FINALLY! Someone Else Says It!

I've said this for years:

If there is anything in education on which everyone agrees, it’s the vital importance of “critical thinking,” writes Alexander Nazaryan in Newsweek. However, before students can think, they need to learn. Call it “uncritical thinking,” the “unquestioning reception and retention of facts.”

Hear hear! If I've said it once I've said it a zillion times:  You can’t think critically if you don’t have a base of information to think critically about.  As I wrote in my comment at the link above:

Kids should learn their multiplication tables, for example; of course, understanding that multiplying is repeated addition, and knowing how to read and use place value, are important in that task, but they need to memorize them. Period. American students should know the names of the 50 states. Period.

Yes, there’s much memorization to be done.

If you’ve ever only been fed a steady diet of political views from one political party, you can’t really think critically about the other side because you don’t know about the other side.

You must *know* some stuff before you can analyze that stuff. In all honesty I can’t see how that idea can even be questioned.