School Gate blog: Tips for remembering facts...

Memorising facts and figures is a waste of time for most schoolchildren because such information is readily available a mere mouse click away, a leading commentator has said.

The existence of Google, Wikipedia and online libraries means that there is no useful place in school for old-fashioned rote learning, according to Don Tapscott, author of the bestselling book Wikinomics and a champion of the “net generation”.

A far better approach would be to teach children to think creatively so that they could learn to interpret and apply the knowledge available online. “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is,” Tapscott said. “Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google,” he said.

Tapscott denies that his approach is anti-learning. He argues that the ability to learn new things is more important than ever “in a world where you have to process new information at lightning speed”. He said: “Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”

Tapscott, who coined the term “the net generation” in his 1998 bestseller Growing Up Digital, bases his observations in his latest book, Grown Up Digital, on a study of nearly 8,000 people in 12 countries born between 1978 and 1994. His observations chime with a trend in British classrooms to cut back on traditional teaching and to personalise learning.

Schools are increasingly moving towards more independent study and so-called enrichment activities, with pupils learning at their own pace and focusing on what interests them most. At Wellington College in Berkshire, for example, teenagers are not taught from the front of the class, but instead sit around a large oval table for seminar-style discussions.

Tapscott believes that the model of education that prevails today in most classrooms was designed for the industrial age. “This might have been good for the mass production economy, but it doesn’t deliver for the challenges of the digital economy, or for the ‘net gen’ mind,” he said.

He suggests that the brains of young people today work differently from those of their parents. He argues that digital immersion, in which children may be texting while surfing the internet and listening to their MP3 player, can help them to develop critical thinking skills.

His views are unlikely to be universally welcomed. Ofsted has reported that pupils’ knowledge and understanding of key historical facts is not good enough to enable them to “form overviews and demonstrate strong conceptual understanding”.

Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College, one of the country’s top-performing independent schools, said that a core level of knowledge was essential: “It’s important that children learn facts. If you have no store of knowledge in your head to draw from, you cannot easily engage in discussions or make informed decisions.”

Michael Gove, the Shadow Schools Secretary, has recently criticised “the move away from fact-based learning”, arguing that “knowledge, intellectual capital, is what makes educational progress possible”.

How to be in the know

Osmosis The movement of a solvent - frequently water - from an area of high water potential (low solute concentration) to an area of low water potential (high solute concentration) through a semi-permeable membrane. And an overused metaphor for absorbing information

Metaphor or simile? “The runner was a bounding cheetah, the runner was like a bounding cheetah”. Using the word “like” in every sentence ceases to be, like, poor vocabulary and becomes, like, a poetic device

Battle of Waterloo This answers a host of questions, including what on earth Abba were on about, who or what Prussians actually were, and whether or not 50 million Frenchmen can be wrong

Capital cities Knowing these does not just make geography teachers happy, it pays dividends in pub quizzes

Times recommends

• Undergraduates to get 'consumer rights'
• Schoolgirls think cosmetic surgery is normal
• Lying parents may face court over school places