Why General Knowledge Should Be a Goal of Education in a Democracy
From Common Knowledge, Volume 11, # 1/2, Winter/Spring 1998
© 1998 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
What follows is the text of Hirsch's speech to the Seventh Core Knowledge National Conference, March 12-14, 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia.
I’m proud to say that Core Knowledge is a teachers’ movement. I don’t want to downplay all those indispensable parents and administrators who are helping this cause, but Core Knowledge has been from the start a bottom-up not a top-down movement.
That’s why we are still puzzling and surprising the people at the top — all those powerful people who have withheld their blessing and their money — they are wondering where did these people come from? How could they do this when we didn’t approve and we didn’t pay?
I have an answer for them. Core Knowledge is growing without them because this is chiefly a parents and teachers’ movement, and you simply can’t buy the kind of dedication that Core Knowledge teachers have.
Those of you who teach young children did not get into this profession because you wanted money and prestige, you got into this profession because you are committed to children.
In fact, one of the reasons Core Knowledge originally had trouble getting started with teachers was that people were telling them it was dry as bones and wasn’t centered on children. That was false, but it was very effective with teachers who had come into this profession because they are committed to children.
But once the word got out to teachers that children truly thrive on Core Knowledge, that children love it, that there really isn’t a conflict between being knowledge-centered and being child-centered — once that idea got out, then Core Knowledge became a teachers’ movement. And it continues to be a teachers’ movement, and I hope it always will be. So I’m grateful to all of you. And I have a confession to make. It isn’t just the people at the top who are surprised. I have to admit I’m also surprised at what you teachers have accomplished.
You’ve done it without coercion and with dedication, and with ever-increasing numbers, because you have become convinced that this is right for children — for all children, especially those who lack advantages at home. You are not just committed to children, you are committed to fairness. Our public schools were meant to realize equal opportunity for all, and in your Core Knowledge schools we are coming closer to that ideal than anywhere else in the country. The data we are getting is beginning to show that excellence and fairness do go together.
So to all of you here, and to your thousands of colleagues back home who couldn’t come to Atlanta, I want to say thanks, keep it up. And may you continue to amaze us.
Well as usual at this conference, you’ve had a great intellectual feast. I want to thank those scholars and teachers who have given you that feast. Do you suppose this is the teachers’ conference that is all meat and almost no potatoes?
Anyway, this wouldn’t be a true Core Knowledge conference if I didn’t also include a little meat in these closing remarks. I know we can only take so much of this rich intellectual diet, so after so many rich sessions, I promise this will be a very brief mini-session and there will be just one big idea before I say “good-bye til next year.”
The big idea could be grasped from a question I was once asked by the superintendent of a big district. “Why should scores go up on standardized tests in Core Knowledge schools if the tests aren’t tied to the Core Knowledge curriculum?” It was a good, sensible question, and some of you may already know the answer. But, just in case you don’t, let me say a few words about the power of knowledge in creating general skills and competence in students. The reasons can be summarized in three statements that scientists have confirmed.
- More knowledge makes you smarter.
- More general knowledge makes you more generally competent in the tasks of life.
- Giving everybody more general knowledge makes everybody more competent, and therefore creates a more just society.
Those ideas are pretty commonsensical, but teachers have usually been told something different.
So it’s worth summarizing the scientific consensus behind Core Knowledge, and explaining why general knowledge should be a goal of education in a democracy. That will answer the superintendent’s question about why scores go up even when the tests aren’t tied to the Core Knowledge curriculum.
First, knowledge makes you smarter.
I am one of those people who don’t like Windows 95. But I still have a soft spot for Bill Gates and his big round glasses, because Bill Gates has brought glamour to Nerdism. He didn’t bother to finish Harvard, but he’s anything but ignorant. He knows a lot, and has correctly told our youth that wide reading and general knowledge are critical to competence. He’s numerate, and literate. He would have done quite well on the TIMSS math and science tests, possibly ranking up there with Swedish 12th graders. You could also say that Bill Gates is independent-minded, has higher-order accessing skills, is a critical thinker, engages in metacognition, and exhibits the various creative competencies that American experts say are much more important than just knowing a bunch of facts.
But it happens that Bill Gates knows a lot of facts. He reads a lot, and always has. Cognitive psychologists tell us that if competent people like Gates didn’t know a lot of facts they couldn’t be critical, creative, independent thinkers. The research literature is very clear on this point: that highly skilled intellectual competence comes after, not before, you know a lot of “mere facts.” First facts, then facility. It’s the only way for us to get deep understanding and attain all those higher-order thinking skills which are so widely praised by educational experts and so wrongly contrasted with “mere facts.”
In my recent book, I spent a lot of space showing why the tendency of experts to emphasize thinking skills and to disparage facts in such educational slogans as “less is more” and “mere rote learning” do have a grain of truth (otherwise they wouldn’t be so popular), but also that they are highly simplified and misleading. But instead of attacking these slogans, I want to accentuate the positive, and summarize the evidence that explains why knowing a lot of “mere facts” makes you smarter.
For one thing, psychologists have discovered that knowing more makes you better able to learn new things, and better able to think critically. That is, knowledge enables you to learn and to think. That fact has immense implications for determining the goals of public schooling in a modern democracy.
But why does more knowledge make you smarter? In a brilliant experiment, Keith Stanovich, the distinguished Canadian reading researcher, showed that when two people have the same level and kind of IQ, the person who has more general knowledge will learn faster and function more competently than the person who has less general knowledge. That experiment has a particular relevance to American schools because we Americans tend to assume that academic competence is mainly a product of innate ability. Even when we are willing to criticize the idea of IQ in favor of such notions as tripartite intelligence (Sternberg) or multiple intelligences (Gardner), the very prominence we give the word “intelligence” still accords too much importance to innate ability, as compared with effort and knowledge. Yes, it’s consoling to insist that all children do have some type of high intelligence, but, in the end, such an emphasis is downright misleading, because it overstresses the importance of intelligence in schooling.
Innate talent is important, but our overemphasis on intelligence is a perculiarly American prejudice that stems from the origins of our culture in the 19th century Romantic movement. Harold Stevenson and others have shown that the Asian view emphasizing knowledge and effort is the more accurate view. We place so much stress on innate talent because we have been brought up on the romantic idea that the aim of education is to follow “nature.” You’ll notice “nature” has the same root as “innate.” But psychologists have shown that this emphasis on innate ability is a highly misleading assumption in education. The average differences in innate abilities are far less pronounced than the average differences in achieved abilities produced by knowledge and effort. It turns out that creativity is not spontaneous, as the romantics thought, but requires long study and mastery-knowledge. Even the most talented person needs about ten years of effort to reach an expert level, and creativity usually takes even longer. For instance, scientists have shown that having a genius for mental arithmetic turns out to be based less on innate talent than on knowledge and intensive practice. Knowledge and practice; these are the things that make you smart.
Why do experts learn new things faster and better than novices? Not because experts have more innate talent, but because they know more. And what they know has become second nature to them, and frees their minds to focus on higher-level aspects of a problem. In a famous experiment, the Dutch psychologist de Groot showed that chess experts have no more innate mental ability on average than novices do, but are able to learn and solve chess problems faster and better, because they have what he called “erudition” — which is to say knowledge. Their knowledge has become so integrated and “chunked” that their conscious minds can focus on a small number of key features. Edison’s comment that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” holds even for the most talented, though in some cases, Edison’s estimate may be off by a few percentage points.
This leads to point two, that the more broad general knowledge you have, the more broadly competent you become in dealing with the tasks of life.
Let’s take an example close to home: being a good teacher. It turns out that the biggest factor in student achievement is teacher quality. (Surprise!) And guess what is the single most consistent predictor of teacher quality leading to student achievement? It’s the score that a teacher made on the verbal SAT test. Don’t panic. A person’s score on the verbal SAT rises dramatically as soon as a person knows more words. The verbal SAT is nothing more than a vocabulary test. Don’t jump to the all-too-American conclusion that high SAT scores mean that a person is innately smart. The verbal SAT does NOT tell you how innately smart you are. Absolutely not. It tells you how many words you know. Those questions that look like thinking questions, such as “X is to Y as P is to BLANK.” Well, correctly filling that blank depends less on brains than simply on knowing the meaning of X, Y, and P, and the realities those words represent. So let’s take the next step. An advanced vocabulary test like the SAT is not just a test of words, because words stand for things, and for knowledge of things. Yep, you guessed it: the verbal SAT is a test of general knowledge.
That explains the findings about student achievement and the teacher’s verbal SAT. You tend to be a good teacher if you tend to be a generally competent person, and you tend to be a generally competent person if you have a lot of general knowledge. Furthermore, what is true for teachers is also true for their students. Knowledge makes them more competent, too. Core Knowledge teachers have told me with great enthusiasm that by teaching a rich banquet of knowledge, they feel they are getting smarter themselves. Well it’s true. More general knowledge makes you more generally competent. I won’t take time to explain all the nitty gritty of why this is so. I did that in my recent book.
Instead, I’ll give one further, very different example to show how universal is this connection between general knowledge and general skill. The armed forces gives every recruit a test called the AFQT, the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It’s very like the SAT. That is to say, it’s not an IQ test, but rather a test of general knowledge. Given to hundreds of thousands, by now millions, of people, this test has offered scientists a huge field of research. For instance, there are several studies on the question: Does a higher score on that general knowledge test make you a more competent soldier? The answer is emphatically yes, whether the soldier’s job is in electronics, or in just being a foot soldier. General knowledge makes you more competent on average no matter what job you do, whether it’s being a clerk, a mechanic, a plain GI, or a platoon leader.
There’s an economic twist to this story. That same general knowledge test, the AFQT, was used in a big sociological study called “The Longitudinal Study of Youth.” This ongoing study has found the same thing the Army found about general knowledge and life competence. The more you know, the better you do in life. This has enormous implications for social justice and education, since the scientists found that general knowledge correlates with annual income. And furthermore it correlates with annual income regardless of which racial or ethnic group you come from. Knowledge makes people competent regardless of race, class, or ethnicity. It is the great social equalizer.
This brings me to my third and last point, which I stated this way: “Giving everybody more knowledge makes everybody more competent, and creates a more just society.” Since knowledge is the great equalizer, the schools have a huge opportunity and responsibility to provide more equal life chances for all students, no matter where they come from.
You who are teaching in Core Knowledge schools are in the vanguard of the new civil rights frontier. That frontier is knowledge, and that truth is showing up in the equity results you are achieving. I congratulate you on the time, the effort, and the dedication, you bring to your work. You have become persuaded by your fellow teachers, and you have put children first.
So this is my conclusion. If knowledge is the new civil rights frontier, you are the new pioneers in American education. Before long, the rest will follow the trail you are blazing. I’ll end by saying that you have my deep thanks, and see you in Orlando [at next year’s conference]!
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Last updated: Fri, May 23 2008
