The War on Knowledge
At the private school where I once taught, the idea was that spelling got in the way of creativity. So I watched as kids wrote ‘macien’ for ‘machine’ at age 14. Tuition was $60,000 a year.
Archive
Can you list the only two countries in the world with an X in their name?
I often toss this question out at cocktail parties. And while my wife cringes at my dorkiness, it’s generally a hit.
People pause, think, blurt out the right answer, and do a little dance. It feels good to know something. (Keep reading for the answer!)
We like facts. They anchor us. They remind us that the world and reality are knowable things—and as we understand them, we better understand our own places in them.
Growing up, facts were an essential part of understanding the world around me. I marveled at the term oblate spheroid and how it perfectly described the shape of our planet. I picked up a nifty trick that let me calculate 20 percent tips in my head (hold your applause). And it still pains me to recount the word that knocked me out of the sixth-grade spelling bee: welp as in a welp of dogs. (I added an H.)
These were seminal experiences in my education, and they all hinged upon the mastery of objective truths.
But schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.
In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.
But without facts, what are students actually learning?
At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.
I then watched smart, curious kids write macien for machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.
Math was treated with the same flippancy. Curious about the curiously low standardized test scores, I once wandered into a math classroom where the teacher was barefoot, in a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt (it was a great shirt). He then drew a circle on the board and announced, “This is not a circle. It’s a representation of a circle.” The lesson, it seemed, was to gain mystique points by using a stoner voice to say something quirky. I couldn’t help but make a connection between that math lesson, and the school’s undying demand for expensive private tutors.
The war on knowledge isn’t confined to elite enclaves. The Seattle Public School system embraced a “Math Ethnic Studies Framework” starting in 2019. There, teachers were encouraged to reflect in their curriculum: “How can we change mathematics from individualist to collectivist thinking?” Yikes.
That math framework, reaching more than 50,000 students, drew on themes like Power and Oppression and History of Resistance and Liberation. Which reminds me of my favorite math joke: Why was 10 scared of 7? Because 7 ate 9 . . . and 9 was oppressed. Or something like that.
That punchline might be harmless, but the underlying philosophy is not.
In the words of Tracy Castro-Gill, the creator of the Math Ethnic Studies Framework, “decolonial teacher education must actively confront coloniality and create alternative frameworks.” In her words, she casts education itself as a colonial project to be dismantled—a fundamental departure from what the word means.
It’s worth pointing out that the word education comes from two Latin roots: educare, which means to bring up, and educere, which means to lead forth. They’re different shades of “helping someone become,” but what’s interesting is what they are not: They have precisely zero to do with race, racial hierarchy, or any modern politics of inclusion or exclusion. The Romans weren’t secretly coding for systemic anything; they were just trying to get their kids and soldiers not to be idiots.
Seattle isn’t alone. In 2021, California unveiled a draft of its new Mathematics Framework, calling for districts to abandon tracking practices and delaying Algebra I until ninth grade in the name of equity. In doing so, however, they stunted the students who may well have soared, all while affluent families bypassed the system through private options.
Even after this debacle led to historic recall elections and the removal of three commissioners on the Board of Education, the war on knowledge has continued in recent years. Since 2023, several districts in blue cities—including Portland Public Schools, select portions of Los Angeles, and San Francisco Unified—have explored or piloted “grading for equity” reforms. These reforms typically eliminate harsh penalties for missing work or cheating; exclude homework, attendance, behavior, and participation from academic grades; and permit unlimited retakes of tests and essays.
The ostensible logic goes like this: traditional grading penalizes students for circumstances outside of their control, such as late buses, lack of quiet space to study, inconsistent supervision. These policies aim to shift focus toward demonstrated mastery of content.
While the intent may be good, one can’t help but wonder if school is still about academic training or has instead set its targets preeminently on engineering social change—a task for which it is woefully incapable.
The College Board, too, has declared facts out of fashion. In 2014, the AP United States History curriculum was revised to focus on broad themes and historical thinking skills. Important dates, names, and events were either removed or deemphasized. Critics from across the political spectrum were baffled. How could a student demonstrate knowledge of the major events in U.S. history without being expected to know when the events happened?
What’s strange, and troubling, is that both political extremes have found a way to undermine knowledge. On the left, measuring knowledge is seen as exposing inequity, so the solution is to stop measuring. On the right, a growing fatalism insists that intelligence is fixed and schools can’t do much to change outcomes, so why invest? Both views lead to the same dead end: a quiet abandonment of learning itself.
None of this is to say that education should become a trivia contest. Knowing facts isn’t the end goal, but facts are a prerequisite to higher orders of thinking, of the ability to separate reality from fiction.
Ask any cognitive scientist and they’ll tell you that factual knowledge is the foundation of thinking. Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, put it simply in his modern classic Why Don’t Students Like School?: “Thinking well requires knowing facts. . . . The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes like reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge.”
Our brains are magical marvels of daydreaming and contemplation. We piece ideas together. We pepper and salt. We ponder. And out of this pondering comes . . . virtually everything. Companies. Screenplays. My hilarious Rage Against the Machine joke from earlier.
And what happens when we empty the well? When the reservoir is dry, we see a cacophonous litany of disparate voices, each talking about their feelings and perspectives, with no respect for factual relevance. Yap, yap, yap.
And yet, despite the ideological fog, there are signs of renewal.
Parents, jolted awake by Zoom school during Covid, are paying closer attention to what their children are actually learning—or not learning.
After San Francisco unveiled its “Grading for Equity” pilot program for the 2025–2026 school year, critics warned that removing grading penalties and lowering expectations sent the message that effort doesn’t matter. After just a couple of days of widespread backlash, SFUSD officially pulled the initiative.
Furthermore, some of the most fact-rich students I’ve ever encountered have been in the last few years, bolstered by late nights of chasing their curiosity down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Soon after students began using YouTube for educational purposes, I watched an eighth-grader named Uday deliver an impromptu lecture in my anatomy class on the intricacies of the integumentary system—rattling off sebaceous glands and keratinocytes with the gusto of a TED speaker. It was thrilling (though I feared for my job).
It seems self-evident that, even in an age of AI, we are built to learn. Our brains still get juicy evolutionarily shaped dopamine hits when they form new connections, and we feel proud to demonstrate mastery. This is plainly apparent when I sit my 3-year-old in front of an interactive globe and she proudly looks up a few minutes later to announce with gusto: “Dada! Venezuela!”
But do facts still matter in a world where people are getting dumber by the year? We’re actually not. Contrary to popular belief, a well-researched psychological phenomenon called the Flynn Effect posits that the average human gets more intelligent every generation.
I personally think that the trend will continue in the near future as we harness technology and feed the curious, the Udays, the ones among us who still hold knowledge in high regard.
After all, knowing things is not a crime. It’s a joy.
Now back to that cocktail party question. The answer is Mexico and Luxembourg.
You don’t need to know that. But don’t you feel a little better now that you do?
At the private school where I once taught, the idea was that spelling got in the way of creativity. So I watched as kids wrote ‘macien’ for ‘machine’ at age 14. Tuition was $60,000 a year.
Archive
Can you list the only two countries in the world with an X in their name?
I often toss this question out at cocktail parties. And while my wife cringes at my dorkiness, it’s generally a hit.
People pause, think, blurt out the right answer, and do a little dance. It feels good to know something. (Keep reading for the answer!)
We like facts. They anchor us. They remind us that the world and reality are knowable things—and as we understand them, we better understand our own places in them.
Growing up, facts were an essential part of understanding the world around me. I marveled at the term oblate spheroid and how it perfectly described the shape of our planet. I picked up a nifty trick that let me calculate 20 percent tips in my head (hold your applause). And it still pains me to recount the word that knocked me out of the sixth-grade spelling bee: welp as in a welp of dogs. (I added an H.)
These were seminal experiences in my education, and they all hinged upon the mastery of objective truths.
But schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.
In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.
But without facts, what are students actually learning?
At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.
I then watched smart, curious kids write macien for machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.
Math was treated with the same flippancy. Curious about the curiously low standardized test scores, I once wandered into a math classroom where the teacher was barefoot, in a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt (it was a great shirt). He then drew a circle on the board and announced, “This is not a circle. It’s a representation of a circle.” The lesson, it seemed, was to gain mystique points by using a stoner voice to say something quirky. I couldn’t help but make a connection between that math lesson, and the school’s undying demand for expensive private tutors.
The war on knowledge isn’t confined to elite enclaves. The Seattle Public School system embraced a “Math Ethnic Studies Framework” starting in 2019. There, teachers were encouraged to reflect in their curriculum: “How can we change mathematics from individualist to collectivist thinking?” Yikes.
That math framework, reaching more than 50,000 students, drew on themes like Power and Oppression and History of Resistance and Liberation. Which reminds me of my favorite math joke: Why was 10 scared of 7? Because 7 ate 9 . . . and 9 was oppressed. Or something like that.
That punchline might be harmless, but the underlying philosophy is not.
In the words of Tracy Castro-Gill, the creator of the Math Ethnic Studies Framework, “decolonial teacher education must actively confront coloniality and create alternative frameworks.” In her words, she casts education itself as a colonial project to be dismantled—a fundamental departure from what the word means.
It’s worth pointing out that the word education comes from two Latin roots: educare, which means to bring up, and educere, which means to lead forth. They’re different shades of “helping someone become,” but what’s interesting is what they are not: They have precisely zero to do with race, racial hierarchy, or any modern politics of inclusion or exclusion. The Romans weren’t secretly coding for systemic anything; they were just trying to get their kids and soldiers not to be idiots.
Seattle isn’t alone. In 2021, California unveiled a draft of its new Mathematics Framework, calling for districts to abandon tracking practices and delaying Algebra I until ninth grade in the name of equity. In doing so, however, they stunted the students who may well have soared, all while affluent families bypassed the system through private options.
Even after this debacle led to historic recall elections and the removal of three commissioners on the Board of Education, the war on knowledge has continued in recent years. Since 2023, several districts in blue cities—including Portland Public Schools, select portions of Los Angeles, and San Francisco Unified—have explored or piloted “grading for equity” reforms. These reforms typically eliminate harsh penalties for missing work or cheating; exclude homework, attendance, behavior, and participation from academic grades; and permit unlimited retakes of tests and essays.
The ostensible logic goes like this: traditional grading penalizes students for circumstances outside of their control, such as late buses, lack of quiet space to study, inconsistent supervision. These policies aim to shift focus toward demonstrated mastery of content.
While the intent may be good, one can’t help but wonder if school is still about academic training or has instead set its targets preeminently on engineering social change—a task for which it is woefully incapable.
The College Board, too, has declared facts out of fashion. In 2014, the AP United States History curriculum was revised to focus on broad themes and historical thinking skills. Important dates, names, and events were either removed or deemphasized. Critics from across the political spectrum were baffled. How could a student demonstrate knowledge of the major events in U.S. history without being expected to know when the events happened?
What’s strange, and troubling, is that both political extremes have found a way to undermine knowledge. On the left, measuring knowledge is seen as exposing inequity, so the solution is to stop measuring. On the right, a growing fatalism insists that intelligence is fixed and schools can’t do much to change outcomes, so why invest? Both views lead to the same dead end: a quiet abandonment of learning itself.
None of this is to say that education should become a trivia contest. Knowing facts isn’t the end goal, but facts are a prerequisite to higher orders of thinking, of the ability to separate reality from fiction.
Ask any cognitive scientist and they’ll tell you that factual knowledge is the foundation of thinking. Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, put it simply in his modern classic Why Don’t Students Like School?: “Thinking well requires knowing facts. . . . The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes like reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge.”
Our brains are magical marvels of daydreaming and contemplation. We piece ideas together. We pepper and salt. We ponder. And out of this pondering comes . . . virtually everything. Companies. Screenplays. My hilarious Rage Against the Machine joke from earlier.
And what happens when we empty the well? When the reservoir is dry, we see a cacophonous litany of disparate voices, each talking about their feelings and perspectives, with no respect for factual relevance. Yap, yap, yap.
And yet, despite the ideological fog, there are signs of renewal.
Parents, jolted awake by Zoom school during Covid, are paying closer attention to what their children are actually learning—or not learning.
After San Francisco unveiled its “Grading for Equity” pilot program for the 2025–2026 school year, critics warned that removing grading penalties and lowering expectations sent the message that effort doesn’t matter. After just a couple of days of widespread backlash, SFUSD officially pulled the initiative.
Furthermore, some of the most fact-rich students I’ve ever encountered have been in the last few years, bolstered by late nights of chasing their curiosity down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Soon after students began using YouTube for educational purposes, I watched an eighth-grader named Uday deliver an impromptu lecture in my anatomy class on the intricacies of the integumentary system—rattling off sebaceous glands and keratinocytes with the gusto of a TED speaker. It was thrilling (though I feared for my job).
It seems self-evident that, even in an age of AI, we are built to learn. Our brains still get juicy evolutionarily shaped dopamine hits when they form new connections, and we feel proud to demonstrate mastery. This is plainly apparent when I sit my 3-year-old in front of an interactive globe and she proudly looks up a few minutes later to announce with gusto: “Dada! Venezuela!”
But do facts still matter in a world where people are getting dumber by the year? We’re actually not. Contrary to popular belief, a well-researched psychological phenomenon called the Flynn Effect posits that the average human gets more intelligent every generation.
I personally think that the trend will continue in the near future as we harness technology and feed the curious, the Udays, the ones among us who still hold knowledge in high regard.
After all, knowing things is not a crime. It’s a joy.
Now back to that cocktail party question. The answer is Mexico and Luxembourg.
You don’t need to know that. But don’t you feel a little better now that you do?
