Facts Are Fun. So Why Do Educators Hate Them?

Or: How I Created "The Quizz" And Saved American Education!

Maybe there was a long-ago time when students had to memorize too much. But anyone who has watched Jay Leno go “Jaywalking” knows that many adults today, even ones who attended college, are remarkably unacquainted with even rudimentary knowledge.

One week he asked this question: “What body of water lies to the west of California?" Remember, the show is shot in California. But he found people who did not know! It’s clearly time to recover lost ground.

One of the weirdest tenets of modern educational theory is that children can engage in “critical thinking” without knowing any facts to think about. Sort of like playing tennis without a ball, swimming without water, or conducting chemistry experiments without chemicals. These activities are properly called make-believe. Common sense says that students should first learn facts, then analyze those facts.

We see lots of surveys in the media indicating that Americans can hardly find their own state on a map. They don't know where Iraq and Vietnam are. They also don't know the simplest kind of information, such as: Roughly how much of the Earth is covered by water--30%, 50%, 70%? The tallest mountain on this planet is what? How many quarts in a gallon?

Call me old-fashioned but I think everyone has to know this basic stuff.

Here’s what happened the last few decades. Educators started to downplay the teaching of basic facts and figures. Instead, many schools stress feelings and opinions. Teachers are taught to say: “Students don’t need to memorize anything. They can look it up.” A slogan which is carte blanche for teaching less and less. Result: some high school graduates don’t know even the simplest things. Which countries border the USA? The deepest spot in the ocean is how deep, 3 miles, 7 miles or 11 miles? How many days from one full moon to the next?

In an effort to dramatize the problem, I started working on A List Of 100 Questions That Everybody Should Be Able To Answer. Not a simple task! I wanted the questions to be real questions but so basic that EVEN educators would agree, yeah, okay, maybe kids should know that. Educators, you see, have so completely bought into dumbing-down and knowing-nothing that some of them are going to say, 1 plus 1? Who needs to know that? The kids have calculators! I’m here to argue that this attitude is irresponsible and constitutes a subtle kind of child abuse. You can’t send children into the world as blank slates. Give them tools to work with. For pleasure and for profit, students need to know fundamental information about the reality they will have to deal with.

Okay, what questions should be on my list?...The Eiffel Tower can be found where? How many times zones are in the USA? The most famous canal in the Western Hemisphere is where? Name three countries that are part of Scandinavia?...Too easy? Too hard? Well, I made long lists and let various friends and relatives criticize the selection. Finally, I got 100 I liked, named the list The Quizz, and put it on the internet. Frankly, I want to stir up debate. I want people to have to deal with this fundamental issue: what should a child know? What should a high school graduate know?

The instructions with The Quizz suggest that high school graduates should know all 100 answers and that students who don't score at least 80 correct answers might want to consider suing their schools--for those schools have surely been guilty of malpractice. Here’s some more questions from The Quizz so you can see how it ended up:

Napoleon ruled what country?

Water boils at what temperature?

Australia is the same width as the United States--which is about 1000 miles, 2000 miles, or 3000 miles?

The average of 6, 10 and 14 is what?

Nonfiction means that it’s true or that it’s false?

What is the chemical composition of water?

Name an important event that occurred during the 19th century.

If it’s winter in the northern hemisphere, in the southern hemisphere it’s what season?

Ants and flies are examples of what?

The Amazon flows into what body of water?

Name a famous American novel written before 1990.

A constellation is what?

The two sides in the American Civil War were called what?

Which brothers invented the airplane?

Sharks are fish but whales are mammals. True or false?

These questions, with few exceptions, do not rise to the level of Trivial Pursuits. Kids should be learning most of this information in elementary school. If students in high school can’t answer this type of question, they are surely attending classes in what I call a "fact free zone." On the other hand, The Quizz is just difficult enough that the average college graduate will probably miss a few.

It’s worth mentioning that educators these days expend a lot of energy complaining about all the testing that students must endure. There’s so much homework! There’s so many demands! The poor kids are being wrecked. Listening to all this casually, you might think that an extraordinary amount of education was taking place. I suspect that this bellowing is propaganda. Recently, at a party, a college professor (at a two-year school) described her incoming students to me this way: “They don’t know anything!!!” Isn’t that scary? Then you turn on Jay Leno and he’s asking some woman who claims to be a teacher, “Where did the Pilgrims come from?” She doesn’t know. And when somebody doesn’t know something like that, you start wondering, well, what does she know? Seriously. It must be a very short list.

If you agree with me that children need facts, please check out The Quizz. Challenge kids you know: can you answer all 100? Especially challenge teachers you know: do your students learn this kind of material?

To view the full 100 questions and commentary, see Essay #20 on Improve-Education.org.