A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to some degree that’s true but personally I think that without building on some decent level of foundational level of knowledge and having a mental model of a subject, you can’t tackle thorny questions because you don’t have enough to draw upon as examples and cou…
Education itself is supposed to teach us learning, not the mere facts/methods, not just the hard knowledge. Hard knowledge comes with it anyway as some sort of 'side product'. You cant learn on nothing, something will be used for it, that something forms the hard knowledge eventually. Typically broad set but shallow hard knowledge. Ironicly, this is what I feel chipping away in modern collaborative developments. The…
As a counterpoint though, the way things have gone in the U.K. is to go deep on niche topics without building up appreciation of the broad strokes. To give an example, there’s a GCSE History course for 14-16 year olds where the syllabus is effectively “medicine through time” and “the American West” without ever going near the British Empire, colonialism, the Tudor or Elizabethan periods, the reformation, the Industrial Revolution, Irish home rule and independence, etc. etc. any one of which gives much more insight into the formation of the state and cultural affairs as it stands today.
To my mind it’s too narrow a focus at too young an age when teaching a subject that a lot of children take. It also means there are constantly “we don’t even teach that at school” debates.