Interesting article by AC Grayling in the “Commentary” column of last week’s New Scientist under the above title. The “Commentary” column, written on alternate weeks by Grayling and Lawrence Krauss, always provides food for thought. This week’s column was, in my view, especially important. As usual because New Scientist don’t make their articles available on-line to non-subscribers here is an edited version.

Philosophers investigating the nature of knowledge and the best methods of acquiring it have always distinguished between knowledge of facts and knowledge of techniques. Knowing that Everest is the highest mountain, and knowing how to measure the height of mountains, are respective examples of the two kinds of knowing. The interesting question is, which is more important?

[…] an education system worthy of the name should equip people with both kinds. But it is still worthwhile to ask which is more important, for the equally obvious reason that no head can first cram in, and then later recall at need, everything that passes as currently accepted fact. What’s more, the number of currently accepted facts is tiny in comparison with what we know we still do not know, which is in turn probably a tiny fraction of what might be knowable.

So although everyone coming out of an educational system should at least know [basic facts] they are much more in need of knowing how to find things out, how to evaluate the information they discover, and how to apply it fruitfully. These are skills; they consist in knowledge of how to become knowledgeable.

[…] information is not knowledge […]

[…] it is no bad thing that the internet is such a democratic domain, where opinions and claims can enjoy an unfettered airing […] This increases the necessity for internet users to be good at discriminating between high and low-quality information, and between reliable and unreliable sources.

We teach research skills in higher education differently for the sciences and humanities […] In the sciences, laboratory technique and experimental design and methodology are fundamental; in the humanities, the use of libraries and archives and the interpretation of texts are in the basic tool kit […]

Knowing how to evaluate information, therefore, is arguably the most important kind of knowledge that education has to teach […] only the International Baccalaureate makes critical thinking […] a standard requirement, and in this as in so many ways it leads the field […] I wonder whether the need for critical thinking lessons is more urgent in the humanities than the sciences because the latter, by their nature, already have it built in. The science lab at school with its whiffs, sparks and bangs is a theatre of evaluation; the idea of testing and proving is the natural order there […]

When we talk of scientific literacy, one thing we should mean is acquisition of just this mindset; without it, too much rubbish gets through.

It’s no wonder that people don’t think is it!?