Why Is Knowledge Shallow?

This scenario brings to mind a famous problem posed by the philosopher John Searle.¹ Searle wanted to argue that a computer might display intelligent behavior without really understanding what it is doing. He posed this thought problem: Suppose a person is alone in a room. We can slip pieces of paper with Chinese writing on them under the door. The person in the room speaks no Chinese but responds to each message. He has an enormous book, each page of which is divided into two columns. There are strings of Chinese characters on the left and on the right. He scans the book until he matches the character string on the slip of paper to a string in the left-hand column. Then he carefully copies the characters in the right-hand column onto the piece of paper and slips it back under the door. We have posed a question in Chinese and the person in the room has responded in Chinese. Does the person in the room understand Chinese?

Almost everyone says no. He's giving sensible responses, but he's just copying them from a book. Searle provided this example to argue that computers, even if they display sophisticated behavior such as comprehending Chinese, aren't thinking in the way in which we understand the term. We might say the same thing about students. Rote knowledge might lead to giving the right response, but it doesn't mean the student is thinking.

We can see examples of "sophisticated answers" that don't have understanding behind them in "student bloopers," which get forwarded with regularity via e-mail. Some of them are good examples of rote knowledge; for example, "Three kinds of blood vessels are arteries, vanes, and caterpillars," and "I would always read the works of the Cavalier poets, whose works always reflected the sentiment 'Cease the day!"" In addition to giving us a chuckle, these examples show that the student has simply memorized the "answer" without comprehension.

The fear that students will end up with no more than rote knowledge has been almost a phobia in the United States, but the truth is that rote knowledge is probably relatively rare. Rote knowledge (as I'm using the term) means you have no understanding of the material. You've just memorized words, so it doesn't seem odd to you that Cavalier poets, best known for light lyrics of love and their romantic view of life, would have the philosophy "Cease the day!" (Figure 4).

Much more common than rote knowledge is what I call shallow knowledge, meaning that students have some understanding of the material but their understanding is limited. We've said that students come to understand new ideas by relating them to old ideas. If their knowledge is shallow, the process stops there. Their knowledge is tied to the analogy or explanation that has been provided. They can understand the concept only in the context that was provided. For example, you know that "Seize the day!" means "Enjoy the moment without worrying about the future," and you remember that the teacher said that "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" (from Herrick's To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time) is an example of this sentiment. But you don't know much more. If the teacher provided a new poem, you would be hard put to say whether it was in the style of a Cavalier poet.

We can contrast shallow knowledge with deep knowledge. A student with deep knowledge knows more about the subject, and the pieces of knowledge are more richly interconnected. The student understands not just the parts but also the whole. This understanding allows the student to apply the knowledge in many different contexts, to talk about it in different ways, to imagine how the system as a whole would change if one part of it changed, and so forth. A student with deep knowledge of Cavalier poetry would be able to recognize elements of Cavalier ideals in other literatures, such as ancient Chinese poetry, even though the two forms seem very different on the surface. In addition, the student would be able to consider what-if questions, such as "What might Cavalier poetry have been like if the political situation in England had changed?" They can think through this sort of question because the pieces of their knowledge are so densely interconnected. They are interrelated like the parts of a machine and the what-if question suggests the replacement of one part with another. Students with deep knowledge can predict how the machine would operate if one part were to be changed.

Obviously teachers want their students to have deep knowledge, and most teachers try to instill it. Why then would students end up with shallow knowledge? One obvious reason is that a student just might not be paying attention to the lesson. The mention of "rosebuds" makes a student think about the time she fell off her Razor Scooter into the neighbor's rose bush, and the rest of the poem is lost on her. There are other, less obvious reasons that students might end up with shallow knowledge.

Here's one way to think about it. Suppose you plan to introduce the idea of government to a first-grade class. The main point you want students to understand is that people living or working together set up rules to make things easier for everyone. You will use two familiar examples—the classroom and students' homes—and then introduce the idea that there are other rules that larger groups of people agree to live by. Your plan is to ask your students to list some of the rules of the classroom and consider why each rule exists. Then you'll ask them to list some rules their families have at home and consider why those rules exist. Finally, you'll ask them to name some rules that exist outside of their families and classroom, which you know will take a lot more prompting. You hope your students will see that the rules for each group of people—family, classroom, and larger community—serve similar functions. (See Figure 5.)

A student with rote knowledge might later report, "Government is like a classroom because both have rules." The student has no understanding of what properties the two groups have in common. The student with shallow knowledge understands that a government is like a classroom because both groups are a community of people who need to agree on a set of rules in order for things to run smoothly and to be safe. The student understands the parallel but can't go beyond it. So for example, if asked, "How is government different from our school?" the student would be stumped. A student with deep knowledge would be able to answer that question, and might successfully extend the analogy to consider other groups of people who might need to form rules, for example, his group of friends playing pickup basketball.

This example can help us understand why all students might not get deep knowledge. The target knowledge—that groups of people need rules—is pretty abstract. It would appear, then, that the right strategy would be to teach that concept directly. But I said before that students don't understand abstractions easily or quickly. They need examples. That's why it would be useful to use the example of the classroom rules. In fact, a student might be able to say, "When people come together in a group, they usually need some rules," but if the student doesn't understand how a classroom, a family, and a community all exemplify that principle, he doesn't really get it. Thus deep knowledge means understanding everything—both the abstraction and the examples, and how they fit together. So, it is much easier to understand why most students have shallow knowledge, at least when they begin to study a new topic. Deep knowledge is harder to obtain than shallow.