Knowledge-Based Education vs. Process-Based Education 87
decisions are made through argumentation and force of reason—not by knowing the right answer. People who know a lot are generally quite smart. I could do well at Jeopardy as could most professors, I would think. But we are not successful intellectuals because we know a lot of facts. We know a lot of facts because we are successful intellectu- als. People have got this backwards.
Consider athletes. A great baseball player and a great basketball player, it can be assumed, also will be very good at lifting weights. But they did not become good at lifting weights and then become great athletes. It was the other way around. They had a natural talent for hitting a ball or shooting baskets and then they had to get stronger in order to compete with others who had the same talents. The talent is the reason—not the weightlifting. Michael Jordan, a really great ath- lete, couldn’t become a successful baseball player because he couldn’t hit a curve ball. That talent had nothing to do with the athletic abil- ity that made him a great basketball player. Hitting a curve ball is a different kind of talent. His weightlifting ability was the same either way. I know a lot of facts and I am talented at designing educational software. The facts I know do not help with the talent. But the more educational software I design in different domains of knowledge, the more facts I pick up.
When we look at people who are knowledgeable and confuse that with people who can think well, we totally miss the point about edu- cation. Education ought not be focused on imparting facts any more than athletic training ought to be focused on weightlifting. You learn to hit a ball by hitting one and you learn to think clearly by thinking. Focusing on the 12 cognitive processes I have outlined, rather than focusing on fact acquisition, helps one learn to think.
TESTING TEACHES THAT SOME SUBJECTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHERS
The tests are small in number. If there were thousands to choose from, then perhaps people could get tested in fiber optics instead of history. But the system has determined which subjects are the most impor- tant. The system made that determination in 1892. Some things have changed in the world since then. There are a few new subjects—psy- chology, computers, medicine, business, and law, for example. Many
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023827