You must first learn to draw within the lines…

Because we see children acquire their native language spontaneously and without instruction, some people think that this can also be done with school knowledge. Think of what Maurice de Hond – a Dutch pollster who thinks he’s an expert in education, criminology, and virology – stated about iPad schools. He saw his granddaughter swiping on the iPad and concluded that she could learn that way. Unfortunately, practice and science show that this is not true!

Many advocates of the primacy of broad development think, or rather believe, that children can learn to think critically, solve problems, and be creative without first acquiring the necessary basic knowledge. They present us with a choice. Either students must learn and remember a lot of “useless” facts, or they can engage in “deeper learning” and thus develop an independent mind. Given such a choice, which would you choose?

False Dichotomy

This is the heart of the debate, but it is a false dichotomy. You need both, but… there is an order. The less students know, the less they can think critically, solve problems, be creative.

Let’s take painting as an example. You don’t have to be an artist or an art historian to understand that almost, if not all, creative painters began by studying with or from masters of classical painting. Piet Mondrian, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali first learned and practiced painting within the lines before they began to paint outside the lines! They could paint before they began to paint creatively.

This applies to the pianist, the chess master, the footballer, the ‘creative accountant’, and also the scientist. First the basics, then improvise!!

Evidence about how our brains work supports this. John Sweller, Dick Clark, and I concluded in the most cited article in education and learning of the 21st ^century that:

‘evidence from empirical studies over the past half century consistently indicates that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guided learning’.

Only with that foundation can students do the rest.

You would hope that teaching children a coherent body of knowledge is a goal widely shared by educators and parents. Yet for too long, educational elites and progressive pedagogues and educators have clung to theories— philosophies, really —that downplay the importance of acquiring knowledge: discovery learning, experiential learning, inquiry learning, constructivist learning, and, most recently, 21st-century learning. What a series of fancy, sexy, catchy names. The problem is that they don’t work. I call such people butterflies who deny that they themselves were ever caterpillars . They claim that they are now so “creative” and “critical” despite, not because of, their solid foundations.

But now the question: Are children autodidact?

In a certain way and for certain things, yes. This is called biological or evolutionary primary learning . This knowledge can be acquired almost ‘effortlessly’. Think of working together, recognizing faces and communicating (folk psychology), understanding other species/kinds (folk biology) and understanding inanimate objects (folk physics). This is evolutionarily advantageous: it increases the chance of survival and having offspring and has been developed over countless millennia. In other words, biological primary knowledge and skills do not need to be taught to a certain extent (you can better teach your child that a certain snake or berry is dangerous/poisonous instead of letting it discover that for itself). But for the rest, children are not or bad autodidacts.

The plasticity of our brains makes it possible to learn new, useful so-called cultural information such as arithmetic, spelling, reading, history… This is called biological or evolutionary secondary learning . But rewiring our brains to acquire culturally generated knowledge is not easy and takes a lot of effort. That is what education is for! Education is about cultural knowledge, knowledge that is necessary to participate in society that we pass on to future generations. It is about things that have developed relatively recently. Writing is only 6000-8000 years old and mathematics 5000. Both are easily transferred via language. We borrow information from others and reorganize that information in our brains into knowledge ( borrowing and reorganizing principle ). This knowledge is not evolutionarily necessary for survival and reproduction. This knowledge can be transferred and acquired via good instruction.

This contrast between biological primary knowledge and the acquisition of cultural knowledge seems logical. Place it in other contexts and you immediately understand it.

What if I told you that lifeguards have a new method for teaching toddlers to swim by throwing them into the deep end of a pool, in the belief that they will learn from their productive struggle? Or that we should throw away Grandma’s cookbook because its restrictive step-by-step approach takes the joy out of baking a cake? Or that sixteen-year-olds should learn to drive from their peers or, better yet, on their own?

In closing: It’s not one or the other, but in order to do the latter (solve problems, be creative, think critically, or swim 50 meters breaststroke) you must first acquire the former through proper instruction (learn to read, write, do arithmetic, history, etc. or become water-free, do the frog kick, and keep your head above water).

As my colleague Rob Marchetto wisely puts it: The most compassionate and student-centered approach to learning is a knowledge-rich curriculum and explicit instruction.