Such a focus on the forest means that the defense of claims
is often vague or irrelevant. Anecdotes
and procedures lack continuity because the steps between the beginning and end
were invisible, as though the camera’s shutter got stuck.
Some folks lay the blame on the observation that you are to blame: when
better alternatives are lacking, you have your noses stuck to your smart
phones. It’s hard to notice one’s
surroundings when always looking down.
True enough, but I saw the poor recall/ignorance of detail
with my high school students long before smart phones became ubiquitous. Face it, teachers have been trained to train you
to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate from the time your’re in grade
school. We teachers have lost balance,
though, and since we abhor “drill and kill” and mock learning “names and
dates,” we have forgotten the need for lower level knowledge, even though it is
the foundation for Bloom’s entire structure.
I can’t help but think that this handicaps inquiry (we read
only for the “main idea”) as well as argument.
Furthermore, we enable and reinforce “biased assimilation,” our
preference for evidence confirming our stands over contradictory facts. If we don’t bother remembering facts, such
self-protective regard is even more secure.
Add to that, of course, postmodernist doubts about
the very concept of objective fact, and we leave you without a crucial
intellectual tool.
Pile on Trump's insistence that everything criticizing him is "fake news." It's not just a class issue. White, educated, middle class parents listen to the conspiracy theorists--some of them, we now know are Russian propagandists--and refuse to vaccinate their children. The dangers multiply.
Bereiter and Scardamalia have documented that knowledge
enables experts to dramatically shorten how they solve problems compared to
non-experts. Some of that is procedural
and skill-based, but underneath it all is domain specific knowledge of what
things are and how they work.
The stories of students’ ignorance continue to surface,
their “college readiness” questioned, and their high failure rates leading to
dysfunctional political initiatives (Rich).
Intellectual skills form the mortar that puts facts into
context and relates them to each other and to conceptual schemes. But mortar without bricks makes for poor
structures.
Sources
Bereiter, Carl, and Marlene
Scardamalia. Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications
of Expertise. Chicago: Open Court, 1993. Print.
Rich, Motoko.
"As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short." New
York Times 26 Dec. 2015, sec. A. NY Times. Web. 31 Dec. 2015.