It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts.

It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts.

The discussion about how students should be educated has never been so intense these days. Although students can learn quickly and systematically by understanding ideas and concepts, I firmly hold the view that learning facts is equally important, for the practical function it can serve, for the deep impressions it can render to the students, and for the systematical ideology it can bring.

To begin with, even though the ideas and concepts are intermediate and quick to learn, facts can bring students deep impressions. Knowledge gained from practical lives is easier to understand because students experienced them in person. Moreover, they will tend to memorize them for their whole lives. For example, when I attended physics class at high school, I could not understand Newton’s third law. It was so abstract that I always made mistakes in the exams. However, when I got permission to perform the experiments in the lab, I did the experiments myself and suddenly got the idea behind the concept. After that, I never made mistakes about Newton’s third law and can describe it clearly.

Moreover, the facts we learned are quite useful in our daily life. As is known to us all, the ideas concepts are fully developed across several hundred years, so they are quite serious and theoretical. Maybe it can help us in many advanced technologies but it’s hard to use in our daily life. Artificial Intelligence is a very important concept, but can it be directly used in our daily lives? The answer is not positive. However, since the facts are derived from the lives, applying it to our lives is much easier.

Last but not the least, the process we learn facts can help us build our system to learn new things. Imagine how a baby learns the world. Their ideologies are quite plain at first, but as they grow up, they form their method to sense the new world. They can’t learn by abstract concepts, the only way for them is to learn from the facts which they encountered in their lives.