Something I'd like to see

[andrewducker]

A list of facts (or groupings of facts) learned in schools, and then a percentage, for each one, of how often they were used in the last year (by a large, varied, sample of the population).

Not that I think that teaching ought to be based entirely on utility, but if we could at least quantify that utility then we could look at the bits that aren't actually useful and start the argument over whether they're worthwhile on other bases (artistically/culturally worthy).

Comments

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Facts are less important than skills, such as information seeking and evaluation skills

[andrewducker]

Absolutely and totally agree.

Too much of my schooling was made up of facts, and not enough of that kind of skills. I hope it's better nowadays.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Totally, although you could probably apply the same criteria to slighty-more-subjective stuff than that, and say, "did this skill I was explicitly/implicitly taught turn up?"

There's stuff I do use, and would hate to be without ("how can someone not know how to integrate simple trigonometric expresions? what if they want to maximize something?") but I feel like essentially nothing on the formal curriculum I actually need, with the possible exception of more subjective things.

[andrewducker]

I meant skills along with facts. Should have been more explicit there.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

(And "not need" goes from the hardest stuff to the easiest stuff. I think stuff like "type i and type ii error" was taught in A-level stats, which not everyone did, but WOULD be useful to people if they did know it. Similarly, the ability to calculate 20% off was taught regularly since primary school, and is useful -- to people who still remember it.)

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Yes, I only mention it because this is a big controversy in education at the moment. Though, in a strange way only the people on the 'skills' side recognise it's a controversy. The people on the 'knowledge' side don't consider the issue. Don't know why.

[erindubitably.livejournal.com]

I use "Don't put that in your mouth" pretty much every week. So that can stay.

[zz]

I don't think I learned that one. :\

[drplokta]

You're not learning facts in school. You're learning how to learn, and how to turn up at the same place at the same time five days a week and do some work. It doesn't matter what you actually study, which is why the emphasis on classics in the 19th century did no particular harm.

(Exceptions for basic English and mathematics.)

[andrewducker]

My point being that it could be spent learning useful stuff. How society works would be something useful to come out of school with. At no point did my school teach me "how voting works", "what an economic system is", etc. And I think I'd be happier if it did.

They might nowadays, of course.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

That would be interesting, though I'm not sure how much (or what) it should activate. Practically any fact might be vitally important at some single point in any particular individual's lifetime -- and the keyword there is "vitally" -- so I wouldn't want to do the selecting for anyone other than myself (and even there I ha' ma doots).

One argument in favor of your point is that there are vastly more facts, today, than there were a few years ago (especially if revisions/reversals of what were previously considered facts are taken into consideration) -- far more than any one person can learn.

As others have pointed out, what really needs to be learned is how to find information/facts and how to evaluate the quality of what one finds. I don't know about the U.K., but here in the U.S. the current educational trend (abetted by the No Child Left Behind fiasco and demands for Objective Testing) appears to ignore these useful skills and concentrate on teaching a relatively small and quite arbitrary list of facts.
(If anything more were needed to confirm my feeling that the U.S. is doomed to become a second-rate country in the near future, for a generation or more, that would do it.)

[yalovetz]

The thing that I am forever grateful I learned and that I use regularly in my work is propositional logic. I [first] learned it in IB maths, but sadly it's not on any British maths courses until you get to degree level (apart from perhaps Higher Maths A Level), despite being pretty simple and easily within the grasp of GCSE level students. Yeah, technically it might be considered a skill or a way of thinking rather than a fact, but it's the only thing I remember being taught in school that I use regularly.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Good point. I learned it in first year philosophy. I think it helped me as a way of externalising intuition, in a way that lets you discuss it instead of ranting 'it's obvious'.

[andrewducker]

I was actually including skills with facts.

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

My uncle's old school did this, and were more geared toward teaching "skills" than "facts" as a result. Bravo them.

He told me recently that our education model (in the US) is still based on a pre-world-war-one model for an agrarian society.