A Solid Education Starts With Facts

The West won’t survive if citizens are taught how to argue before they are taught what is true.

The argument: A free society depends on citizens grounded in shared factual knowledge, and schools must restore content mastery before skills if we want to preserve self-government.

WHY IT MATTERS

Today’s fact-free students will become tomorrow’s poorly informed leaders, teachers, and citizens. What kind of society do we expect to build—or sustain—when the expectations for the students in our education system is at an all-time low?

Most schools today encourage “critical thinking,” inviting students to build rhetorical skills, decode documents, apply methods and form opinions before students have learned the underlying content. Students are asked to engage without understanding. For example, students might be asked to “evaluate arguments” without knowing basic historical facts. This skills-first approach has left little room for passing down essential knowledge.

Photo by: austin_7792 (Unsplash)

These practices mean that students often have strong emotional responses to current events, but not nearly enough context. One illustration is how often students repeat political slogans without understanding the basic geography or history behind them. For example, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that “only 47% of the students who embrace the slogan [“From the river to the sea”] were able to name the river and the sea. Some of the alternative answers were the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic.”

Civic knowledge is also low. A 2024 survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation found that “70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz on topics like the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices, and other basic functions of our democracy.” This knowledge deficit is strongly linked to educational policies that focus too narrowly on skills, minimize achievement, and allow students to progress without mastery. You probably have heard teachers complain about “teaching to the test,” with cumbersome requirements teachers must adhere to while frequently being forced to ignore more meaningful, fact-based content.

This lack of knowledge is a disaster for public discourse. But it is also detrimental to building the very “critical thinking” skills that schools promise to provide. Facts are the essential building blocks of deep understanding. T.A. Van Dijk and W. Kintsch explain that one of the major contributions of psychology is the understanding that “much of the information needed to understand a text is not provided by the text itself but must be drawn from the language user’s knowledge of the person, objects, states of affairs, or events the discourse is about.”

In other words, readers can’t properly understand even a newspaper article if they don’t already have a considerable number of facts at hand. That’s why it’s so important that schools bring back the teaching of substantive content and expect students to master it.

Doing so would mean teaching a coherent sequence of history, geography, and civics, along with a return to memorization of key facts and the use of frequent quizzes to enforce retention. Schools should also adopt reading built around shared cultural references and insist on student mastery before advancement. That’s not to say that we abandon skills, but students must have concrete knowledge before they can engage in higher-order thinking.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The preservation of our republic depends on having a well-educated citizenry. Schools must get back to teaching content knowledge—and expect mastery. As John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, wisdom and knowledge “diffused generally among the body of the people, [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.”

Jenna A. Robinson, Senior Editor of Education at Restoring the West, is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Follow her on X @jarobinson1.