On “inflexible knowledge”

The concept of inflexible knowledge has made the rounds on the edu-circuit for years now.  In short, math education isn’t working, because if it were, then people would be able to apply prior knowledge to solve problems in new situations. That is, knowledge would just transfer like a hot knife through butter.

Robert Craigen, math professor at U. of Manitoba has this take on the idea of “inflexible knowledge”:

It isn’t knowledge that is inflexible — it is people. One should learn the knowledge, and then have practice and exposure applying it in flexible ways. The error of progressive ed is the notion that if one doesn’t acquire knowledge in particular ways then it isn’t flexible. 

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s