In the spring of 2000, E.D. Hirsch Jr. published an essay in American Educator titled “You Can Always Look It Up—Or Can You?” It’s one of those pieces that distills a lifetime of insight into a few pages. Hirsch argued that the notion of teaching “learning skills” instead of knowledge was deeply misguided. To look something up, he noted, presupposes that you already know something—enough to recognize what’s relevant, to interpret what you find, to sift sense from nonsense.
The problem wasn’t that children were lazy or that teachers were inept, but that progressive pedagogy had confused knowing what with knowing how. Hirsch saw this long before most of us: the capacity to find information isn’t the same as understanding it. Skills are empty vessels; knowledge is what fills them.