JJ McCullough makes a pedagogical point

Koreans, with their educational system that over-focuses on rote memorization, would probably cheer the conclusions that JJ McCullough comes to in this video about the need to know brute facts as opposed to learning so-called "general skills," which include—I presume—skills like how to think through a problem. I'm not sure I agree with this perspective.

Over on YouTube, I left the following comment under this video:

As a former teacher in the US who now lives in Korea, I can see, up close, the pernicious effects of an education system that focuses too fanatically on rote learning and memorization. Koreans learn a lot of facts as they go through the education mill, but they learn almost nothing about how to think. Call it "general skills" if you want, but learning how to think—and having a culture of free discussion—is essential if you value creativity and innovation.

I agree that US kids leave school generally lacking in facts, which are the things you need if you're going to think about something: thinking is always thinking about, after all. But US kids don't freeze up when faced with a new problem or situation. Asian kids are trained to think in terms of multiple-choice tests: there is only one correct answer to a given problem. The moment they see something unfamiliar, they try to fit the situation into some pre-set algorithm they learned in the past—fitting the square peg into a round hole. Failing that, they freeze up. It's a running joke among expat English teachers: "How do you shut a Korean student up? Ask him a question." Korean kids fall silent and just sit there when they don't know something.

It doesn't help that Korean society tends to be hierarchical, and since there's also no real culture of discussion, it's hard for good ideas to win out over bad ideas. A Korean boss comes up with a lame idea, and all of his underlings are obliged to praise him and go along with his idea, even if it leads the company over a cliff. When Korean kids learn how to peel a tangerine, they all learn (memorize) exactly the same technique, and they think it's strange when they see someone using a different method to peel the tangerine. A doctor sees a patient for a five-minute consult, doesn't even look at the patient, but types the patient's symptoms into a computer, looks at the algorithm's results, and makes a prescription based purely on the computer's recommendation. All of this is the result of rote, multiple-choice-style thinking (i.e., only one answer is right). It's a monoculture that simultaneously corrals thinking along certain channels and demands passive acceptance of the hierarchy.

To be fair, innovation and creativity do happen in South Korea, but it's often a struggle for good results to emerge from the morass of soul-deadening conformity, rote learning, and hierarchical thinking. An institution like KAIST (something like Korea's answer to MIT) is ferociously innovative, but that's because the educational system at KAIST has embraced the Western model. KAIST wants and needs thinkers.

If you look at the 1950s-era Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognition, you see that knowledge, i.e., memorized facts, lies at the base of the pyramid. Positively, this makes knowledge the base on which all higher cognition is built (comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation—per the original pyramid diagram). Negatively, it makes knowledge the lowest, simplest, most rudimentary form of cognition. There's nothing sophisticated about merely knowing facts: the facts have to be used and applied, and that's what higher cognition is for. Korean culture falls down miserably when it comes to higher-cognitive skills being taught in the education system. And truth be told, the American system isn't much better. But in the US, at least, you have discussion and debate; you're taught to think in organized outlines when writing, and there's a respect for higher cognition generally not found in Korean education. I've proofread enough Korean professors' papers to have seen the sloppy thinking firsthand. It's a mess.

So for all those reasons, I can agree, at least a little, that a focus on facts does a limited amount of good. But focusing on facts at the expense of focusing on thinking skills is a recipe for cultural disaster. Facts don't apply themselves.