Skills vs. Content

One of the biggest problems with education is that content-education is being replaced by skills-education. Certainly we needs skills, but what sense does it make to teach "critical thinking skills" when students don't have anything to think about? We will ignore for the moment the fact that "critical thinking skills" itself is essentially meaningless. I saw this problem when I tried to teach "integration" to interdisciplinary studies students who didn't know anything and, thus, had nothing to integrate. A similar problem occurred in my composition classes, where somehow I was supposed to teach students how to write and how to make arguments without teaching them vocabulary, grammar, or logic, and without them knowing enough about any subject to even write about it. All of this is due to the emphasis on "higher order thinking skills" in Bloom's taxonomy -- by people who clearly have no understanding of Bloom's taxonomy, and the fact that the "higher order thinking skills" are at the top of a pyramid, the base of which is made up of facts and knowledge. Bloom understand that you cannot think without knowledge, that thinking without objects of thought is impossible, but his followers latch on to the fact that he says that "higher order thinking skills" are most important. He knows you can't skip levels -- they do not. As a result, we have precisely this problem of trying to teach skills but not content. It can't be done.