead, Lee proposed to invade the North to draw Union troops away from Vicksburg. And so we got the Battle of Gettysburg, 1-3 July 1863. And Vicksburg surrendered to Grant 4 July 1863. Now that you know the context, it is easy to remember the dates. They mean something to you now. They are related.
In my school experience, the teachers guided us through general skills in elementary (with the occasional basic knowledge), then half general skills half fact in middle school, before being purely fact-based in high school. I feel like that worked well, as most students were able to use the skills they spent years developing to achieve a lot more. Any time a teacher made a mistake, you’d see ten people calling them out on it, since they were all following along and connecting it to the things they were previously taught. The downside to this is that there are some people who just check out in elementary and don’t bother trying because they see a strict teacher forcing them to read diary of a wimpy kid or something like that and think “this is stupid, why should I care about school when the teachers don’t even care enough to teach us”. It becomes really evident later on who those people are as a quarter of the students (the ones who checked out early) are struggling to get 50s, while everyone else is in the 80s and 90s. No middleground.
Perfectly said. I'm am educator and I graduated in 07 through that same failed policy. JJ is talking about education in America without addressing how VASTLY different the education systems are between US and Canada (I have family in Quebec and Trinidad, their system is completely different from what I went through). Plus the education system differs VASTLY from state to state in the US. I'm in NY and we are known for having prettu high standards. Like a NY teaching liscnece will transfer over to most states for lack of better words. Conversely, in the South, the banned books list is so long because they are trying to alternative facts slavery away.
@@Violexie-wb7op "in the South, the banned books list is so long because they are trying to alternative facts slavery away." Where in the blue bloody hell did you get that, damnyankee? I was educated in Texas all the way to a doctorate. There was never any attempt to say slavery did not happen. You know what I think? (That was a rhetorical question. Of course you don't know what I think. You are an 'educator' in NY so evidently your ideas about the South come from Uncle Tom's Cabin.) I think you are damned near totally ignorant of the South and the way Southerns think. But you have no notion of how blindingly ignorant you are, so you make unsubstantiated statements about Southerners. That's called prejudice. You are prejudiced. A German language professor once told us, "You should know enough by the time you graduate to know you don't know much." You should take a lesson from that. If you can.
I'm a proponent of learning "general skills" in school. I think the goal is supposed to apply things like critical thinking *in context* - that is, with knowledge. On the one end, facts with no critical thinking like memorizing dates, etc, (such as in history classes), are often forgotten and a wasted effort. On the other, critical thinking with no context can only open yourself to learning, but not actually learning. The end goal is always to acquire (correct) facts. Learning about biases of journals, etc, is actually an argument *for* general skills. Epistemological, critical thinking is the only sound way to acquire new knowledge. I'm not against learning facts in school though. I think I'd just rather tip the scales more than it currently stands.
Here's my high-school student perspective, I think a mixture of both is best but it depends on the class being taught. General skills learning definitely has its place in elementary school for younger childen, so that they stay engaged with the material and learn to love learning and then be more enthusiastic with their schooling and may retain more information in school about direct facts as they get older and start middle and high-school which could then lead to career opportunities through college. I think one thing school does need to do better at least here in the US is prepare kids for real life troubles, because most careers aren't academically related. This is an opinion and like any it has its flaws so feel free to message me and we can discuss it.
This a a classic "yes, AND" situation. Yes, we need to educate "what you need to know" AND we need to have people think critically about what they are learning and why.
@@precariousworlds3029 there isn’t time. Curricula need to be highly condensed and efficient, you can’t just teach everything, especially when we’re talking about two entirely separate philosophies/approaches. We’re forced to decide which has more merit, and the evidence really points to the common body of facts an adult is expected to know rather than nebulous skills that we don’t really know how to teach or evaluate, and that most people learn regardless
It seems like the STEM model of learning has invaded the realm of humanities. When I learn a math concept, I’m learning how to execute any math problem placed before me, not a set of facts about those math concepts. Now, instead of learning about specific facts in history or specific books in English, we learn how to analyze any historical document or any book. I think this is probably the origin of skills-based teaching
That’s a good insight. There was definitely a time when humanities became unfashionable because they were not scientific enough, so maybe we have overcompensated.
You've got a point. The issue is that learning outside of school at the time was considered normal. You went and worked or read or was read to or played with friends and heard stories. Nowadays people get out of school, find a braincrapping job that they take forever and when to go back home they watch TV or another blockbuster.
@@JJMcCullough Is it overcompensation though? I understand that from a Canadian perspective, what I am saying might not make sense, but take AP classes for example. In AP history classes, not only do you learn facts and ideas, but you also learn how to learn and analyze documents. This makes the kids who take AP History courses 10x better at learning history in general then kids who do not (using kids in APUSH who took AP Euro in 10th vs world history). Learning to learn is very helpful, since you can't force kids to WANT to learn (which is necessary for fact based learning)
@@jeanc1622 I don't know if this is true. Within living memory, performative stupidity or anti-intellectualism was a real thing. One reason why Jews were not popular In early to mid-20th century universities in the United States is because Jews tended to take the educational mission seriously rather than seeing places like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton as elaborate finishing schools of the Oxbridge tradition. If anything performative stupidity is no longer seen as valid. The concept of the Gentleman Cs is gone even if most people at elite universities aren't necessarily that intellectually curious, they have to at least look like they are into scholarship.
As a kid who read nothing but star wars and similar books... You wouldn't have gotten me to read something else because I wouldn't have been interested. Letting me pick what books I wanted to pick actually got me reading a lot more than I would have otherwise, and I think it did make me better at reading, both through practice and through expanding my vocabulary.
I think JJ is also really underestimating the amount of historical and cultural references that get packed into these books. They're usually require much more our of their readers than someone who had never picked one up would expect.
As someone who learned more "facts and figures" in school, I do think we should all have a base set of knowledge by the time we graduate high school. I almost became a teacher and come from a family of teachers. Their biggest complaint over the years has been the struggle to be consistent with the curriculum and the approach to teaching which seemingly changes with every new Secretary of Education and/or state education officials in the US. "General skills", including critical thinking can be implicitly taught without having to make them the curriculum itself. I believe you can learn to be a critical thinker via classroom discussions and being challenged to read materials and learn facts you may not particularly like. Thanks, JJ.👍😋
I dislike the idea of a base set of knowledge, because individual uniqueness in skill and knowledge is a large part of the advancement of society. Having everybody think the same and know the same things is great for the unification of a society, but it's unhealthy for the long-term development of the society.
@@bro748 Right, diversity of knowledge is good, but the main issue seems to be that, left to their own devices, individuals on average don't actively seek out new knowledge bases in different and uncomfortable domains. Individuals naturally prefer to stay comfortable, and if they can take smaller steps from their current place into nearby topics, they will. Every individual benefits from a diverse knowledge base stemming from different topics and domains that enables them to be actively, productively critical of more topics (and be aware of how knowledge makes them productively critical), more than just that society benefits from a diverse knowledge base stemming from different individuals. There seems to be some potential in the idea that the ability to challenge, change, and improve the base set of knowledge goes up, the more people have that base set of knowledge to question in the first place.
This was the subject of my final thesis project in college, focused specifically on “general skills” in math/problem solving and rote learning. There was no doubt in my student surveying that general skills learning turned out less understanding overall because it didn’t allow the incremental building of knowledge. Learning the rules on a rote basis (ie, memorizing the times table) allowed students to free their minds of the smaller calculations and focus on the more complex ideas that math can illustrate.
I'd wager a general "how to learn and think" explanation for kids isn't a bad thing to do every once in awhile, but once I got into university I realized the only difference from a high level class to a low level class was the number of prerequisite facts you are supposed to remember. This has been the case for pretty much every class I've taken, from language to science to maths.
This is something I also found. I believe anyone can learn anything just by following the coursework and taking enough time. College programs are designed to slowly introduce you to a complex topic. I never found any level course substantially more difficult than the previous ones.
Damn, you guys are either geniuses or the rest are imbeciles. If you think Newtonian physics isn't easier than Quantum physics then I don't know what to say.
facts just alone mean nothing though if you can not understand the processes that affirm them. skills are the application of facts, gardening for example or cooking, you can not detach the two, if you learn a skill you also have to learn facts relating to it, it does not work the other way, you can learn facts without skills.
Your take on those videos where athletes cross over to other sports is the absolute opposite of mine. I'm always amazed at how quickly an athlete picks up things from another field, and is able to make some of those basic movements that would take an inexperienced person weeks or month of practice to learn.
I think it's a half-empty half-full type of thing. There is significant overlap in the skills required by different sports, but at the same time expertise in one sport doesn't translate to expertise in another sport
Like @EriniusT alluded to - I think a top 1% baseball player could get to top 50% football player much more quickly than an average non-athletic person. But getting to top 1% level would be more comparable levels of effort between them
I believe that the point here is that it is incorrect to assume that a good pro athlete in one specific sport will be automatically better than a regular person. Yes, there is an overlap, but a regular person that has had a good level of experience playing soccer, for example, will probably play better than a pro athlete that has not played soccer, even though they are a pro athlete in another area. Thats the argument that facts are more useful than general skills. The person with more facts/experience in an area/subject will do better than someone with general skills, but little experience/facts.
Consider it this way, if you're picking people for a basket ball game you'd take a Gold Medal Olympic sprinter over some guy, but would you take an Olympic sprinter over an obscure NBA player?
I watched the gymnast vs parkour videos because I was curious about them, and there was some stuff in parkour the gymnasts did better and vice versa. Also even though the parkour guy in the clip looks awkward on the gymnast bars, he can still perform on them much better than the average person. That being said I don't think any of this actually goes against JJ's premise, since the domains of parkour and gymnastics do have so much overlap. It just failed to serve his point in the way he was using it.
My first instinct, coming from a STEM backgroundn was to recoil in horror at the topic title. Upon watching the video, I find I'm in a much more nuanced position. I went to high school two decades ago, where there was a transition from fact-based knowledge to skill-based, and I thought back to a formative experience I had. I had an excellent history teacher in high school. He was engaging, knowledgeable, and engendered a fascination with history. Even the weaker students in my class gained a really deep understanding of the course of events in the 20th century, with a deeper understanding of cultural factors and motivations behind such topics as the World Wars. One day we had a substitute who was more-old school (though at least 15 years younger) than our teacher, and was appalled we didn't know dates and names of important battles in WWII. When the teacher came back the next day and worried keeners asked him about it he said "if we understood war deeply, we'd have the skills to determine if a quick google search for the date of D-Day was giving accurate information". That very much solidified "skills-based learning" as a positive thing in my mind. As I'm older now, I do think we may have gone a little too far from "core competency". Working in a pharmacy, the general public largely has deficits in medical literacy. "does this bottle of vitamin C contain any chemicals in it? If so, can you recommend me one that doesn't?" is a type of question I deal with regularly, and it's difficult because the asker doesn't even have the vocabulary to discuss why that's a meaningless question. The other topic is inflation. I often hear people bemoan "why is that union protesting over a 1% raise? I haven't had a raise in 5 years", and it's frustrating that they're making decisions about their life lacking the knowledge that in inflation-adjusted dollars their wages have shrunk by 16%. So I guess on this topic I'm a boring centrist.
On the dates thing, I feel like there's some facts that are more useful than others. Like, knowing the rough course of events during WWII and about what time which battles were fought is probably more helpful than very specific dates for battles. After all, the exact date doesn't matter that much and is harder to remember than the fact that it was during winter.
@@cameron7374 and arguably that's only if you're specifically studying WW2 history. I'm realizing that I'm considering what should be common knowledge and why should it be. It's good to know the rough time frame of major operations but why would that matter to the average person if they just needed to know what was going on in the 1940s.
In our school exams rather than exact dates we had to order events chronologically. I think that makes more sense than remembering on so and so date "oh the battle of Waterloo was 200 years ago
@@DaLatinKnight WWII is definitely the main history thing to know about in at least some detail. ("This thing was awful, here's how awful it was and what / why it happened. Let's not do that again.")
@@cameron7374 It's nice to think that people would learn about the details of WW2 with the intent of preventing the travesties from happening again. But there's another side to this coin. Some do read up on the history in detail for the explicit purpose of doing it again, but not repeating the errors made by the people committing those travesties and ensuring a future attempt is successful. Just pointing out that the teaching of history doesn't always have the desired outcome.
I'm from the U.S. Midwest. Early in my schooling, my experience was also facts based; however, I noticed the focus of school changed as I grew older. Not just in my grade, but in general. My younger siblings had a different experience in the same grades. By the time I was in high school, only about 50% of schooling was facts based. I bet there is a strong correlation between the experience people had in school and their age/generation.
We definitely did a fact-based approach at my school in the Western US. My only real complaint is that I felt like there were some important gaps in what I was taught with regard to certain subjects. There was definitely an air of American exceptionalism and a glossing over certain inconvenient facts while focusing on others. I think a fact based approach works so long as you put things in their proper context.
Yes I’m sure if you’re studying American history it will focus on the history of America and manifest destiny, not sure how that has anything to do with modern American exceptionalism, the same can be said for learning the history of any place.
I’m in the US Naval Nuclear program and it just clicked for me that this is the primary way that they teach us. The tests are a lot of memorization and drawing of graphs and diagrams which progresses from more rote knowledge to deeper understanding as you get further through the program. Something I was actually thinking about for a long time was how this was different from anything else I’d ever done and why this particular way seemed to help a lot more than how I used to learn, I got a degree in Philosophy before joining the military where the focus was more general skills based, and I think the most important thing that my previous education was missing was a dependence on the effectiveness of scaffolding of knowledge because as you learn how one component or system works it becomes easier to integrate all of the facts and have “integrated plant knowledge” which is the main goal of the whole program where you would both have a deep understanding of how things operate normally and how to manipulate them to do what you need them to in the case of an emergency.
Recent uni grad here. This video got me thinking a lot a team building exercise I did at my job on campus where I put students into groups and we did a trivia event. I asked questions like “who is the author of 1984” or “who is the only US president to have resigned from office” and the amount of upper year university students who not only didn’t know the answer, but were hostile to the thought that they’d be expected to maybe know it was shocking. Feels like a product of an education system which holds up critical thinking as the end all be all of an intellect but doesn’t focus on learning basic facts about society
I'm eight years older than you and would classify my education as one based on facts and figures. That said, your video reminded me of a breakthrough of sorts that I had when I was a freshman in college taking a philosophy class. I've always been interested in history and it ended up being my major. While I generally understood the philosophy class, it struck me that I could apply my knowledge of history to the topics in the philosophy class, which made it more meaningful to me--and allowed for a better understanding. I employed this strategy for various other classes throughout college. Of course, knowing history didn't help with calculus or accounting, but I had enough sense to know that.
I think peoples subconscious desire for fact-based knowledge is the reason education TH-camrs have gotten so popular. Ever since I was a little kid I've watched education videos here.
The central thesis of this video seems very similar to Thomas Sowell's 'Intellectuals and Society.' In the book, Dr. Sowell argues that intellectuals are often able to describe ideas that have no basis in reality. He compares the politics professor to the engineer, arguing that the professor is judge by his theories, while the engineer is judged by the end product. If a professor comes up with an idea that fails, he still has his job. If the engineer designs a bridge that collapses, he is ruined.
Now that I think about it, my classes back in school did seem to wave wildly between these two forms of teaching depending on the subject, and I do distinctly recall finding more bluntly informational classes significantly more resonant with me than ones that handled topics more vapidly and with greater emphasis on our personal thoughts on the matter. I'm not going to commit to an opinion straight away, but this does put some of my experience into words...
Coming from Mississippi, I can definitely say that my schooling was predominantly fact-based, and taking history tests largely revolved around regurgitating rote-memorized names and dates. Critical thinking was seldom emphasized. You went through your textbook, rote-memorized the important information, then promptly forgot it once you were finished with the test. The students with the highest grades weren't necessarily the intelligent ones per se, just those with the best memories. French class-- which I'm sure you're quite familiar with, being Canadian-- was one of the few classes that taught an applicable skill and actually encouraged students to apply knowledge that they had gained. We were tested on our ability to read and write in the language, but not really on our speaking or understanding ability. Je peux lire, ecrire, et parle francais bien... mais je ne peux pas comprend le francais parle de tout. (I can read, write, and speak French well... but I cannot understand spoken French at all.)
@@jimmymcbean7794 You can memorize all the rules of (say) first-order logic in a day, and then spend another day memorizing the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. But if I then ask you to prove the existence of an uncountable set (or any similar ZFC theorem), you might have no idea where to begin. You have all the facts you need, you just don't know how to apply them.
This. It's not either/or as JJ frames the discussion. Students need both. A base set of facts added to general learning skills prepares students for lifelong learning.
A cultural literacy inquiry: Do kids know who or what Old Yeller is? Do elementary schools still play that movie, or did the adults who were traumatized by it become teachers and stop playing it?
While I think the Western Canon as it existed in the middle of the 20th century was quite problematic and myopic in its scope, I think the remedy is to have a more diverse and globally representative canon, not just dismiss the concept altogether. You mentioned communication but I think that's a key factor too. When things are self directed, you end up siloed with whatever you're mentally digesting and never have the benefit of talking through your thought processes with someone and hearing interpretations that you missed due to various mental blind spots.
@@SleepyMatt-zzz eh wouldn't trust those. I am sure at least 90% of Americans could do that, those videos find people who are very ignorant and cut out anyone who gets It right, and they cut around those who change their mind quickly after realizing the answer. I could do the same if I went to any nation.
This is interesting to me because when I look back on my education, fact-based knowledge was one of the more painful points of that process. It was frustrating to be asked to memorize seemingly random facts and later regurgitate them onto a test only to forget them weeks later. On the other hand, my own self-directed education through things like reddit and youtube was largely fact-based simply because that's what I found interesting. I wanted to know things about the world. I desired knowledge and it was frequently served to me in the form of various memes, historical stories, interactive explanations, etc. The facts I learned on the internet always felt significantly more engaging than what I learned in school and despite never having to regurgitate it all for a quiz, I feel like I retained that knowledge much better than anything I learned in school. So I guess I agree that fact-based knowledge is vital for education, I think exactly how that knowledge is presented and taught is probably more important in our educational approach. Maybe one way of putting it would be instead of "names and dates" we should be teaching "stories and causes." Like it's not so important to me that a man named "Christopher Colombus" sailed to the Americas in 1492; it's more important to me that starting in the late 15th century, a European colonization of Native American land began that sparked the slave trade and the modern history of the Americas. And I feel like it goes without saying that students will remember and engage better with material they're personally interested in. So whenever possible allowing students to choose their areas of study (within reason; maybe no star wars books) would be really beneficial.
I hard agree with this. facts are only useful if you can relate them to other things (which is the exact thing that general knowledge is all about). There's a reason you focus more and more on a specific topic the farther into the education system you go. J.J basically just said that people think of general knowledge as having knowledge about everything, and so that's why we should only learn facts. I don't think that's a logical argument. We should learn facts that help us analyse new facts in the future when we start learning more specific knowledge.
I love this way of thinking. Very interesting. For a while now I have developed a gripe when people talk about "common sense" and how that phrase was always used. Everyone would say "nobody has common sense anymore" And I realized. Most people think that most things that they know are common and universal, where this (and myself) would imply that there is actually only a small percentage of your working knowledge that is "common" to everyone. And once we get beyond the basics like addition, or reading and writing even, that percentage grows even smaller.
And I've seen this as an educator. So many students and people process things differently and make different connections that the reason something makes inherent sense to you can be very different for someone else. Especially in the absence of a more rigorous fact-based background.
@@BL3446 IMO Niolet made a quip. I do not see evidence that he agreed with you nor disagreed with you. Did he read your comment? IDK. Did he respond to your comment? I think not. His comment does not contain @Sneak. Ease off. IME the phrase 'common sense' is used only in the negative; that is, 'It's just common sense', which is to say, 'You have none, and I think my position is self-evident, and I cannot support it with evidence.' As for people reaching different conclusions, that means they do not begin from the same facts. If two parties start with the same foundation, they will build similar houses. When the foundations differ, so will the houses.
I am from the Czech Republic and I am now studying economics. I would say that when I was at elementary school we kinda did the fact-based knowledge (especially for history and geography), but I feel like I didn’t like which facts counted as important (learning capital cities in Europe was great, but learning where is almost every Czech river located felt pointless). I remember studying for the exams by just reading the chapter in the textbook over and over again. Than I went to a grammar school and the most important thing was to find connections between everything, which I enjoyed in geography but not really in history, where sometimes the teacher wanted us to find connections which I considered far-fetched. After some time we got a new history for the last 3 years and we did basically only one topic the cold war, here the connections started to make sense for me and I also enjoyed his exams where the questions was some broad topic and we had to write as much as we know about it.
I feel like the AP US History class represents a balanced approach to this divide perfectly. In AP US History, you spend the year learning both fact-based knowledge about US history, and skills-based knowledge about how to analyze historical documents. On a document-based question, you must use your basis of knowledge to analyze a document or political cartoon from a specific era that you’ve never seen before. That way, you employ both your general analysis skills and your general US history knowledge
Yes, I came here to say the same thing. You are required to at least know some facts, but the curriculum emphasizes why those facts exist in the first place (i.e. context).
I would add that another key component of fact based knowledge is that it instills a certain level of discipline. Self directed learning, as empowering as it may be, may lack the required discipline that young people need to be successful as they move through life. Once discipline is well established in a young person they can apply it to any endeavour they hope to master.
Went through school late 1990s-2011. I found that schooling was more facts focused with a relentless focus on memorization and regurgitation of facts.. all of which I promptly forgot as soon as the test/exam was concluded.
I was going to wait until the end of the video to comment, but then you said you learned critical thinking in grade school, and described the practical method in which this was taught. And my little traumatized heart broke once again because I literally learned those things in my 20s, with no guidance, while the people closest to me were telling me I was ruining their lives by doing so.
Richard Dawkins is one of the best examples of this. He is an evolutionary biologist, yet his claims on history and the history of religion are praised by millions, despite being full of holes
Damn this was a really good video, thank you for making it. Always love hearing about whatever books you’re currently reading and the new ideas/questions they provoked! Do you maintain a reading list anywhere?
In his essay collection _Of This and Other Worlds_ CS Lewis wrote that literature tests should only be simple fact-based questions about the events in the book, so the students are forced to actually read it. They should not be asked to bare their soul to the teacher by "responding to" the book. Not quite the same argument, and of course there was more to it than that, but there's an interesting resonance.
I'm autistic and probably have ADHD, so I think it should be noted that everyone learns differently, you can not put everyone within the same system and expect it to work. I would call my education fact based, however there are rarely any things I do actually remeber from school, because either a teacher didn't explain it well and I had to look it up myself, teach myself, or because we had barely any variaty. Sure I did learn stuff, and I could have been off worse, but I always felt like I really only started to learn and like learning when I got out of school. Watching Powerpuff Girls thought me english, but it heled to have a basis of vocabulary I knew from school. I think in the end a healthy mix of both is needed. What I dislike is when it's arbitrary facts I am learning. Like dates for example. Knowing when exactly what happened doesn't matter much when I do not know anything about that time peroid and what it meant. It's just a pointless question for a test to which I will forget the answer. And such types of learning and testing only tought me how to forget facts as fast as possible to make room for more. I had to memorize the periodic table, but was never told what the numbers actually mean or why it even exists, what we as humans did to find out about those elements. And a lot of times I think I would have been better of learning on my own, because it's not like I didn't wanna know these important things, I just wanted to also understand them and I was never given the tools for that. A 10 minute TH-cam video tought me more about human history than 10 years of school, in which I only learned about how tragic the holocaust was, egyptian culture existed and I feel like that's already it, everything else I picked up from media and self research or my parents explained it to me.
In America you have to memorise the periodic table? That isn't required in Malaysia. We only need to memorise elements 1-20 and a few other common elements in order to answer exam questions.
@@yokelengleng I'm not from america. I'm actually quite good at memorizing stuff, but it's not like this was anything that helped me in my life especially since after the test I immediatly forget anyways. And I don't think stuff like this is even good to train a memorization ability...I'm still very forgetful when I don't try to activly memorize something for a test.
I was, ironically, skeptical of this video when I first clicked on it 😅 though after watching, it is, as usual, a very well packaged distillation of knowledge I don’t often find elsewhere on this platform 😊 always makes me happy to see such nuanced perspectives in today’s online climate
I just graduated college in May, but I was also an art student, so my experience might be different from people who were solely in academic classes. The program I was in hammered hard on fact-based knowledge, but also expected you to hone your skill based knowledge in-class (but only while the prof wasnt trying to relay facts to you) as well as outside of class independently. Skills and facts were taught as very separate concepts, but I can't help but feel like they're intertwined in a way that my professors could never get to the root of in a class setting. They were too focused on controlling what we were doing and when we were doing it.
I'm a philosophy student, and in my epistemology class we recently discussed a paper that made the argument that "doing your own research" is usually a bad way of going about seeking out knowledge! It was really interesting and is related to this kind of thing.
Actually teaching people how to do research would probably help things. A lot of people seem to think getting false information from randos on Facebook or TikTok counts as “doing your own research” because they were never really taught how to actually do research.
@@EnigmaticLucas It feels like the same people who say "i did my own research" are the same people who would say "never trust anything you read on the internet", 20-30 years ago.
@@EnigmaticLucas you can certainly "do your own research" with academic journals and come to any disparate wacky conclusion you want by cherry picking that stuff too.
I just finished my doctorate degree in education. My program was a mix of instructor-directed and self-directed learning. We learned foundational theories but selected our own topics for projects. On a side note, I had a high school English teacher who pushed cultural literacy. It always stuck with me.
I think teaching general skills is more beneficial because you can always learn more facts-based knowledge over time. You used the example of attempting to analyze a speech from a Nepalese politician. You have your analysis skills, so you can just research the facts of Nepalese politics on your own using the analysis skills that you learned in school
point is that without a crap ton of background knowledge (that isn't necessarily all easily googleable) you simply can't do this. even reading cannot be done without mastery of a wide range of vocabulary.
@@kenlandon6130 But I think general skills are so much more widely applicable. When you go to college, you can learn the specifics of your future career. While you’re in elementary, middle, and high school, it’s important to learn skills that could apply regardless of your specialty
Im a preschool teacher, going to school to be an art teacher, coming from a family of teachers lol. From what I’ve always been doing and been taught to do is to teach kids as much factual knowledge about the world as I can, while harboring those general skills along the way. Obviously it’s very important to have those skills, but that’s something you learn over time. I always hated learning the same thing over and over, when it came to the rotating curriculum or whatever it is. Especially when it comes to common core and the reading and annotating of random passages just to get the general skills down but not actually learning much of anything. I also went to a Montessori high school, so it was kind of 50/50 with the self directed vs fact taught learning. But the teachers who were my favorite are the ones who taught us fact based knowledge along with giving us freedom or creativity with the projects. My favorite was my history teacher’s projects- they ranged from designing an apartment before permits in the 1800s industrial America, to recording a documentary about the Vietnam war. I might not have done well in school but he was the one who got me interested in learning with the interesting fact based teaching he would deliver in his presentations, and how he made it personal to us so that we were passionate about it. Those teachers were the ones who inspired me to keep teaching, and they inspire me to inspire my kids every day, even if they’re only 4 and 5 I try and teach them as much as they can know. Obviously skills like reading and writing and counting are important, but I try to teach them with science and history and culture along with the skills because facts are just as important. It’s imperative for them to absorb all they can in this critical moment of their lives.
"Common sense over book smarts" is a popular sentiment in the American South. Facts and knowledge aren't valued by them, which makes it more questionable why they latch onto people like Ben Shapiro who spout things like "facts don't care about your feelings." "Common sense" for these American Southerners often seems to boil down to tradition. Something that only matters because of their personal affinity towards it. Feelings. So we have a huge surplus of people who clearly value their gut feelings over facts and yet claim to believe the opposite. That's why we have so many obstinate dumb-fucks who talk as if they think they're playing 4D chess when really what they're saying is remedial at best or, more often, separate from reality entirely.
When I was in Grade 9, my History Teacher made us memorize all the CANADIAN PRIME MINISTERS in order, and with dates, from MacDonald to (then) Chretien. At that point we had no schooling on almost any of them, but I guess this was the start. I couldn't remember them all, so I wrote them down the inside of my forearm. But then, it seems, after writing them there, I did the test without cheating and it was fine. To this day I still remember them and the dates are a bit off every once in a while but I know about when they were, before and after whom. Anyway, this knowledge has really helped over the years in understanding all kinds of references and other historical mentions and even our money.
I can say I have a good grasp on some specific kinds of knowledge not just because of the facts that I've learned on school, but also because of the incentives I had to research about certain topics myself. As an example, Age of Empires II presented to me its versions of historical events, which were not 100% accurate, but were interesting enough for me to research: one of the campaigns was about the Cid Campeador, which led me to learn about Spanish history, and by knowing many aspects of it, all the facts I knew about it were of help when I was studying the Story of the Spanish Language in my university career. So I can see how the fact-learning proccess is, indeed, the way to go
Part of the issue is that we are in an era of specialization. For instances "Jack of all trades" used to be a compliment. Now it is seen more and more as derogatory, with the "Master of none" moniker being appended and emphasized. Author Robert A. Heinlein has a delightful quote, summarized with "Specialization is for insects" that I'll leave the reader look up.
Learning how to learn is one of the best skills to have. Be a lifelong learner. Find a mentor and people to help you learn. Thanks J.J for helping people to be a better learner.
One does have to have a predisposition for being a "lifelong learner." Most people think they've learned everything they need to know and actively resist learning new things to the point where they might allow someone to convince them they should overthrow the government, for example.
Our approach to education was developed by Comenius in the 17th century. His book “The Door of Languages Unlocked” was meant to be a children’s encyclopedia and act as a core basis of knowledge. Will still follow this approach to this day. We have not abandoned core skills but rather included other forms of literacy (eg media literacy, data literacy) that is now needed in light of new technology. I agree that we may be out of balance in some regards but I’m not so sure things are as bad as you are making them out to be. But this an excellent video for having a fruitful conversation about rebalancing education priorities.
I remember in elementary school, my 4th grade teacher had these sets of 5-6 books and each student was a assigned a set to read during silent reading time. I think doing this helped diversify what students read. Of course, I just read the books that I thought were the most interesting
I agree wholeheartedly JJ. As a 22 year old Spaniard studying on Germany you just put into words what i feel about the current evolution of the broadly speaking "western" education system. Thank you for these videos, there are few commentators in TH-cam like you.
I think having a base set of knowledge or skills on which to base the next thing can be as helpful as hurtful. If I know how to ski, it doesn't mean I can hop on a snowboard and handle any run, there are skills that may transfer, but there will also be learned behaviors that will need to be unlearned. Which brings me to an anecdote. People who hunt sometimes take up photography. When photographing animals, hunters often put the animal dead center of the frame, which is not the way a photographer would handle the situation.
When I was really young and learning how to spell, my parents made a system of learning around the house. Everything that could be touched, seen, or generally interacted with, had a sticky note on it with the name of that thing. So the pantry had the word “pantry” on it, doors had “door” windows had “window”, so on and so forth. I believe this to be the reason my grammar was so far ahead of my classmates theoughout my school career, and why I spoke much clearer than some students. This type of learning also helped me further by being able to read and write coherently because I wasn’t struggling to come up with or pronounce words. I am absolutely a supporter of fact based learning, as it is the reason I love history so much. By understanding basic history, it informs you of the world around you, and by increasing your historical literacy, you can start to understand why things are the way that they are. This is definitely one of my favorite videos of yours JJ, much love from the state with the best flag design🦀
There is so much knowledge to learn in the world that if you learn too much you're bound to forget about it so people shouldn't feel bad if they don't remember something
when an individual doesn't display passion for anything(i mean every last thing) they do, it makes your mind drift off and become disinterested & forgetful... when you incorporate passion in everything you do(every last mundane thing daily) you always remember!!!!! education is the key to progression!!!
On the contrary, the more things you know the easier it is to learn new things. Many facts may sound random but if you know a lot of context, it's easier to fit it into the framework and have a story behind the fact.
My schooling was especially anti-fact based but I was always drawn to that way of thinking. I think one reason-& I'm surprised this wasn't discussed-is the anti-truth sentiment overall. Many people were scared to declare too broadly or too forcefully that anything is so certain because of being conditioned to believe that A) it can lead to backlash & B) it might not be universally interpreted as so. We have so much cultural sensitivity etc. I'd say, as to lose a sense of certainty for anything
Certainty is dangerous. The Nazis were certain. Jacob Bronowski covered the contrast between knowledge and certainty in the Ascent of Man. Brilliant. Here is a clip from Episode 11: th-cam.com/video/ltjI3BXKBgY/w-d-xo.html
Great video! I'm an educator myself (I teach at the college-level) and I found this very interesting! I admit I am enchanted by the idea of "general skills" idea, but this video brings up a lot of good points. In my own experience, I enjoy learning things about lots of different topics, and your discussion about how you need facts to base knowledge on and how knowledge in one domain can help in another definitely resonates. I find that having a "web of facts" -- knowing facts but also how facts are related to each other -- helps a lot. The more you know about a particular topic, the easier it is to learn new things about it as you have more context to understand things.
The phenomenon of making learning "fun" always deeply troubled me, because learning can't ALWAYS be fun. When I was taught math it was as a slow, methodical process, much like exercise, even as teachers tried to liven it up, my parents focused on just doing it as work. When we got to advanced concepts I watched many of the kids around me collapse, I suspect, because they were made to think that learning was fun, and couldn't handle it when it turned out that there is no "fun" way to learn the Quadratic Formula.
There's an unfortunate cycle that our school systems are based around taking people who find learning a topic fun, sending them to a university where they are taught the subject they like by people who like that subject, and then sending those people back to schools to teach kids who are 0% interested in that topic. They don't get the disconnect. "But kids, reading is FUN! You are wrong not to like it." Instead of "listen some of you will hate this but that's life. Make best efforts and I will treat you fairly." Alot of teachers take it personally, and then the kids take that personal and give up.
I don't think necessarily that making learning "fun" should be a requirement, but it should definitely be interesting at least. I've learned about about topics I don't care about at all because the presenters made the topics interesting and held my attention. Unfortunately, 95% of my time in school was neither fun nor interesting so I spent a lot of time outside school learning on my own.
@@Zariel_999 Learning can be fun, but that is so completely subjective that it's basically unquantifiable. At best, try to make it engaging, make the student an actual participant in the learning and not a target or receptacle.
I agree with this. In an ideal world, parents would instill curiosity in their children and they would come to school ready to learn. Some teachers are more skilled than others, but acquiring information in and of itself should be compelling. Of course, we have to account for learning disabilities and similar things, but teachers today are in the unfortunate position of teaching to people who don't want to learn.
I feel like it really depends on the teacher and the courses you take. For example, last year I took a history course that focused heavily on dates and names. Today, I’m in a history course that involves much more general ideas about time periods in history. My teacher last year really emphasized knowing these dates and names (granted, because the course required it), while the teacher I have this year is very keen on the idea that big ideas and general skills are so much more important (and not only because the course requires it). I will say that my ability to discuss historical topics really expanded last year, while this year it has expanded in a way where I’m able to connect historical events better. I believe that this logic is applicable to many other subjects, not only history. 😁
Wow, this video puts so much of my own experience into perspective. I was a very opinionated teenager, but poorly educated. I did not attend university, but I learned to read, and have read literally hundreds of nonfiction books on all sorts of topics since graduating high school. My self-directed education was decidedly fact- based, and though I wrote no papers and did relatively little “research”, my view of the world, though I’m sure it has big holes is much better rounded than many of my peers.
I think a bit of both is important. The most important thing to teach is how to research and cite sources in my opinion, but knowing specific things is obviously important to grok the context of the world around us. When I was in school it was primarily fact-based learning, but the issue I had was that none of the teachers could explain why anything they were teaching was important. The facts are important to know, but spreading the enthusiasm and motivation to learn is what I found lacking most in my school experience.
Hi J.J.! I have been spending time learning about Vancouver's history and culture this week and thinking what a great resource your channel has been for "Canada Stuff" :) Then I think I saw you walking down Granville in DT wearing a plaid jacket a few days ago, which was super cool. Thanks for your great content!
Watched this when it came out and have been thinking about it since. I’ve definitely been on the “F memorization and fun facts” bandwagon for a long time; studied physics in college to get away from it. However, the more I reflect, the more I think that my disdain for “just” learning facts, perhaps as well as my preference for only learning “principles” and “skills” were unfounded. Mainly I think that I was never actually taught skills in the first place. Rather, they were mentioned to me, but in practice, “knowing” the skill in the sense of being able to explain it was almost always entirely different than integrating it into my behavior and intuition. Instead I think skills “bubble up” from learning very many discrete things. Patterns emerge between them and after a while you just sort of go, “oh, this is like all those other things,” and it sticks with you. Being told “those things are all alike” doesn’t stick quite as well, but is certainly easier to remember in the sense of being able to explain it, which is perhaps now totally overvalued.
My history class has been fact based, English has been skill based- but there’s been a big shift in two years. We went from reading and talking about books in English and doing mock “Socratic seminars” to learning about rhetoric, sentence structure, tone, etc They are technically still teaching us skills in terms of identifying these things and writing about them and such, but we’re also learning WHAT THEY ARE. It is a general knowledge that I’ve found very helpful to understand writing in general.
I'm a senior undergrad in computer science and for my first year, there was a lot of general stuff they taught, and some of our assignments were self directed in that we could make our own programming projects. Especially since I had been programming with my robotics club since high school, I breezed through those classes, but I don't think i really improved as a developer. Since taking harder classes about design patterns, algorithms/theory, and hardware/OS details, I think a lot of the improvements in my work has come from drawing from that specific knowledge. In terms of critical thinking, I don't feel very different when programming than I did when I was in high school, except that I can recall some things that I learned in class. During my internship this summer, I felt like I wrote some of my best code specifically using a design pattern I had learned from the previous semester.
You've made me understand one of the most consistently annoying things I experience as an American living in the UK. I regularly hear otherwise-intelligent journalists explain British politics to an American audience, and consistently misinterpret the story. IMO, the more prestigious the media, the worse the errors. The New York Times is perhaps the worst! I think because these are smart people who understand American politics well, they think they understand the political systems of other countries. It also happens the other way round, where brilliant British journalists have misinformed takes on US politics, but not as often.
@@qwertyTRiG I can totally imagine. Most British people know as much about Irish politics as Americans know about Canadian politics (hardly anything). What really grates me though is American political journalists holding fourth on British politics as if they're experts, while making really basic errors. It's incredibly arrogant, but especially annoying as the journalists are oblivious to their ignorance.
quick question: what is your opinion about the existence of evolution (asking because i am always suspicious about homeschoolers when it comes to that)
THANK YOU. I am a teacher and this is soooo true. Teachers have been indoctrinated into horrible ways of teaching that hurt poor students that most. I will be buying this book. Thank you for putting it on my radar.
I could never get behind why people hated History when in school. It always helped to understand the natural progression of things. For example, simply learning the fact that a country was conquered and oppressed, you knew that an uprising was bound to happen. Critical thinking does arise purely from facts as you and ED Hirsch have pointed out in this award-winning video!
It has a lot to do with how it's taught. I was blessed with good history teachers who did a good job mixing fact-based and skill-based learning, but my friends who've had boring ones hate the subject.
Even within a specific subject like physics, it's really hard to strike the balance between general physics skills (of being able to conceptualise stuff and being able to make smart assumptions about the setup of the problem at hand) and knowing useful knowledge (like the parallel axis theorem, the moments of inertia of particular shapes and the Taylor series).
I think I somewhat agree with this: I am in the commercial education space (corporate training) and I have always thought of General Skills as the "goal" (e.g. developing a new hire into someone who can independently help clients), while Fact-Based Knowledge form a common substrate for common conversation and communication.
interesting point about your usian bolt soccer analogy. He played soccer for a season with my local team! The central coast mariners in the A-League. He was very underwhelming.
Ten years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher made us memorize The Road Not Taken by Frost and we had to write out the entire poem from memory for a test. While it was hard work and somewhat frustrating, it was honestly refreshing looking back as I still know that classic poem from heart which is more than can be said about most of the books we “read” in school.
I teach Bible college courses, and to my student's chagrin I am a huge proponent of "mere facts" in learning. I hope that I emphasize the adapting of these facts into daily practice and pragmatic reasoning well enough. I whole-heartedly agree that you can't be truly balanced in your thinking unless you've heard a multiplicity of basic facts around the subject and can connect-the-dots of a broad base of knowledge from various input and arena. Great theory! Great discussion. This also explains how I have self-directedly, ironically, engaged with the world most of my life, choosing to be a learner and gatherer of facts and information. Thanks JJ.
I'm a senior in high school, I think I've had a fairly equal mix of those 2 approaches to educations, and I think that they probably both have *some* merit. I personally would be in favor of learning more fact based things if it weren't for how 1, what is considered important to know seems to be changing quite a lot and very rapidly, the books I read in my freshman year are now not at all the type of books they want freshmen reading, etc, and 2, my single biggest issue with the schooling system is that it's not engaging enough. I adore learning, but I can only really learn if I actually enjoy it, which comes almost entirely down to the way information is communicated. I can spend all day watching educational youtube videos made to be entertaining while still teaching as much or more than normal teaching, but can't focus in class for more than like 5 minutes
@@treyshaffer You need some facts but once you have those you can just go waaay into analyzing media/literature from that era without explicitly dropping in any new hard facts.
I was homeschooled and there was a huge emphasis among all long term homeschoolers i knew growing up on the facts. It definately served me well, and i would take it any day over an explicitly skills based approach. Besides, my mom and dad were extrordinarily smart and well versed people in a variety of topics, i couldn't have asked for better tutors.
I think a good example of people critically looking at something without any background knowledge being dangerous is the idea of sending artifacts from the royal British museum to their original country, you’ll have people saying items need to be returned to Egypt or China without having any background knowledge of the politics or safety of those countries (Ex: 2011 Cairo museum looting, Mao Zedong and the destruction of all of Chinese history) they will just say the artifacts are stolen.
As others have noted, part of the "war on facts" was a rightful critique of the laziest fact-based "memorize xyz, names and dates, etc", rather than the more difficult discussion around the facts, or names and why they were important at that time (screw the dates). I was in primary school when the transition was taking place and got to see the gamut. From "memorize these facts, then lazily test multiple-choice style" (which eschews relevance, implications, or practical interpretations of "general knowledge skills"); to well synthesized blends of base knowledge and thought skills; to mindless general skills dribble (complete with "pick your own book for the class" experimentation). As with most life-lessons, the combination (base knowledge with practical synthesis) seems the best course (and the hardest).
As a university (music theory) teacher this is very interesting. As someone has already said in the comments, I think a lot of the rationale for teaching "general skills" was a reaction against poor pedagogy, when students were often only expected to memorize "mere facts" without putting them into cultural context, discussing what they mean, or thinking about them broadly in relation to other facts. I think what Hirsch and you are pointing to is maybe most teachers have gone too far in the other direction now. I think students need to be taught lots of facts, but also general skills like reading, writing, and "critical thinking" (contextualizing and discussing things as you explained you can do with your knowledge of Canadian politics). In my own teaching I try to teach the "facts" (which are actually widely-held theories about how music works and can be represented) and do lots of simple drill exercises so students get comfortable with the basics of our Western musical system, but then also zoom out and show them how to critically think about music and how we're learning about it. Achieving a good balance is easier said than done. Keep up the good work J.J.!
This is why Ms. Frizzle was the best teacher, and The Magic School Bus was a balanced mix of these. You learned facts, but in their context. My favorite teacher in younger grades did things like coming in to class with full bubonic plague makeup when learning about The Plague, or a "final exam" that was basically The Amazing Race (the show of the time!) with challenges applying everything we learned that semester. We learned a lot of facts, and how to think critically in the process. Shout out to all the wonderful teachers out there!
You don't want them talk critical thinking that's why they all learn critical race Theory even though it wasn't taught in school. Did you sincerely think that kids haven't been using critical thinking skills and that's why they agree with human rights for lgbtq+ people and Indigenous people and people of color and black people.. did you guys seriously not know that kids are already practicing critical thinking skills that's why they're getting into drag and that's why they're quitting school and that's why they don't give a shit about playing the corrupt politics game. You sincerely think that they're learning critical race theory in school that's fucking Beyond hilarious they're not learning that in school they choose to learn that themselves online
@JamesMacPherson theoretically uninterested in performing the same mistakes as the past including white hegemony you're all just extremely white supremacist and don't even realize it so you're mad at kids because they understand critical race Theory it's laughable that you guys are this prejudiced against kids
@@Tazallax JJ McCullough said that English wasn't used to oppress indigenous people but that's culturally contextually incorrect because if we didn't speak English in residential schools we were beaten raped and sometimes killed. Listening to JJ McCullough about history is like listening to a racist teach you how to be racist.
I have to commend you for the fact that your channel is probably the only one in my feed that will present me with a title and thumbnail I generally disagree with but still get me to watch the whole thing, and I think you make a really strong point for fact-based learning.
I wonder in this case if "general skills" doesn't necessarily map onto "general intelligence" but perhaps more onto methodology. It's true I couldn't apply critical thinking skills to Nepalese politics without knowing any facts about Nepal, but I can testify to having learned skills like how to iterate and improve upon a first draft of "finished" work, or how to provide creative feedback, that rely more on applying certain methods than knowing specific information. More challenging, though, is how to effectively test for knowledge that will be retained in long term memory, and more importantly, how as a society to decide which facts are taught.
I think some of your content is on the right track with that, considering some of the sketches you do in your videos.
Hey man, i agree with ya on this, I wholly disagree with the thumbnail and so far the argument isnt convincing me as much as I thought it would. I say this with my own anecdote about mathematics, my way of mathematics was very different than that of my peers, I sought to actually understand the stuff I was given, took me s ome time to notice the equal sign really meant EQUAL and thus you could do shite to both sides but just understanding that brought me far far ahead of my peers. Or perhaps multiplication where I skipped out on memorisation and naturally started remembering them, while it rendered me slower in calculations, it also demonstrated to my head what multiplication means. Or even another anecdote I have on quadratic equations which immediately opened up to me(except for cometing the square, still looks like magic to me) once I noticed the whole x thing=y=0, understood fully the gravity of factorisation and the graph, in fact quadratic equations helped me understand the cartesian graph.
@@Cecilia-ky3uw I was exactly like you and I was certainly ahead of my peers bc of that - in physics I never bothered to memorize formulas, I just tried to understand what was the principle at play and would often derivate the formula from simpler, more fundamental ones - and when I realized you could use the units to figure out the formula, what I later discovered is called dimensional analysis, then it all became even simpler.
I think what I'm trying to say with this is that although I agree with OP that I generally disagree with the thumnail and he presents a... interesting case, I do think he is basically saying that the solution to the problem caused by our last solution to the educational system is simply to go back to how things were - but there's a reason we abandoned that.
Like you somewhat implied I think of the main things is actually understanding and being able to play with the form and the ideas and still be able to work with that. So neither a purely "factual" nor a purely "skill-based" teaching method make that much sense bc it is all about context - learning is a dynamic process and we should focus less on how to make a kid learn everything they need on school and more about how to allow us, as a society, to be ever able to recontextuallize things, use prior knowledge AND skills to come to a better understanding while still having the practical knowledge of how to deal with it all.
We should teach them "basic knowledge" but also give them the tools to "critically analyze" it, or, in other words, play with it and know inside and out, know its limitations, its pitifalls, how one might improve upon it and then repeat the process, approaching the "same" things but with a more nuanced and more detailed manner, giving them the tools (but also the resources) to apply that to acquire and intutively actually understand new knowledge, not only "knowing" but comprehending it, and being able to go beyond what is in the page.
@@hcxpl1 oh yeah I ddid learn to do what you call dimensional analysis and while I still know nothing about how to imagine things like energy or anything multiplied by kilogram, although I didn't use dimensional analysis quite as much and stuck to the formulas because while the simpler questions are dimenesional analysisable, the harder ones require formulas and logic and I wasn't not particularly good at derivating formulas.
@@hcxpl1
I think the war on fact-based knowledge comes from a widespread hatred of memorization. If you learn a set of facts in school, a normal student will memorize them temporarily for a test, and then purge them thereafter to prepare for the following exam. Learning skills is easier to retain over a long period of time
I think there is definitely truth to that.
@@JJMcCullough That does bring up another important discussion though, and that is the way that those discrete facts are taught, which is usually rote memorization. I recommend anyone to read "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer if you want to read about some alternative systems people have used :)
Definitely. I was taught fact-based knowledge and what bothered me in history textbooks is that facts didn't really form a good story. Just a bunch of spotlights on a timeline lazily tied together. Maybe it would take more time, but I would care more if it was more personal, so that I would unrestand the motivation of not only each historical person, but also what day to day life of a regular person was like. What worried them, what were they thinking? Basically criterias of a good movie also apply to a history book lol.
Similar thing with math, you spend more time memorizing formulas to solve problems, not why and how these formulas were derived. Then you move on to learn new formulas to solve different kind of problems without forming deeper knowledge of how the math works, you're just a human calculator.
There's little continuity in a lot of subjects taught on schools.
You don't necessarily forget the facts. I did European history from 1848 to 1945 for my secondary school exams at 18. I went to Hungary on holiday last week and immediately know who Kossuth was and why he was important in their history. That really improved my understanding of what was in front of me
Because most of the time people teach facts without context - Sure Napoleon write the civil code, but without explaining how strongly it changed the relationship between governments and citizens this code influences all of Europe (and far beyond) to this day this fact is just as useless as amount HP of Creeper in Minecraft.
History Teacher here, long time watcher, first time commenter - I am actually BLOWN AWAY. I have always been frustrated by how much high school kids struggle to do research, and (in what I always thought was me being lazy) resort to telling stories and facts of what happened - and the kids seem to prefer that, and I sure like to think that they know more at the end. I think this theory might be what I've been trending into all this time. I need to do a ton more research into this...using my background knowledge to explore successfully!
New high school teacher here. I’m becoming more convinced that our role as educators is to introduce kids to things so they know they exist and that will let them explore the world as adults better. If at 25 they can think: hey! That reminds me of something Ms. L said 10 years ago, let me look into it! That means that at least they know that something is a possibility . Yes, they also have to know how to search for the answers, but where to start when you have never heard that something is a possibility? I presently teach biology, I’m not expecting them to understand everything, I just want them to know the terms so when something happens to them or someone near them they vaguely know what the doctors are talking about and what kind of questions to ask. Or when I explain evolution. I know they won’t necessarily get it, but they know that it comes from a transcription error in your DNA that makes the difference between individual and species. If I don’t introduce the concept to them and hope they know how to research it, how can I ensure something so important isn’t missed?
My best grades were from a history class. the teacher made everything we were learning a story that we could remember, the facts and figures came with them. It almost impossible for me to remember knowledge for tests that hasnt grounded itself in my head in some of format than a list of numbers.
History teacher here as well, completely agree! I find research skills are lacking in most students (especially since Google), but telling stories seems to convey a lot more and you can see the understanding 'click' a lot quicker!
Story telling was the method of teaching history my grade school had and I absolutely loved it! I wasn't discouraged by the fact that i absolutely sucked at reading so I was able to focus on the actual lesson and take interest in it. The issue that I see is that story telling might have more of a bias built into it that would greatly impact what the students take away from the lessons. This obviously isn't limited to a story telling based lesson but at least with textbooks school boards can more effectively judge the "degree of accuracy/bias" a lesson has.
History teacher here as well. I agree with you. I personally hate when colleagues, administrators want us to move away from fact teaching and move towards researching. The kids struggle a lot. Yes, like this video says, if they don’t have the facts to make that research it going to be very difficult. I also teach the facts as a story and the students seem to enjoy that part of class the most. I do have them work in research here and there but once they have all the facts about a specific topic
The main problem with facts-based learning is that most teachers are terrible at conveying it in an engaging and entertaining way. It was only after youtube that I realized how cool subjects like social studies really are.
Very much this. Motivation is key. We can't expect most kids to have an internal motivation to learn a lot of facts and information, however valuable. I'd argue that Star Wars kid will benefit more from reading 100 Star Wars books than he will from being forced to read one history book he has no interest in.
Most teachers are terrible at conveying general skills in an engaging and entertaining way
Very few people can write good essays
@@ldsviking I was going to say this, too. He may not gain any actual knowledge about facts from those books, but he will get better and faster at reading in general. I read fantasy books a lot during my school years, and by high school, I was one of the fastest readers in the entire class. They leaned on me hard during popcorn reading XD
The problem can also be described as students expecting to be entertained 🤷♀️
You need both. I personally had a general knowledge based education, and only actively started to remember facts from school later on, in university. But I learned facts by myself by reading books, magazines, newspapers and later internet articles. But one thing I noticed while being an exchange student in a fact based education system was that we had no time to reflect or discuss what we have learned, which really felt frustrating to me as I felt the knowledge never had a chance to develop or take root. It was literally just remembering what some guy said, instead of coming to some deeper insights that I need some discussion with others to reach. But you are right that its pointless to discuss a topic without any facts to base the discussion on, and only learning to question things because you do not yourself know about them is well... not conducive to moving the discussion forward.
Educational systems are always criticized for not doing enough though. Might just be a matter of time and resources like most things.
That sounds most plausible to me.
I feel like a good middle ground between the two concepts is letting kids independently research pre-assigned topics in the form of Presentations and group projects
I think that's not a bad compromise. One of the most memorable projects I did in grade school was a report on the Wright Brothers, which I chose from a list of pre-approved inventors.
@@JJMcCullough this reminds me of a presentation project I did in highschool about the Gallipoli campaign. It was probably the only memorable exercise in learning I have from highschool level humanities. I remember being consistently frustrated with how unchallenging and superficial classes on history, politics, or English classes were. I think I could nearly recite that presentation by memory now, while I’d really struggle to remember any other assignment I did in school.
If only we handled every day situations as such, say worldwide " healthcare" 2020,2021,2022, and I posit 2023 onwards....
The problem with group projects is 1 or 2 people end up doing all the work. The rest are just told what to do so they can all succeed together.
@@JJMcCullough Stuff like that also seems to me to leave a far better memory mark so to say. We had a project to do about legal drugs, such as coffein and diffrences between it in coffee to tea. But my pick was a report on nutmeg and I remember the stuff I read about it being used as a drug to this day whenever I pick up the spice.
I actually had a similar conversation with my teacher, as he would frequently make references to things my class didn't know, like TV shows or other media. He proposed a "American Pop Culture" or "Cultural Literacy" class where we would get that background and learn about influential media. The class I have with him is supposed to be about graphic design, but we have great conversations and debate that engage the class more than any other class I take since he lets us have long conversations and debates about current topics other teachers would cut off to "get back to the lesson". I feel I've learned a lot more about society and things I will use later in life in that class than my other classes which are extremely focused on specific skills.
I'm 57 years old. I recently set myself the task of doing something I'd never done in school (my education stretched from 1970 to the mid 80s). I decided to memorise all the monarchs of England and their dates. I then read about a variety of topics of English history and discovered that simply having the names and dates of the kings and queens allowed me to remember a whole lot more of the new stuff I was learning and to understand much more the context and the motives of the people involved. "I wish I'd been taught better!" I could cry, but the reality is 13-year old me would never have stuck to doing that memorisation. But I do find that those facts form a framework (or I like to think, a set of pigeonholes) that helps put new knowledge in place.
I'm impressed with Hirsch and his still producing thoughtful stuff at the age of 92! Something for us all to aspire to even if we don't agree with him.
The last bit is important imo.
I hear teenagers parrot older people all the time saying “i wish they taught me more life skills and less stuff that didn’t matter”….but the issue is that everything they claim to want to know is either required learning or is available as an elective….and it has been there since like the 1970s and exists in basically the same form….we were all just too busy talking.
If you have memorized the English monarchs you're going to LOVE the English Monarchs song by Horrible Histories (please search for it PLEASE).
@JamesMacPherson learning the times table opened up the door to many multiplication formulas for various areas of shapes and that led to a lot more knowledge about how multiplication works fundamentally. I don't think I would have gotten this far if I didn't have the base of memorized facts that I later understood fundamentally.
Loved your video, as always JJ. I'm a Math and Physics teacher (college level) and we have been pressured to embraced General Skills (re branded as Outcome-Based Education) and I remember one time with my colleges we were trying to do the changes to our courses that needed to be done to achieve this new standards and a lot of topics of Basic Physics had to be remove from the course because they were to fact oriented. The excuse given by our bosses was "if the student reached the outcome of self-learn they would be able to learn the missing topics" but of course, if there are no external pressure to learn something the former students will never learn all that topics. It's really frustrating for me, when I'm conducting a test, that my students ask me for the electrical charge of the proton (for example) that we literally use in every problem solved in class or in the homework.
Even within a specific subject like physics, it's really hard to strike the balance between general physics skills (of being able to conceptualise stuff and being able to make smart assumptions about the setup of the problem at hand) and knowing useful knowledge (like the parallel axis theorem, the moments of inertia of particular shapes and the Taylor series) and many schools and universities will prioritise different these things to different extents. I once had a physics teacher whose tendency to expect us to remember word for word dictionary definitions of things was infuriating, but the ability to mull over phrases like "potential difference is energy transferred per unit charge, energy transferred per unit charge" allowed me to finally get my head around what were initially very abstract concepts such as p.d.
I've watched too many J.J videos to the point whilst I'm writing in school or exams I hear his voice reading out what I've written lmao
I’m a first year social studies teacher. I’ve been very frustrated with the formulaic approach to topics such as history, literature, civics, etc… I have been trying to put my finger on the exact issue that I’ve had with this approach, and I think that you’ve hit on it. You can’t learn general skills without first having something to map them onto. You learn general skills during the pursuit of specific skills.
I hope your textbook is written in time and not in themes. I used to teach social studies, the themes made students think the themes occured at the same time.
@@georgehancock2307 woah let's teach history out of order, what a great idea
Scrambled history
@@key37raminus people that often design these ideas are failed teachers....negative selection
Coming from a high school (2000-2004) that had a hard focus on fact-based rote knowledge (thanks to 'no child left behind'), I found things a little more challenging at university because there wasn't a foundation of "this is how you get knowledge and contextualize it" so much as "here is the knowledge you are required to have". I distinctly remember an 11th grade honors American history class being literal a list of facts without context or any meaningful links. It was pub trivia history and an astonishing amount of it was the "approved and sanitized" version at that. The general skills approach did enable 2 generations of "I did my research" Facebook commenters, but knowing the 27 nicknames for Andrew Jackson and the names of Columbus's ships did even less for the culture at large.
Most high school classes are taught by incompetents. Especially history.
History in high school is taught as a 'survey': you get the high points and ignore the meaning. Who cares about the date of the Battle of Vicksburg?
Context makes it meaningful.
Grant ground out the Vicksburg campaign because he had to. Sherman advised Grant to fall back to Memphis to resupply and regroup. Grant told him that if they retreated from Vicksburg, the war was lost. The opposition in Congress would force negotiations with Jeff Davis and end the war. The Union would be broken. He was right.
Jeff Davis and his cabinet knew the significance of Vicksburg. Judah Benjamin, Secretary of State in 1863 (he had been Secretary of War before that) wanted to send part of the Army of Northern Virginia to Mississippi to relieve Vicksburg. R E Lee opposed that. (I know many admire Lee. I say, "Lee lost." Lee fought for Virginia, not for the CSA.) Instead, Lee proposed to invade the North to draw Union troops away from Vicksburg. And so we got the Battle of Gettysburg, 1-3 July 1863.
And Vicksburg surrendered to Grant 4 July 1863.
Now that you know the context, it is easy to remember the dates. They mean something to you now. They are related.
🧢🧢🧢
In my school experience, the teachers guided us through general skills in elementary (with the occasional basic knowledge), then half general skills half fact in middle school, before being purely fact-based in high school. I feel like that worked well, as most students were able to use the skills they spent years developing to achieve a lot more. Any time a teacher made a mistake, you’d see ten people calling them out on it, since they were all following along and connecting it to the things they were previously taught.
The downside to this is that there are some people who just check out in elementary and don’t bother trying because they see a strict teacher forcing them to read diary of a wimpy kid or something like that and think “this is stupid, why should I care about school when the teachers don’t even care enough to teach us”. It becomes really evident later on who those people are as a quarter of the students (the ones who checked out early) are struggling to get 50s, while everyone else is in the 80s and 90s. No middleground.
Perfectly said. I'm am educator and I graduated in 07 through that same failed policy. JJ is talking about education in America without addressing how VASTLY different the education systems are between US and Canada (I have family in Quebec and Trinidad, their system is completely different from what I went through). Plus the education system differs VASTLY from state to state in the US. I'm in NY and we are known for having prettu high standards. Like a NY teaching liscnece will transfer over to most states for lack of better words. Conversely, in the South, the banned books list is so long because they are trying to alternative facts slavery away.
@@Violexie-wb7op "in the South, the banned books list is so long because they are trying to alternative facts slavery away."
Where in the blue bloody hell did you get that, damnyankee?
I was educated in Texas all the way to a doctorate. There was never any attempt to say slavery did not happen.
You know what I think? (That was a rhetorical question. Of course you don't know what I think. You are an 'educator' in NY so evidently your ideas about the South come from Uncle Tom's Cabin.) I think you are damned near totally ignorant of the South and the way Southerns think. But you have no notion of how blindingly ignorant you are, so you make unsubstantiated statements about Southerners.
That's called prejudice. You are prejudiced.
A German language professor once told us, "You should know enough by the time you graduate to know you don't know much." You should take a lesson from that. If you can.
I'm a proponent of learning "general skills" in school. I think the goal is supposed to apply things like critical thinking *in context* - that is, with knowledge. On the one end, facts with no critical thinking like memorizing dates, etc, (such as in history classes), are often forgotten and a wasted effort. On the other, critical thinking with no context can only open yourself to learning, but not actually learning. The end goal is always to acquire (correct) facts. Learning about biases of journals, etc, is actually an argument *for* general skills. Epistemological, critical thinking is the only sound way to acquire new knowledge. I'm not against learning facts in school though. I think I'd just rather tip the scales more than it currently stands.
Here's my high-school student perspective, I think a mixture of both is best but it depends on the class being taught. General skills learning definitely has its place in elementary school for younger childen, so that they stay engaged with the material and learn to love learning and then be more enthusiastic with their schooling and may retain more information in school about direct facts as they get older and start middle and high-school which could then lead to career opportunities through college. I think one thing school does need to do better at least here in the US is prepare kids for real life troubles, because most careers aren't academically related. This is an opinion and like any it has its flaws so feel free to message me and we can discuss it.
This a a classic "yes, AND" situation. Yes, we need to educate "what you need to know" AND we need to have people think critically about what they are learning and why.
Yeah I don't understand why we can't have both skills-based and fact-based education. Both have merits
@@precariousworlds3029 there isn’t time. Curricula need to be highly condensed and efficient, you can’t just teach everything, especially when we’re talking about two entirely separate philosophies/approaches. We’re forced to decide which has more merit, and the evidence really points to the common body of facts an adult is expected to know rather than nebulous skills that we don’t really know how to teach or evaluate, and that most people learn regardless
It seems like the STEM model of learning has invaded the realm of humanities. When I learn a math concept, I’m learning how to execute any math problem placed before me, not a set of facts about those math concepts. Now, instead of learning about specific facts in history or specific books in English, we learn how to analyze any historical document or any book. I think this is probably the origin of skills-based teaching
That’s a good insight. There was definitely a time when humanities became unfashionable because they were not scientific enough, so maybe we have overcompensated.
You've got a point. The issue is that learning outside of school at the time was considered normal. You went and worked or read or was read to or played with friends and heard stories. Nowadays people get out of school, find a braincrapping job that they take forever and when to go back home they watch TV or another blockbuster.
@@JJMcCullough Is it overcompensation though? I understand that from a Canadian perspective, what I am saying might not make sense, but take AP classes for example. In AP history classes, not only do you learn facts and ideas, but you also learn how to learn and analyze documents. This makes the kids who take AP History courses 10x better at learning history in general then kids who do not (using kids in APUSH who took AP Euro in 10th vs world history). Learning to learn is very helpful, since you can't force kids to WANT to learn (which is necessary for fact based learning)
also nvm I see Canada also has APs.
@@jeanc1622 I don't know if this is true. Within living memory, performative stupidity or anti-intellectualism was a real thing. One reason why Jews were not popular In early to mid-20th century universities in the United States is because Jews tended to take the educational mission seriously rather than seeing places like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton as elaborate finishing schools of the Oxbridge tradition. If anything performative stupidity is no longer seen as valid. The concept of the Gentleman Cs is gone even if most people at elite universities aren't necessarily that intellectually curious, they have to at least look like they are into scholarship.
As a kid who read nothing but star wars and similar books... You wouldn't have gotten me to read something else because I wouldn't have been interested. Letting me pick what books I wanted to pick actually got me reading a lot more than I would have otherwise, and I think it did make me better at reading, both through practice and through expanding my vocabulary.
I think JJ is also really underestimating the amount of historical and cultural references that get packed into these books. They're usually require much more our of their readers than someone who had never picked one up would expect.
As someone who learned more "facts and figures" in school, I do think we should all have a base set of knowledge by the time we graduate high school. I almost became a teacher and come from a family of teachers. Their biggest complaint over the years has been the struggle to be consistent with the curriculum and the approach to teaching which seemingly changes with every new Secretary of Education and/or state education officials in the US. "General skills", including critical thinking can be implicitly taught without having to make them the curriculum itself. I believe you can learn to be a critical thinker via classroom discussions and being challenged to read materials and learn facts you may not particularly like. Thanks, JJ.👍😋
I agree, we should have both "general skills" & factual knowledge.
I dislike the idea of a base set of knowledge, because individual uniqueness in skill and knowledge is a large part of the advancement of society. Having everybody think the same and know the same things is great for the unification of a society, but it's unhealthy for the long-term development of the society.
@@bro748 Right, diversity of knowledge is good, but the main issue seems to be that, left to their own devices, individuals on average don't actively seek out new knowledge bases in different and uncomfortable domains. Individuals naturally prefer to stay comfortable, and if they can take smaller steps from their current place into nearby topics, they will. Every individual benefits from a diverse knowledge base stemming from different topics and domains that enables them to be actively, productively critical of more topics (and be aware of how knowledge makes them productively critical), more than just that society benefits from a diverse knowledge base stemming from different individuals.
There seems to be some potential in the idea that the ability to challenge, change, and improve the base set of knowledge goes up, the more people have that base set of knowledge to question in the first place.
This was the subject of my final thesis project in college, focused specifically on “general skills” in math/problem solving and rote learning. There was no doubt in my student surveying that general skills learning turned out less understanding overall because it didn’t allow the incremental building of knowledge. Learning the rules on a rote basis (ie, memorizing the times table) allowed students to free their minds of the smaller calculations and focus on the more complex ideas that math can illustrate.
I'd wager a general "how to learn and think" explanation for kids isn't a bad thing to do every once in awhile, but once I got into university I realized the only difference from a high level class to a low level class was the number of prerequisite facts you are supposed to remember. This has been the case for pretty much every class I've taken, from language to science to maths.
This is something I also found. I believe anyone can learn anything just by following the coursework and taking enough time. College programs are designed to slowly introduce you to a complex topic. I never found any level course substantially more difficult than the previous ones.
Yeah, I had trouble learning calculus in high school, likely because they sped us through Algebra 1 at double or triple the normal speed.
Damn, you guys are either geniuses or the rest are imbeciles. If you think Newtonian physics isn't easier than Quantum physics then I don't know what to say.
facts just alone mean nothing though if you can not understand the processes that affirm them. skills are the application of facts, gardening for example or cooking, you can not detach the two, if you learn a skill you also have to learn facts relating to it, it does not work the other way, you can learn facts without skills.
Your take on those videos where athletes cross over to other sports is the absolute opposite of mine. I'm always amazed at how quickly an athlete picks up things from another field, and is able to make some of those basic movements that would take an inexperienced person weeks or month of practice to learn.
I think it's a half-empty half-full type of thing. There is significant overlap in the skills required by different sports, but at the same time expertise in one sport doesn't translate to expertise in another sport
Like @EriniusT alluded to - I think a top 1% baseball player could get to top 50% football player much more quickly than an average non-athletic person. But getting to top 1% level would be more comparable levels of effort between them
I believe that the point here is that it is incorrect to assume that a good pro athlete in one specific sport will be automatically better than a regular person. Yes, there is an overlap, but a regular person that has had a good level of experience playing soccer, for example, will probably play better than a pro athlete that has not played soccer, even though they are a pro athlete in another area.
Thats the argument that facts are more useful than general skills. The person with more facts/experience in an area/subject will do better than someone with general skills, but little experience/facts.
Consider it this way, if you're picking people for a basket ball game you'd take a Gold Medal Olympic sprinter over some guy, but would you take an Olympic sprinter over an obscure NBA player?
I watched the gymnast vs parkour videos because I was curious about them, and there was some stuff in parkour the gymnasts did better and vice versa. Also even though the parkour guy in the clip looks awkward on the gymnast bars, he can still perform on them much better than the average person. That being said I don't think any of this actually goes against JJ's premise, since the domains of parkour and gymnastics do have so much overlap. It just failed to serve his point in the way he was using it.
My first instinct, coming from a STEM backgroundn was to recoil in horror at the topic title. Upon watching the video, I find I'm in a much more nuanced position. I went to high school two decades ago, where there was a transition from fact-based knowledge to skill-based, and I thought back to a formative experience I had. I had an excellent history teacher in high school. He was engaging, knowledgeable, and engendered a fascination with history. Even the weaker students in my class gained a really deep understanding of the course of events in the 20th century, with a deeper understanding of cultural factors and motivations behind such topics as the World Wars. One day we had a substitute who was more-old school (though at least 15 years younger) than our teacher, and was appalled we didn't know dates and names of important battles in WWII. When the teacher came back the next day and worried keeners asked him about it he said "if we understood war deeply, we'd have the skills to determine if a quick google search for the date of D-Day was giving accurate information". That very much solidified "skills-based learning" as a positive thing in my mind.
As I'm older now, I do think we may have gone a little too far from "core competency". Working in a pharmacy, the general public largely has deficits in medical literacy. "does this bottle of vitamin C contain any chemicals in it? If so, can you recommend me one that doesn't?" is a type of question I deal with regularly, and it's difficult because the asker doesn't even have the vocabulary to discuss why that's a meaningless question. The other topic is inflation. I often hear people bemoan "why is that union protesting over a 1% raise? I haven't had a raise in 5 years", and it's frustrating that they're making decisions about their life lacking the knowledge that in inflation-adjusted dollars their wages have shrunk by 16%.
So I guess on this topic I'm a boring centrist.
On the dates thing, I feel like there's some facts that are more useful than others. Like, knowing the rough course of events during WWII and about what time which battles were fought is probably more helpful than very specific dates for battles. After all, the exact date doesn't matter that much and is harder to remember than the fact that it was during winter.
@@cameron7374 and arguably that's only if you're specifically studying WW2 history.
I'm realizing that I'm considering what should be common knowledge and why should it be. It's good to know the rough time frame of major operations but why would that matter to the average person if they just needed to know what was going on in the 1940s.
In our school exams rather than exact dates we had to order events chronologically. I think that makes more sense than remembering on so and so date "oh the battle of Waterloo was 200 years ago
@@DaLatinKnight WWII is definitely the main history thing to know about in at least some detail. ("This thing was awful, here's how awful it was and what / why it happened. Let's not do that again.")
@@cameron7374 It's nice to think that people would learn about the details of WW2 with the intent of preventing the travesties from happening again. But there's another side to this coin. Some do read up on the history in detail for the explicit purpose of doing it again, but not repeating the errors made by the people committing those travesties and ensuring a future attempt is successful. Just pointing out that the teaching of history doesn't always have the desired outcome.
I'm from the U.S. Midwest. Early in my schooling, my experience was also facts based; however, I noticed the focus of school changed as I grew older. Not just in my grade, but in general. My younger siblings had a different experience in the same grades. By the time I was in high school, only about 50% of schooling was facts based. I bet there is a strong correlation between the experience people had in school and their age/generation.
We definitely did a fact-based approach at my school in the Western US. My only real complaint is that I felt like there were some important gaps in what I was taught with regard to certain subjects. There was definitely an air of American exceptionalism and a glossing over certain inconvenient facts while focusing on others. I think a fact based approach works so long as you put things in their proper context.
We weren't taught American history; we were taught American mythology with a healthy dose of corporate propaganda to wash it down.
Yes I’m sure if you’re studying American history it will focus on the history of America and manifest destiny, not sure how that has anything to do with modern American exceptionalism, the same can be said for learning the history of any place.
I’m in the US Naval Nuclear program and it just clicked for me that this is the primary way that they teach us. The tests are a lot of memorization and drawing of graphs and diagrams which progresses from more rote knowledge to deeper understanding as you get further through the program. Something I was actually thinking about for a long time was how this was different from anything else I’d ever done and why this particular way seemed to help a lot more than how I used to learn, I got a degree in Philosophy before joining the military where the focus was more general skills based, and I think the most important thing that my previous education was missing was a dependence on the effectiveness of scaffolding of knowledge because as you learn how one component or system works it becomes easier to integrate all of the facts and have “integrated plant knowledge” which is the main goal of the whole program where you would both have a deep understanding of how things operate normally and how to manipulate them to do what you need them to in the case of an emergency.
Recent uni grad here. This video got me thinking a lot a team building exercise I did at my job on campus where I put students into groups and we did a trivia event. I asked questions like “who is the author of 1984” or “who is the only US president to have resigned from office” and the amount of upper year university students who not only didn’t know the answer, but were hostile to the thought that they’d be expected to maybe know it was shocking. Feels like a product of an education system which holds up critical thinking as the end all be all of an intellect but doesn’t focus on learning basic facts about society
I'm eight years older than you and would classify my education as one based on facts and figures.
That said, your video reminded me of a breakthrough of sorts that I had when I was a freshman in college taking a philosophy class. I've always been interested in history and it ended up being my major. While I generally understood the philosophy class, it struck me that I could apply my knowledge of history to the topics in the philosophy class, which made it more meaningful to me--and allowed for a better understanding. I employed this strategy for various other classes throughout college. Of course, knowing history didn't help with calculus or accounting, but I had enough sense to know that.
I think peoples subconscious desire for fact-based knowledge is the reason education TH-camrs have gotten so popular. Ever since I was a little kid I've watched education videos here.
Absolutely. I mean, how many critical thinking channels are there?
@@JJMcCullough great point, hahaha
@@JJMcCullough exactly!
The central thesis of this video seems very similar to Thomas Sowell's 'Intellectuals and Society.' In the book, Dr. Sowell argues that intellectuals are often able to describe ideas that have no basis in reality. He compares the politics professor to the engineer, arguing that the professor is judge by his theories, while the engineer is judged by the end product. If a professor comes up with an idea that fails, he still has his job. If the engineer designs a bridge that collapses, he is ruined.
Now that I think about it, my classes back in school did seem to wave wildly between these two forms of teaching depending on the subject, and I do distinctly recall finding more bluntly informational classes significantly more resonant with me than ones that handled topics more vapidly and with greater emphasis on our personal thoughts on the matter.
I'm not going to commit to an opinion straight away, but this does put some of my experience into words...
Coming from Mississippi, I can definitely say that my schooling was predominantly fact-based, and taking history tests largely revolved around regurgitating rote-memorized names and dates. Critical thinking was seldom emphasized. You went through your textbook, rote-memorized the important information, then promptly forgot it once you were finished with the test. The students with the highest grades weren't necessarily the intelligent ones per se, just those with the best memories. French class-- which I'm sure you're quite familiar with, being Canadian-- was one of the few classes that taught an applicable skill and actually encouraged students to apply knowledge that they had gained. We were tested on our ability to read and write in the language, but not really on our speaking or understanding ability. Je peux lire, ecrire, et parle francais bien... mais je ne peux pas comprend le francais parle de tout. (I can read, write, and speak French well... but I cannot understand spoken French at all.)
You can learn general skills. I don't understand how critical thinking and factual knowledge cannot coexist in educational contexts.
The problem comes when the former completely replaces the latter.
Critical thinking comes from formal logic which I would argue is a form of specific factual knowledge.
@@jimmymcbean7794 You can memorize all the rules of (say) first-order logic in a day, and then spend another day memorizing the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. But if I then ask you to prove the existence of an uncountable set (or any similar ZFC theorem), you might have no idea where to begin. You have all the facts you need, you just don't know how to apply them.
@@NYKevin100 Exactly.
This. It's not either/or as JJ frames the discussion. Students need both. A base set of facts added to general learning skills prepares students for lifelong learning.
A cultural literacy inquiry: Do kids know who or what Old Yeller is? Do elementary schools still play that movie, or did the adults who were traumatized by it become teachers and stop playing it?
While I think the Western Canon as it existed in the middle of the 20th century was quite problematic and myopic in its scope, I think the remedy is to have a more diverse and globally representative canon, not just dismiss the concept altogether. You mentioned communication but I think that's a key factor too. When things are self directed, you end up siloed with whatever you're mentally digesting and never have the benefit of talking through your thought processes with someone and hearing interpretations that you missed due to various mental blind spots.
hirsch wrote a good book about this Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
I'm just thinking back to all the videos I've seen of Americans who can't identify Canada on a map...
@@SleepyMatt-zzz eh wouldn't trust those. I am sure at least 90% of Americans could do that, those videos find people who are very ignorant and cut out anyone who gets It right, and they cut around those who change their mind quickly after realizing the answer. I could do the same if I went to any nation.
This is interesting to me because when I look back on my education, fact-based knowledge was one of the more painful points of that process. It was frustrating to be asked to memorize seemingly random facts and later regurgitate them onto a test only to forget them weeks later. On the other hand, my own self-directed education through things like reddit and youtube was largely fact-based simply because that's what I found interesting. I wanted to know things about the world. I desired knowledge and it was frequently served to me in the form of various memes, historical stories, interactive explanations, etc. The facts I learned on the internet always felt significantly more engaging than what I learned in school and despite never having to regurgitate it all for a quiz, I feel like I retained that knowledge much better than anything I learned in school.
So I guess I agree that fact-based knowledge is vital for education, I think exactly how that knowledge is presented and taught is probably more important in our educational approach. Maybe one way of putting it would be instead of "names and dates" we should be teaching "stories and causes." Like it's not so important to me that a man named "Christopher Colombus" sailed to the Americas in 1492; it's more important to me that starting in the late 15th century, a European colonization of Native American land began that sparked the slave trade and the modern history of the Americas.
And I feel like it goes without saying that students will remember and engage better with material they're personally interested in. So whenever possible allowing students to choose their areas of study (within reason; maybe no star wars books) would be really beneficial.
I hard agree with this. facts are only useful if you can relate them to other things (which is the exact thing that general knowledge is all about). There's a reason you focus more and more on a specific topic the farther into the education system you go. J.J basically just said that people think of general knowledge as having knowledge about everything, and so that's why we should only learn facts. I don't think that's a logical argument. We should learn facts that help us analyse new facts in the future when we start learning more specific knowledge.
You hit the nail on the head.
I love this way of thinking. Very interesting.
For a while now I have developed a gripe when people talk about "common sense" and how that phrase was always used. Everyone would say "nobody has common sense anymore"
And I realized. Most people think that most things that they know are common and universal, where this (and myself) would imply that there is actually only a small percentage of your working knowledge that is "common" to everyone. And once we get beyond the basics like addition, or reading and writing even, that percentage grows even smaller.
And I've seen this as an educator. So many students and people process things differently and make different connections that the reason something makes inherent sense to you can be very different for someone else. Especially in the absence of a more rigorous fact-based background.
"Common sense" very often is neither.
@@bubbles581 Are you agreeing with me or did you not read my comment?
@@BL3446 IMO Niolet made a quip. I do not see evidence that he agreed with you nor disagreed with you. Did he read your comment? IDK. Did he respond to your comment? I think not. His comment does not contain @Sneak. Ease off.
IME the phrase 'common sense' is used only in the negative; that is, 'It's just common sense', which is to say, 'You have none, and I think my position is self-evident, and I cannot support it with evidence.'
As for people reaching different conclusions, that means they do not begin from the same facts. If two parties start with the same foundation, they will build similar houses. When the foundations differ, so will the houses.
I am from the Czech Republic and I am now studying economics. I would say that when I was at elementary school we kinda did the fact-based knowledge (especially for history and geography), but I feel like I didn’t like which facts counted as important (learning capital cities in Europe was great, but learning where is almost every Czech river located felt pointless). I remember studying for the exams by just reading the chapter in the textbook over and over again. Than I went to a grammar school and the most important thing was to find connections between everything, which I enjoyed in geography but not really in history, where sometimes the teacher wanted us to find connections which I considered far-fetched. After some time we got a new history for the last 3 years and we did basically only one topic the cold war, here the connections started to make sense for me and I also enjoyed his exams where the questions was some broad topic and we had to write as much as we know about it.
I feel like the AP US History class represents a balanced approach to this divide perfectly. In AP US History, you spend the year learning both fact-based knowledge about US history, and skills-based knowledge about how to analyze historical documents. On a document-based question, you must use your basis of knowledge to analyze a document or political cartoon from a specific era that you’ve never seen before. That way, you employ both your general analysis skills and your general US history knowledge
AP Euro as well!
Yes, I came here to say the same thing. You are required to at least know some facts, but the curriculum emphasizes why those facts exist in the first place (i.e. context).
@@jacobmckinney8006 It emphasizes why those facts exist, and how to use those facts to make coherent arguments
AP world History as well
I would add that another key component of fact based knowledge is that it instills a certain level of discipline. Self directed learning, as empowering as it may be, may lack the required discipline that young people need to be successful as they move through life. Once discipline is well established in a young person they can apply it to any endeavour they hope to master.
Went through school late 1990s-2011. I found that schooling was more facts focused with a relentless focus on memorization and regurgitation of facts.. all of which I promptly forgot as soon as the test/exam was concluded.
I was going to wait until the end of the video to comment, but then you said you learned critical thinking in grade school, and described the practical method in which this was taught. And my little traumatized heart broke once again because I literally learned those things in my 20s, with no guidance, while the people closest to me were telling me I was ruining their lives by doing so.
The whole bit about Ben Carson and brain surgeons could easily apply to architects from my experience with them.
And software engineers. Any professional career tbh.
Richard Dawkins is one of the best examples of this. He is an evolutionary biologist, yet his claims on history and the history of religion are praised by millions, despite being full of holes
Damn this was a really good video, thank you for making it. Always love hearing about whatever books you’re currently reading and the new ideas/questions they provoked! Do you maintain a reading list anywhere?
No but that’s a good idea!
In his essay collection _Of This and Other Worlds_ CS Lewis wrote that literature tests should only be simple fact-based questions about the events in the book, so the students are forced to actually read it. They should not be asked to bare their soul to the teacher by "responding to" the book.
Not quite the same argument, and of course there was more to it than that, but there's an interesting resonance.
I'm autistic and probably have ADHD, so I think it should be noted that everyone learns differently, you can not put everyone within the same system and expect it to work. I would call my education fact based, however there are rarely any things I do actually remeber from school, because either a teacher didn't explain it well and I had to look it up myself, teach myself, or because we had barely any variaty. Sure I did learn stuff, and I could have been off worse, but I always felt like I really only started to learn and like learning when I got out of school. Watching Powerpuff Girls thought me english, but it heled to have a basis of vocabulary I knew from school. I think in the end a healthy mix of both is needed.
What I dislike is when it's arbitrary facts I am learning. Like dates for example. Knowing when exactly what happened doesn't matter much when I do not know anything about that time peroid and what it meant. It's just a pointless question for a test to which I will forget the answer. And such types of learning and testing only tought me how to forget facts as fast as possible to make room for more. I had to memorize the periodic table, but was never told what the numbers actually mean or why it even exists, what we as humans did to find out about those elements. And a lot of times I think I would have been better of learning on my own, because it's not like I didn't wanna know these important things, I just wanted to also understand them and I was never given the tools for that.
A 10 minute TH-cam video tought me more about human history than 10 years of school, in which I only learned about how tragic the holocaust was, egyptian culture existed and I feel like that's already it, everything else I picked up from media and self research or my parents explained it to me.
In America you have to memorise the periodic table? That isn't required in Malaysia. We only need to memorise elements 1-20 and a few other common elements in order to answer exam questions.
@@yokelengleng I'm not from america. I'm actually quite good at memorizing stuff, but it's not like this was anything that helped me in my life especially since after the test I immediatly forget anyways. And I don't think stuff like this is even good to train a memorization ability...I'm still very forgetful when I don't try to activly memorize something for a test.
I was, ironically, skeptical of this video when I first clicked on it 😅 though after watching, it is, as usual, a very well packaged distillation of knowledge I don’t often find elsewhere on this platform 😊 always makes me happy to see such nuanced perspectives in today’s online climate
Thank you so much my friend!
I just graduated college in May, but I was also an art student, so my experience might be different from people who were solely in academic classes. The program I was in hammered hard on fact-based knowledge, but also expected you to hone your skill based knowledge in-class (but only while the prof wasnt trying to relay facts to you) as well as outside of class independently. Skills and facts were taught as very separate concepts, but I can't help but feel like they're intertwined in a way that my professors could never get to the root of in a class setting. They were too focused on controlling what we were doing and when we were doing it.
I'm a philosophy student, and in my epistemology class we recently discussed a paper that made the argument that "doing your own research" is usually a bad way of going about seeking out knowledge! It was really interesting and is related to this kind of thing.
The paper was "Do your own research!" by Neil Levy, published in Synthese in 2022.
Actually teaching people how to do research would probably help things.
A lot of people seem to think getting false information from randos on Facebook or TikTok counts as “doing your own research” because they were never really taught how to actually do research.
@@EnigmaticLucas It feels like the same people who say "i did my own research" are the same people who would say "never trust anything you read on the internet", 20-30 years ago.
That sounds very interesting！
Maybe you can share me a link to the paper?
@@EnigmaticLucas you can certainly "do your own research" with academic journals and come to any disparate wacky conclusion you want by cherry picking that stuff too.
I just finished my doctorate degree in education. My program was a mix of instructor-directed and self-directed learning. We learned foundational theories but selected our own topics for projects.
On a side note, I had a high school English teacher who pushed cultural literacy. It always stuck with me.
I think teaching general skills is more beneficial because you can always learn more facts-based knowledge over time. You used the example of attempting to analyze a speech from a Nepalese politician. You have your analysis skills, so you can just research the facts of Nepalese politics on your own using the analysis skills that you learned in school
point is that without a crap ton of background knowledge (that isn't necessarily all easily googleable) you simply can't do this. even reading cannot be done without mastery of a wide range of vocabulary.
@@kenlandon6130 But I think general skills are so much more widely applicable. When you go to college, you can learn the specifics of your future career. While you’re in elementary, middle, and high school, it’s important to learn skills that could apply regardless of your specialty
Im a preschool teacher, going to school to be an art teacher, coming from a family of teachers lol. From what I’ve always been doing and been taught to do is to teach kids as much factual knowledge about the world as I can, while harboring those general skills along the way. Obviously it’s very important to have those skills, but that’s something you learn over time. I always hated learning the same thing over and over, when it came to the rotating curriculum or whatever it is. Especially when it comes to common core and the reading and annotating of random passages just to get the general skills down but not actually learning much of anything. I also went to a Montessori high school, so it was kind of 50/50 with the self directed vs fact taught learning. But the teachers who were my favorite are the ones who taught us fact based knowledge along with giving us freedom or creativity with the projects. My favorite was my history teacher’s projects- they ranged from designing an apartment before permits in the 1800s industrial America, to recording a documentary about the Vietnam war. I might not have done well in school but he was the one who got me interested in learning with the interesting fact based teaching he would deliver in his presentations, and how he made it personal to us so that we were passionate about it. Those teachers were the ones who inspired me to keep teaching, and they inspire me to inspire my kids every day, even if they’re only 4 and 5 I try and teach them as much as they can know. Obviously skills like reading and writing and counting are important, but I try to teach them with science and history and culture along with the skills because facts are just as important. It’s imperative for them to absorb all they can in this critical moment of their lives.
I confirm that this video is award-winning.
"Common sense over book smarts" is a popular sentiment in the American South. Facts and knowledge aren't valued by them, which makes it more questionable why they latch onto people like Ben Shapiro who spout things like "facts don't care about your feelings."
"Common sense" for these American Southerners often seems to boil down to tradition. Something that only matters because of their personal affinity towards it. Feelings.
So we have a huge surplus of people who clearly value their gut feelings over facts and yet claim to believe the opposite. That's why we have so many obstinate dumb-fucks who talk as if they think they're playing 4D chess when really what they're saying is remedial at best or, more often, separate from reality entirely.
When I was in Grade 9, my History Teacher made us memorize all the CANADIAN PRIME MINISTERS in order, and with dates, from MacDonald to (then) Chretien. At that point we had no schooling on almost any of them, but I guess this was the start. I couldn't remember them all, so I wrote them down the inside of my forearm. But then, it seems, after writing them there, I did the test without cheating and it was fine. To this day I still remember them and the dates are a bit off every once in a while but I know about when they were, before and after whom. Anyway, this knowledge has really helped over the years in understanding all kinds of references and other historical mentions and even our money.
People often fear facts. Especially, if they damage their world view or make them feel unsafe.
I can say I have a good grasp on some specific kinds of knowledge not just because of the facts that I've learned on school, but also because of the incentives I had to research about certain topics myself. As an example, Age of Empires II presented to me its versions of historical events, which were not 100% accurate, but were interesting enough for me to research: one of the campaigns was about the Cid Campeador, which led me to learn about Spanish history, and by knowing many aspects of it, all the facts I knew about it were of help when I was studying the Story of the Spanish Language in my university career. So I can see how the fact-learning proccess is, indeed, the way to go
People who play Paradox Games tend to score the best in my AP European History class lol
Part of the issue is that we are in an era of specialization. For instances "Jack of all trades" used to be a compliment. Now it is seen more and more as derogatory, with the "Master of none" moniker being appended and emphasized. Author Robert A. Heinlein has a delightful quote, summarized with "Specialization is for insects" that I'll leave the reader look up.
Learning how to learn is one of the best skills to have. Be a lifelong learner. Find a mentor and people to help you learn. Thanks J.J for helping people to be a better learner.
One does have to have a predisposition for being a "lifelong learner." Most people think they've learned everything they need to know and actively resist learning new things to the point where they might allow someone to convince them they should overthrow the government, for example.
@@Craxin01 see the book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date - Samuel Arbesman,
Being a Nepali, I am happy to get a mention from one of my favourite TH-camrs. 🙂🙂
As an educator, I think you have made some very valid points. Very interesting topic with lots to reflect on!
The issue is, who decides which "facts" are being taught to our children. Society can't even agree on what is or isn't factual in the first place.
0:15 Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God.
Our approach to education was developed by Comenius in the 17th century. His book “The Door of Languages Unlocked” was meant to be a children’s encyclopedia and act as a core basis of knowledge.
Will still follow this approach to this day. We have not abandoned core skills but rather included other forms of literacy (eg media literacy, data literacy) that is now needed in light of new technology. I agree that we may be out of balance in some regards but I’m not so sure things are as bad as you are making them out to be. But this an excellent video for having a fruitful conversation about rebalancing education priorities.
I remember in elementary school, my 4th grade teacher had these sets of 5-6 books and each student was a assigned a set to read during silent reading time. I think doing this helped diversify what students read. Of course, I just read the books that I thought were the most interesting
I agree wholeheartedly JJ. As a 22 year old Spaniard studying on Germany you just put into words what i feel about the current evolution of the broadly speaking "western" education system. Thank you for these videos, there are few commentators in TH-cam like you.
I think having a base set of knowledge or skills on which to base the next thing can be as helpful as hurtful. If I know how to ski, it doesn't mean I can hop on a snowboard and handle any run, there are skills that may transfer, but there will also be learned behaviors that will need to be unlearned.
Which brings me to an anecdote. People who hunt sometimes take up photography. When photographing animals, hunters often put the animal dead center of the frame, which is not the way a photographer would handle the situation.
That's a great example
When I was really young and learning how to spell, my parents made a system of learning around the house. Everything that could be touched, seen, or generally interacted with, had a sticky note on it with the name of that thing. So the pantry had the word “pantry” on it, doors had “door” windows had “window”, so on and so forth. I believe this to be the reason my grammar was so far ahead of my classmates theoughout my school career, and why I spoke much clearer than some students. This type of learning also helped me further by being able to read and write coherently because I wasn’t struggling to come up with or pronounce words. I am absolutely a supporter of fact based learning, as it is the reason I love history so much. By understanding basic history, it informs you of the world around you, and by increasing your historical literacy, you can start to understand why things are the way that they are.
This is definitely one of my favorite videos of yours JJ, much love from the state with the best flag design🦀
There is so much knowledge to learn in the world that if you learn too much you're bound to forget about it so people shouldn't feel bad if they don't remember something
when an individual doesn't display passion for anything(i mean every last thing) they do,
it makes your mind drift off and become disinterested & forgetful... when you incorporate passion in everything you do(every last mundane thing daily)
you always remember!!!!! education is the key to progression!!!
On the contrary, the more things you know the easier it is to learn new things. Many facts may sound random but if you know a lot of context, it's easier to fit it into the framework and have a story behind the fact.
Fantastic stuff, J.J. Not enough discourse these days on the building blocks of understanding.
My schooling was especially anti-fact based but I was always drawn to that way of thinking. I think one reason-& I'm surprised this wasn't discussed-is the anti-truth sentiment overall. Many people were scared to declare too broadly or too forcefully that anything is so certain because of being conditioned to believe that A) it can lead to backlash & B) it might not be universally interpreted as so. We have so much cultural sensitivity etc. I'd say, as to lose a sense of certainty for anything
Certainty is dangerous. The Nazis were certain. Jacob Bronowski covered the contrast between knowledge and certainty in the Ascent of Man. Brilliant. Here is a clip from Episode 11: th-cam.com/video/ltjI3BXKBgY/w-d-xo.html
Great video! I'm an educator myself (I teach at the college-level) and I found this very interesting! I admit I am enchanted by the idea of "general skills" idea, but this video brings up a lot of good points. In my own experience, I enjoy learning things about lots of different topics, and your discussion about how you need facts to base knowledge on and how knowledge in one domain can help in another definitely resonates. I find that having a "web of facts" -- knowing facts but also how facts are related to each other -- helps a lot. The more you know about a particular topic, the easier it is to learn new things about it as you have more context to understand things.
The phenomenon of making learning "fun" always deeply troubled me, because learning can't ALWAYS be fun. When I was taught math it was as a slow, methodical process, much like exercise, even as teachers tried to liven it up, my parents focused on just doing it as work. When we got to advanced concepts I watched many of the kids around me collapse, I suspect, because they were made to think that learning was fun, and couldn't handle it when it turned out that there is no "fun" way to learn the Quadratic Formula.
There's an unfortunate cycle that our school systems are based around taking people who find learning a topic fun, sending them to a university where they are taught the subject they like by people who like that subject, and then sending those people back to schools to teach kids who are 0% interested in that topic. They don't get the disconnect. "But kids, reading is FUN! You are wrong not to like it." Instead of "listen some of you will hate this but that's life. Make best efforts and I will treat you fairly." Alot of teachers take it personally, and then the kids take that personal and give up.
No it’s cause the teacher didn’t resonate with them you pseudo Shakespearean armchair psychologist
I don't think necessarily that making learning "fun" should be a requirement, but it should definitely be interesting at least. I've learned about about topics I don't care about at all because the presenters made the topics interesting and held my attention. Unfortunately, 95% of my time in school was neither fun nor interesting so I spent a lot of time outside school learning on my own.
@@Zariel_999 Learning can be fun, but that is so completely subjective that it's basically unquantifiable. At best, try to make it engaging, make the student an actual participant in the learning and not a target or receptacle.
I agree with this. In an ideal world, parents would instill curiosity in their children and they would come to school ready to learn. Some teachers are more skilled than others, but acquiring information in and of itself should be compelling. Of course, we have to account for learning disabilities and similar things, but teachers today are in the unfortunate position of teaching to people who don't want to learn.
I feel like it really depends on the teacher and the courses you take. For example, last year I took a history course that focused heavily on dates and names. Today, I’m in a history course that involves much more general ideas about time periods in history. My teacher last year really emphasized knowing these dates and names (granted, because the course required it), while the teacher I have this year is very keen on the idea that big ideas and general skills are so much more important (and not only because the course requires it). I will say that my ability to discuss historical topics really expanded last year, while this year it has expanded in a way where I’m able to connect historical events better. I believe that this logic is applicable to many other subjects, not only history. 😁
Wow, this video puts so much of my own experience into perspective. I was a very opinionated teenager, but poorly educated. I did not attend university, but I learned to read, and have read literally hundreds of nonfiction books on all sorts of topics since graduating high school. My self-directed education was decidedly fact- based, and though I wrote no papers and did relatively little “research”, my view of the world, though I’m sure it has big holes is much better rounded than many of my peers.
I think a bit of both is important. The most important thing to teach is how to research and cite sources in my opinion, but knowing specific things is obviously important to grok the context of the world around us. When I was in school it was primarily fact-based learning, but the issue I had was that none of the teachers could explain why anything they were teaching was important. The facts are important to know, but spreading the enthusiasm and motivation to learn is what I found lacking most in my school experience.
Hi J.J.! I have been spending time learning about Vancouver's history and culture this week and thinking what a great resource your channel has been for "Canada Stuff" :) Then I think I saw you walking down Granville in DT wearing a plaid jacket a few days ago, which was super cool. Thanks for your great content!
Watched this when it came out and have been thinking about it since. I’ve definitely been on the “F memorization and fun facts” bandwagon for a long time; studied physics in college to get away from it. However, the more I reflect, the more I think that my disdain for “just” learning facts, perhaps as well as my preference for only learning “principles” and “skills” were unfounded.
Mainly I think that I was never actually taught skills in the first place. Rather, they were mentioned to me, but in practice, “knowing” the skill in the sense of being able to explain it was almost always entirely different than integrating it into my behavior and intuition.
Instead I think skills “bubble up” from learning very many discrete things. Patterns emerge between them and after a while you just sort of go, “oh, this is like all those other things,” and it sticks with you. Being told “those things are all alike” doesn’t stick quite as well, but is certainly easier to remember in the sense of being able to explain it, which is perhaps now totally overvalued.
My history class has been fact based, English has been skill based- but there’s been a big shift in two years. We went from reading and talking about books in English and doing mock “Socratic seminars” to learning about rhetoric, sentence structure, tone, etc
They are technically still teaching us skills in terms of identifying these things and writing about them and such, but we’re also learning WHAT THEY ARE. It is a general knowledge that I’ve found very helpful to understand writing in general.
I'm a senior undergrad in computer science and for my first year, there was a lot of general stuff they taught, and some of our assignments were self directed in that we could make our own programming projects. Especially since I had been programming with my robotics club since high school, I breezed through those classes, but I don't think i really improved as a developer. Since taking harder classes about design patterns, algorithms/theory, and hardware/OS details, I think a lot of the improvements in my work has come from drawing from that specific knowledge. In terms of critical thinking, I don't feel very different when programming than I did when I was in high school, except that I can recall some things that I learned in class. During my internship this summer, I felt like I wrote some of my best code specifically using a design pattern I had learned from the previous semester.
You've made me understand one of the most consistently annoying things I experience as an American living in the UK. I regularly hear otherwise-intelligent journalists explain British politics to an American audience, and consistently misinterpret the story. IMO, the more prestigious the media, the worse the errors. The New York Times is perhaps the worst! I think because these are smart people who understand American politics well, they think they understand the political systems of other countries. It also happens the other way round, where brilliant British journalists have misinformed takes on US politics, but not as often.
As another example, the only British newspaper with any understanding at all of Ireland is The Guardian. And even they are far from perfect.
@@qwertyTRiG I can totally imagine. Most British people know as much about Irish politics as Americans know about Canadian politics (hardly anything). What really grates me though is American political journalists holding fourth on British politics as if they're experts, while making really basic errors. It's incredibly arrogant, but especially annoying as the journalists are oblivious to their ignorance.
I'm home-schooling my kid starting monday. Thanks J.J! You're the coolest Canadian I know
quick question: what is your opinion about the existence of evolution (asking because i am always suspicious about homeschoolers when it comes to that)
@@paisleepunkto me as an atheist religion like Christianity is just superstition.
THANK YOU. I am a teacher and this is soooo true. Teachers have been indoctrinated into horrible ways of teaching that hurt poor students that most. I will be buying this book. Thank you for putting it on my radar.
Totally agree with this video! Also, you should do a video about that bill in Alberta seems like a big escalation of tensions!
I could never get behind why people hated History when in school. It always helped to understand the natural progression of things. For example, simply learning the fact that a country was conquered and oppressed, you knew that an uprising was bound to happen. Critical thinking does arise purely from facts as you and ED Hirsch have pointed out in this award-winning video!
It has a lot to do with how it's taught. I was blessed with good history teachers who did a good job mixing fact-based and skill-based learning, but my friends who've had boring ones hate the subject.
Even within a specific subject like physics, it's really hard to strike the balance between general physics skills (of being able to conceptualise stuff and being able to make smart assumptions about the setup of the problem at hand) and knowing useful knowledge (like the parallel axis theorem, the moments of inertia of particular shapes and the Taylor series).
I think I somewhat agree with this: I am in the commercial education space (corporate training) and I have always thought of General Skills as the "goal" (e.g. developing a new hire into someone who can independently help clients), while Fact-Based Knowledge form a common substrate for common conversation and communication.
I like the way you phrased that, and I agrere.
interesting point about your usian bolt soccer analogy. He played soccer for a season with my local team! The central coast mariners in the A-League. He was very underwhelming.
As a specialist in general skills, I feel conflicted
The legend himself
factual knowledge >>> "general skills"
@@modmaker7617why
Awesome video! I definitely agree with this. Born in 1990 and am constantly looking up basic knowledge in didn't learn in school.
Ten years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher made us memorize The Road Not Taken by Frost and we had to write out the entire poem from memory for a test. While it was hard work and somewhat frustrating, it was honestly refreshing looking back as I still know that classic poem from heart which is more than can be said about most of the books we “read” in school.
I teach Bible college courses, and to my student's chagrin I am a huge proponent of "mere facts" in learning. I hope that I emphasize the adapting of these facts into daily practice and pragmatic reasoning well enough. I whole-heartedly agree that you can't be truly balanced in your thinking unless you've heard a multiplicity of basic facts around the subject and can connect-the-dots of a broad base of knowledge from various input and arena.
Great theory! Great discussion.
This also explains how I have self-directedly, ironically, engaged with the world most of my life, choosing to be a learner and gatherer of facts and information.
Thanks JJ.
Hello J.J., could you turn on closed captions for this video? I find it hard to process audio without captions 😅
I'm a senior in high school, I think I've had a fairly equal mix of those 2 approaches to educations, and I think that they probably both have *some* merit. I personally would be in favor of learning more fact based things if it weren't for how 1, what is considered important to know seems to be changing quite a lot and very rapidly, the books I read in my freshman year are now not at all the type of books they want freshmen reading, etc, and 2, my single biggest issue with the schooling system is that it's not engaging enough. I adore learning, but I can only really learn if I actually enjoy it, which comes almost entirely down to the way information is communicated. I can spend all day watching educational youtube videos made to be entertaining while still teaching as much or more than normal teaching, but can't focus in class for more than like 5 minutes
I think it varied greatly by subject in school, literature and the arts were always going to be more general concept than fact based
It's pretty hard to take history and not make it a fact based class lol
@@treyshaffer exactly, or science and math
@@treyshaffer You need some facts but once you have those you can just go waaay into analyzing media/literature from that era without explicitly dropping in any new hard facts.
regarding critical thinking, the most important part is to acknowledge one's susceptibility to cognitive biases before doing their "own research"
I was homeschooled and there was a huge emphasis among all long term homeschoolers i knew growing up on the facts. It definately served me well, and i would take it any day over an explicitly skills based approach. Besides, my mom and dad were extrordinarily smart and well versed people in a variety of topics, i couldn't have asked for better tutors.
I think a good example of people critically looking at something without any background knowledge being dangerous is the idea of sending artifacts from the royal British museum to their original country, you’ll have people saying items need to be returned to Egypt or China without having any background knowledge of the politics or safety of those countries (Ex: 2011 Cairo museum looting, Mao Zedong and the destruction of all of Chinese history) they will just say the artifacts are stolen.
0:15 Impressive. Very nice. Let's see J.J. McCullough's card.
Look at that subtle off-white coloring; the tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God... it even has a watermark.
As others have noted, part of the "war on facts" was a rightful critique of the laziest fact-based "memorize xyz, names and dates, etc", rather than the more difficult discussion around the facts, or names and why they were important at that time (screw the dates). I was in primary school when the transition was taking place and got to see the gamut. From "memorize these facts, then lazily test multiple-choice style" (which eschews relevance, implications, or practical interpretations of "general knowledge skills"); to well synthesized blends of base knowledge and thought skills; to mindless general skills dribble (complete with "pick your own book for the class" experimentation). As with most life-lessons, the combination (base knowledge with practical synthesis) seems the best course (and the hardest).