Chapter 2 of Why Students Don’t Like School

In this chapter Willingham discusses the need for fact learning to facilitate the development of cognitive skills, i.e. reasoning, problem solving, analysis and synthesis.

His main point is: “Factual knowledge must precede skill.”

Here is his simple figure of the mind (see post from June 1).



Thinking is “combining information in new ways.” The information comes either from the facts you’ve memorized (long–term memory), or from the Internet or other reference materials (the environment).

Critical thinking advocates argue that because, thanks to the Internet, we have so much access to information, memorization is not as important as it use to be. After all, I can look up just about I need to know on Google. Willingham continues, describing the argument as follows:

“Perhaps instead of learning facts, it’s better to practice critical thinking to have students work on evaluating all the information available on the Internet rather than trying to commit some small part of it to memory.”

He says this argument is false.

“…Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most – critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving – are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory. (Emphasis mine.)

Information from the environment is not internalized and understood by an individual to the degree it is when it is stored and retrieved from long-term memory.

Critical thinking skills cannot exist in isolation as a discipline all their own. It’s easy to assume that when you learn a new thinking skill it can be applied to every situation. But the ability to think critically about one topic does not guarantee the ability to think critically about another. Critical thinking depends on having knowledge about the subject to be thought about.

For example, thinking critically about W.W. II does not give a person the ability to think critically about a game of chess, a bagpipe band, or educational theory. A person cannot think critically about which they know nothing or very little. (So that’s the problem with our politicians!) To talk about critical thinking without linking it to factual knowledge is leaving out a critical component of the learning process.