Is There More to Knowledge Than Just Learning?

Even if students take in and retain the information from teaching, is there something more involved in understanding or making meaning out of the material? Is there something involving creativity or problem solving that students must be able to do either with the material or as a separate skill that goes beyond simply retaining the material? Jay Mathews in
The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills - washingtonpost.com seems to accept there is something deeper but rejects trying to teach it, at least before the basics are learned.

I am not so impressed. I have been writing cranky columns about 21st-century skills on washingtonpost.com calling the movement a pipe dream whose literature should be tossed in the trash.

Here's another typical response to the "something deeper" or different that goes beyond simple learning from a Direct Instruction advocate. Rob Kremer states,

Starting with the front page, where there's a big article on the controversy over math instruction. For years, the educrats have been trying to shove down the throats of parents and children their ridiculous theories on how kids learn math. When parents see the stupid stuff their kids are doing (group projects, math journals, spending hours on trivial problems) they go crazy. The educrats hem and haw, try to run out the clock. The persistent parents win.

Well, the article today tried to put the best face on it for the education establishment. The real story is that parents resent their kids being used as guinea pigs as the educrats try once again to pretend they have this new approach to learning (which is nothing more than the same old bullshit John Dewey 'constructivism' packaged in some other shiny box) but the parents know better.

Johnny can't multiply 9 times 5 in the fourth grade, but the educrats yammer on about 'conceptual understanding.'"

Terms such as "understanding" are much too vague and open to misuse so we should not rush to judgment. It is possible writers who decry constructivism see bad teaching rather than actual constructivism in the scientific sense.