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sideshow:

Has michael Gove spoken to ANY uk education experts?

There' s 5,000 working for him and they still have failed year after year to get it right. That's why he has to ask others. Rachel Wolf did most of the work not Gove.

 Beware of geeks bringing gifts - or ideas for that matter.

Eureka!:

It seems to me Gove is glorifying the educational ethos that many posters here have intimated that they support. I guess it doesn't look so good in stark black and white.

sideshow:

Does it matter if our children can't remember facts?

Yes.

sideshow:

I thought that thinking skills and learning behaviours were more important than facts?

No. These things are just excuses for dumbing down.

There are no generic thinking skills. We think effectively when we know a lot about a topic.

Eureka!:

oldandrew:

There are no generic thinking skills.

Perhaps not (though I would have to think about it more), but what is certain, is that there is a generic "thinking personality/attitude".

Let me guess, that "thinking personality" is just like yours?

Eureka!:

This attitude should not only be questioning of the world, but also of oneself and one's own state of mind/knowledge.

Any idiot can ask questions. It takes knowledge to answer them or even (and I think this is the most important part of getting kids to think) to understand them.

Eureka!:

When facts dominate the agenda, there is less room for the thinking personality to develop.

Facts are part of knowledge, and knowledge is what we use for thinking. We currently have a crisis in education due to a lack of basic factual knowledge. Kids can't develop higher level maths skills because they can't do their times tables fluently. They can't interpret a text because their vocabulary and fluency at reading are too limited. The idea that we can skip the knowledge part and move straight on to the "thinking" part is what has got us into this mess. 

Eureka!:

oldandrew:

We think effectively when we know a lot about a topic.

OK, maybe so, in a certain sort of way. But then you are limited to "effective thinking" about topics you know a lot about, if that is fully true. The finest sort of thinking, IMO, is when you know only a little, and your thinking attitude engages with your world view/general knowledge to produce a basic understanding of a new situation/topic.

It might be your opinion but it's obvious ***. Intellectual innovation invariably comes from the knowledgable rather than the ignorant. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants, remember.