School learning is focused on a somewhat different kind of knowing 'that'.

Much school learning requires acquiring factual knowledge -- knowing that Austin is the capital of Texas, that 7 x 8 = 56, that water boils at 212° F -- followed by assessment to see if the facts have been retained, to see if they are "known." This kind of knowing is very different from knowing how to ride a bike or knowing that speed and pitch are correlated. For this kind of learning, neither apprenticeship nor play is an optimal instructional approach. But how important is this kind of knowing?

Through the history of our culture, learning facts has been vital. Being an educated person has required the availability of such information in your head. When the goal of education is to ensure that everyone in the culture has a large body of facts in his or her head, the pedagogy and assessment reflect that goal. Educational research has focused on "associative" models of learning -- how to organize the presentation of information so that it is remembered, how to provide webs of information rather than isolated bits, and so forth.

The importance of remembering lots of information has lost much of its value in recent years. New technologies, which have already transformed our culture, are gradually transforming the goals of our schools. Rote memorization of facts is less important than in previous centuries because such information is available everywhere; distributed widely in books or in various devices like handheld calculators, databases, and electronic references.

Virtually all the facts that used to dominate the enterprise of schooling can now be captured on a single CD. Any child can quickly use a disk reader to find out that George III was the king of England at the time of the American Revolution, that the Norman Conquest happened in 1066, the conversion of Celsius to Fahrenheit, and not only the names of the planets, but their weights, circumferences, orbits, and so on. This information has moved from in your head to at your fingertips.

The result of these changes is that education is refocusing on knowing how -- how to search for information, how to organize, how to categorize, how to think, how to communicate -- and knowing that -- that authors have points of view, that there are many kinds of cultures and many kinds of knowing, that economics is an important determinant of history, that water is heavier than oil.

Ignorance is being defined less in terms of what a child can remember and more in terms of what a child can do. Teachers who still see children -- rather than books or computers -- as information storage devices are troubled by the changes. If their enterprise is not to teach the names of the planets and the times tables, then what is it? And what will be the pedagogy?

Others are seeing opportunities for pedagogical innovation based on changing educational goals. In the last decade, there has been renewed interest in apprenticeship and in exploration by many educators and cognitive scientists (Antonacci, and Colasacco, 1994; Bruer, 1993; Bruner, Jolly, and Silva, 1990; Collins , Brown, and Newman, 1989; Daiute, 1989; Edwards and Maloy, 1992; Vukelich, 1993; Wells, 1990).