Is That a Fact?

Send us Fan MailMost schools design curriculum around a fact forward approach. Facts are always in the foreground while ideas lurk in the background and generally make only cameo appearances. This is exactly wrong. The role of facts is to support ideas. Facts are organized by ideas and not the reverse. It is ideas that have consequences. While there may be "inconvenient facts," they are inconvenient only to ideas that fail to take them into account. Critical thinking seeks to give structure and meaning to facts and harness them for much greater ends than mere retrieval.This episode seeks to put facts in their rightful place and empower parents to help their children focus on ideas even when the education establishment does not.