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Have you read that K-12 education must focus on “critical thinking,” “positive mindset” and “metacognitive skills“? If you have heard these assertions once, you have heard them a hundred times. But repetition doesn’t make these admonitions more plausible. A moment’s reflection will reveal, for example, that you can’t think critically about nothing in particular, that having a positive mindset bears a remarkable resemblance to staying upbeat in the face of setbacks and that metacognitive skills such as “retrieval practice” were once known as learning the material for a test. The productive transfer of skills from one domain of human activity to another, which underlines the call for the nurturing of many of these capacities, is exceptionally rare.

Meanwhile, it is ever more common for school districts and states to publish “portrait of the graduate” — a vision of the well-educated student. As a review of this collection of portraits reveals, there is little emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge. One study that scanned a large number of such portraits produced this condensed list: “Analyze to understand, care for and contribute to society, collaborate across difference, communicate in all media and modalities, create to solve and share, and practice self-awareness and regulation.” Such a hodgepodge of metacognitive, behavioral and ethical goals is often confused, wrongheaded or underthought from the start. To analyze something, you need to know what it’s about; communication in the absence of learning might well be mindless or destructive. In public (and private) schools that are increasingly segregated by income and race, what “differences” are we talking about?

But the drumbeat continues — often found in the admonition to “teach 21^st century skills,” with the ethical implication that an education that doesn’t provide them is cruelly undermining children’s very well-being. A careful review of these “new” skills reveals a lengthy laundry list, multiple elements of which lack sharp definition or repackage long-held, if perennially vacuous, pedagogical aims. To cite some examples, I have my doubts that our century alone values “managing time and resources effectively to complete tasks and achieve outcomes,” or that “forming well-reasoned arguments” would strike us (or even the ancient Greeks) as anything but obvious as an educational goal.

Even elements that seem both contemporary and sane, such as teaching digital literacy and the thoughtful use of artificial intelligence, leave us pressing for meaning. What standards should teachers and students use to evaluate social media if they know little to nothing about the topic?

What has been devalued in these exhortations to impart “skills” is the teaching of knowledge about the world, including geography, history, high-level science and math, foreign languages and the human condition through literature and the arts. Why do we devalue and neglect real knowledge? One key reason is that knowing is equated with “memorization” — a term that has apparently become a pejorative label for an antiquated model of learning. This is astonishing. We expect experts to know vast amounts of information by heart, regardless of whether they are surgeons or concert pianists. We know that without storage of information in long-term memory, learning would become next to impossible — indeed, survival itself would be at risk.

But a second reason — the most common riposte to arguments for teaching content — is that doing so is just regarded as old-fashioned in the era of the internet. After all, we are told, we can always “look it up.”

To question this ubiquitous assertion, take one of the most famous theories in physics: string theory. When we look it up, we find out that to understand string theory, we need to grasp what a Calabi-Yau manifold is. Searching for that term, we are told that “Calabi-Yau manifolds are compact, Ricci-flat Kähler manifolds that are important in string theory” and that “a Ricci flow is a differential equation that smooths a manifold’s metric.” Search for an account of that equation, and we are informed that it’s a “geometric partial differential equation.”

It turns out that, beyond the pleasure of looking at some pretty, knotty shapes without the first conception of what they might be, what I really need to grasp string theory is “a strong foundation in complex geometry, differential geometry and algebraic geometry, including concepts like complex manifolds, Kähler manifolds and Chern classes. Key mathematical tools include differential and integral calculus, topology, abstract algebra and tensor calculus.” This includes, for example, an understanding of the quintic hyperface where a fifth-degree polynomial in multiple variables is equal to zero (what we are after is a smooth quintic hypersurface in P⁴ (a quintic threefold) which is a Calabi-Yau variety).

Are you still with me? Only one reader in 20,000 (I am an optimist on both counts) can, I suspect, understand the terms in the last paragraph, and such understanding isn’t just one more AI prompt away. It’s not that I lack critical thinking; it’s that any level of critical thinking is simply irrelevant to the fact that I haven’t studied the math.

You don’t need string theory to make this point. For years, Ed hugsfollowed more recently by policymakers in Englandstate leaders such as John White in Louisiana, commentators like Natalie Wexler and organizations like the Knowledge Matters Campaignhave argued — supported by considerable evidence — that without broad background knowledge, becoming a strong reader is impossible. According to this body of research (and to common sense), it’s pointless to ask an American child to “find the main idea” in a sentence like “he switched to the googly and so rearranged the placing of the silly mid-off” — yet many English students would have no trouble understanding the cricket reference. Research and insights from cognitive and educational psychology, sociology and curriculum studies converge on the foundational idea that knowledge acquisition is the essential foundation for complex thought, including thinking critically about a topic.

Those who advocate for schools to teach metacognition should also demand that students first learn about the world and the human condition.

The response that some things can’t be understood without studying them, or that students will struggle to comprehend texts if they are unfamiliar with the background knowledge those texts presuppose, hasn’t stopped the steady retreat from requiring schools to teach knowledge. Exhibit 1 is grade inflation: High school graduates earned an average 3.11 GPA in 2019, up from 3.00 in 2009 and 2.68 in 1990while NAEP scores (and ACT/SAT performance) declined. In short, we call knowledge today what we used to call ignorance. Exhibit 2 is the steady reduction in state requirements of any testing for high school graduation (incorporating recent decisions in New York and Massachusettswe are down to six states).

And Exhibit 3 is what counts as news: Does the nation care that Louisiana — the only state in which the vast majority of teachers have been using the same high-quality, content-rich curriculum for years — was also the only state to show NAEP gains in fourth and eighth grade right through the COVID years and continuing? Consider, too, the mainstream indifference (a couple of commentators notwithstanding) to the fact that charter schools, especially those in charter management organizationsalone bucked the national trend of falling NAEP 12th-grade outcomes.

There is really only one important counter-push, known as HQIM (high-quality instructional materials). Fifteen states have now joined a partnershipled by the Council of Chief State School Officers, to shift their public schools to the use of these curricula. In English Language Arts, such curricula are rated by EdReports as meeting state standards — and must pass a “building knowledge” standard as part of the evaluation. Still, as is clear from detailed work that the Institute at Johns Hopkins has conducted over the last decade, many EdReports“approved” ELA curricula still focus on disconnected bodies of thematically related topics that fail to build sequential knowledge (E.D. Hirsch’s CKLA – Core Knowledge Language Arts – has been a rare exception). As Heather Peske has recently arguedthe use of knowledge-rich curriculum is now threatened by how AI is often used — namely, to dumb down strong curriculum.

There are powerful ways in which AI could support effective knowledge acquisition (CourseMojo is one example). But, as ever with technology, the question will be whether the misuses undermine the potential benefits.

We reap what we sow. Today, poorer students are reading more poorly, compared with their wealthy peers, than they have since NAEP started measuring the gap. Preaching anti-intellectualism and a disdain for acquiring knowledge may be politically efficacious. It also creates a smokescreen over the nation’s widening income distribution, which is, in turn, highly correlated with disparate educational outcomes.

The arguments in this piece have been couched in the language of utility — why it’s important to know stuff, and why it’s worth reflecting on the causes of knowledge’s dethronement. But in closing, remember Plato’s Apology, and in particular Socrates’ now-untimely statement that the unexamined life is not worth living. Except that what Plato has Socrates say is, in fact, much more radical: For a human being, “the unexamined life is not livable.” Knowledge furnishes the mind — what we know is the most intimate, the most enduring, of our companions. Without it, we are but bundles of instincts, emotions and habitual behaviors. Fortunately, children love to absorb knowledge — if we would but provide it.

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