TOPIC: ISSUE28 - "Students should memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. Students who have learned only facts have learned very little."

I strongly oppose this assertion that students should study the ideas, trends,  and concepts that help explain the facts at first rather than facts themselves because the author hold the belief that the what  facts tell is very little. Facts, especially historical ones, should be told to students without any distortion rather than explanations prepared as a “guidance ” for them. There are basically relies in the following three reasons.

First of all, under some circumstances, the ideas, trends, concepts-explanations of those facts-could be unjustifiable. Take education in some human-rights-lacking countries, like North Korea, for an illustration, what students learn from the books is always the "undeniable" trend that the "capitalism" will end up with revolutions, the notion of  "class" that to analyze society, history, and even arts, and the idea of communism that something good in the future-forever in the future- requires people's freedom and wealth-opportunities "at the present".

Secondly, it is critical for education to teach students to think independently rather than accept explanations from others whereas it is the key to a democratic society. We start to think where we truly raise a question in our mind, otherwise it could only be an action of recalling memories the knowledge in the books meanwhile, not necessarily objective when it comes to the situation foregoing. Students would try to explain the facts they learn with the explanations If students learn the those at first. That is, they have given away the chance that to judge the facts by their own thoughts unconsciously. As Einstein said, after all the things learned from school forgotten, then the remains, are education.

Finally, to form various explanations about the same fact aside from "rightness" is fundamental to establish and maintain a democratic society. Even in Germany, suffered from Nazism, students do not learn critiques on Nazi but the facts in the history but what the history originally is. Although not every student believes that Nazism is a nightmare to their country or the human being, the deprivation of independent thinking makes even easier to another Hitler to come into power.
The extent to which students today accept the notion that Hitler is a criminal without thinking can be equal to the extent to which someday they accept the notion that all Jews are guilty with sufficient propaganda. Moreover, students learn the same explanations are much less likely to communicate with others because they all, at least in a group, share a same idea. Lacking of communication rally provides soil for obscurant.

Generally speaking, the priority of students that learn facts should be higher than that of students for learning ideas, notions, trends, and all the things to explain those facts. Because only through this way are students free from unjustifiable explanations and learn to think individually and thus, they can maintain a democratic tradition or forge a democracy society.

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