Content Knowledge Is Still Necessary

A couple of decades ago, we started hearing people say "You don't have to teach students that stuff. They can just google it." This was dumb, and wrong.

But now we're getting a new level of this with AI hucksters. Here's just one sample of the pitches it am sent many times a day:

In the 1967 classic The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was advised "one word: plastics." If it was remade in 2025, the one word would be AI.

Or the people who keep pitching the idea that AI can take over the difficult parts of student writing, like coming up with ideas, or writing a thesis, or maybe, you know, just have the AI write the assignment and then the student could do the rewrite. 

Relax, they say. It's just like when calculators arrived and math teachers freaked out.

Well, no, it's not. First, it would have to involved a calculator that gave the wrong answer a significant amount of the time. Second, there is no writing prompt that can be answered with only one correct essay. 

Content knowledge matters. This is so basic to education, and tech shortcuts do not change it. All aspects of learning rest on Knowing Stuff.

You can google for information all day, but if you don't Know Stuff, you have no way to sort the information wheat from the sludge-covered chaff. "Well, that's why students need the 21st Century skill of analysis and critical thinking," say the techphiles. But you cannot teach critical thinking and analysis like they are content-free skills, waves that exist without a medium through which to move.

My critical thinking skills are fine in areas where I have some content knowledge, or can connect the new information to knowledge I already have. I cannot apply critical thinking to areas in which I am completely ignorant and cannot connect to stuff I already know. As an adult, I have the advantage of having had years to learn lots of stuff, but children do not have that advantage.

Which is why the best thing we can do for small humans is give them the chance to learn stuff. I'm going to argue that it doesn't even matter what the stuff is. For years the Board of Directors here at the Institute were deeply interested in "work trucks"-- construction vehicles of all kinds. Now in second grade, we are deep in Pokemon territory. Do I love this for us? I do not. But they have absorbed a ton of information, and they have learned to organize and categorize large chunks of information in ways that they never could have if we had tried to teach organization without using something to organize. Plus a ton of vocabulary and math that they have picked up via these damned stupid delightful cards.

You can't acquire knowledge and skill second hand, nor can you do it in a vacuum. Of all the AI-for-student-writing advice I read, the most maddening may be "Have the AI write a rough draft and then have the students rewrite." How the hell does someone who has not written know how to edit a piece of writing? And how do you edit a piece when you have no idea what the author meant to say (or, in fact, the author is incapable of intent)? How do they develop the skill of figuring out what they think about a topic by having the AI spit out some topics for them? The only way this could be worse would be if the topic assigned was something the students had no knowledge of at all.

This kind of thinking puts product over process, but it also shows a failure to fully understand the product itself, like a builder who has built a house but neglected to put a foundation under it. 

Knowing Stuff is inescapably important. Writing requires thinking about stuff. Critical thinking is thinking about stuff. Evaluating sources and materials involves thinking about stuff. And you cannot think about what you know nothing about. And neither google nor ChatGPT can change that.