The Tree Before the Fruit: Why Knowledge Is the Foundation of All Learning

There was a period not so long ago when knowledge managed to get itself a rather bad reputation in some educational circles…

Facts were dismissed as ‘mere rote learning’. Memorisation became the enemy of understanding. The future, we were told, belonged to skills (21st-century ones, obviously) critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication, problem solving, and the ability to Google something quickly enough to look independent.

I do understand why that happened. As a Biology teacher, I get deeply frustrated and grumpy when students try to rote-learn their way through the subject. I don’t want them memorising definitions in isolation, learning mark scheme phrases as if they’re practising Year 6 spellings, or chanting the stages of mitosis without understanding what’s actually happening inside the cell. I fight that battle constantly because I know how important understanding is.

The answer to shallow memorisation, though, isn’t less knowledge. It’s better knowledge: connected, carefully revisited, clearly taught, and understood well enough that students can actually use it. Then, crucially, students need to use that knowledge, apply it, and transfer it when the context changes.

Knowledge and understanding aren’t opposites. Understanding depends on knowledge. If students don’t know key vocabulary, processes, examples and relationships between ideas, there’s nothing for understanding to attach to. Even when students understand something in the moment, that understanding is unlikely to last if it isn’t anchored in secure knowledge.

Somewhere along the way, I think a sensible correction turned into something else. There was a necessary challenge to the way knowledge had sometimes been taught: badly, thinly, disconnected from meaning, and treated as if remembering something was the same as understanding it. But instead of concluding that knowledge needed to be taught better, more meaningfully and more deliberately, we seemed to arrive at a different conclusion altogether: that knowledge shouldn’t sit at the foundation at all.

The problem was never knowledge itself. The problem was knowledge taught without meaning, knowledge taught without connection, and knowledge taught as if students could simply store it up without ever being asked to think with it.

So ‘facts alone aren’t enough’ somehow became ‘facts aren’t that important’, and that’s where things started to go all kinds of wibbly wobbly…

Students can’t think critically about nothing. They can’t be creative with ideas they don’t yet have, evaluate an argument they don’t understand, or inquire deeply if they don’t know enough to ask useful questions. All of those things become richer, more interesting and more meaningful as knowledge grows.

We want students to analyse, evaluate, question, create, connect and solve problems; that’s the fruit, and of course we love it. But fruit doesn’t appear just because we value it or talk enthusiastically about how much we’d like it to grow. I love berries as much as the next person, but enthusiasm alone won’t make them appear on the branches.

Learning is the same in lots of ways. The visible outcomes we care about (analysis, creativity, inquiry, conceptual transfer, problem solving) depend on what has been built underneath. Students need the vocabulary, concepts, examples and background knowledge that allow those outcomes to grow into fruition (see what I did there?!).

We see how deep that knowledge really goes when students meet the heavy winds of challenge. Can they apply it when the question looks different? Can they transfer it when the context changes? Can they still use it when the support is gradually taken away?

That’s when the roots matter, because without them, the tree topples.

How Knowledge Became the Villain

The suspicion around knowledge didn’t come out of nowhere and there were good reasons to challenge classrooms where students were expected to memorise disconnected facts without meaning, context or purpose. If learning becomes ‘remember this because I said so’, it’s not surprising that people start looking for something better!

Progressive education, constructivist ideas, inquiry, project-based learning and problem-based learning all grew from important intentions. Students aren’t passive. They need to make meaning, connect ideas, ask questions and apply what they know in ways that feel purposeful.

I don’t think the issue was ever the intention. The issue was what happened when knowledge and skills started to be spoken about as if they were on opposite teams.

Knowledge became associated with rote learning, passive classrooms and low-level recall, while skills became associated with independence, creativity, student voice and deeper thinking. Knowledge was always going to struggle in that comparison.

‘Critical thinking’ sounds more exciting than ‘secure knowledge’. ‘Creativity’ sounds more appealing than ‘background knowledge’. ‘Student-led inquiry’ sounds much more inspiring than ‘carefully sequenced content’. Once those ideas are wrapped in the language of care, it becomes even harder to question the framing, because nobody wants to sound as if they’re arguing against student voice, independence, creativity or joy. You end up looking like the educational equivalent of a Victorian workhouse manager, clutching a knowledge organiser and muttering about standards, which is, admittedly, a tough sell.

But care isn’t the same as making learning feel easy in the moment.

Sometimes care means doing the harder thing. It means giving students the roots they need before the winds arrive. It means teaching the knowledge, vocabulary and concepts that help them cope when the task becomes more complex, the question looks unfamiliar, or the support is gradually taken away. That isn’t uncaring; it’s part of how students become stronger.

The equity issue is uncomfortable, but real. When two students arrive in the same classroom with different levels of background knowledge, the student who knows more is often better placed to make sense of the new learning. They’ve got more roots, more hooks, and more places for new ideas to attach.

Which means when we put knowledge on the backburner, we don’t actually make learning fairer. We make it easier for gaps to widen (and this can affect certain groups more unfairly). The student with more knowledge can often learn more because the new learning has somewhere to attach, whilst the student with less knowledge has to work harder just to get started. That doesn’t mean and it certainly isn’t because they’re less capable, it’s we’ve given them less to stand on because they have less to anchor to.

What Knowledge Does for Thinking

A lot of this comes back to working memory.

Daniel Willingham argues that factual knowledge must precede skill. That can sound blunt, and it’s sometimes misread as if students should only learn facts before they are allowed to do anything interesting. That isn’t the point though. The point is that students need enough knowledge to think with.

When students face too much new information at once, they can become overloaded very quickly. New vocabulary, new concepts, new instructions, new examples and new task demands all have to be held in mind and processed at the same time. If working memory is full, there isn’t much space left for analysis, creativity or problem solving.

Prior knowledge makes the task more manageable. When students already know the relevant vocabulary, concepts and examples, they don’t have to process every element as new. Some of the work has already been done, and the new information has somewhere to go because it can connect to what’s already in long-term memory.

This is where schema becomes useful. A schema is an organised network of knowledge, and it helps students make sense of new learning because they can connect it to what they already know. If a student understands cells, genes, chromosomes, proteins and inheritance, then learning about genetic mutation has somewhere to land. If those ideas are weak or disconnected, mutation becomes another isolated thing to memorise for Friday’s quiz and forget by Monday morning.

That’s not because the student isn’t trying, but because the roots aren’t strong enough and they don’t have branches to anchor to.

This is why ‘just teach the skill’ doesn’t really work. Skills are always being used on something. You can’t analyse without content, evaluate without criteria, infer without background knowledge, or explain clearly if the vocabulary is shaky.

Knowledge isn’t the end of learning; it’s the material learning is built from.

Knowledge Underpins Every Pedagogy

Knowledge doesn’t belong to one style of teaching. It isn’t only relevant when teachers explain, model, question or use retrieval practice. It sits underneath every approach we use.

Inquiry needs knowledge. Discussion needs knowledge. Feedback needs knowledge. Modelling needs knowledge. Problem solving needs knowledge. Collaboration needs knowledge, otherwise students are mostly pooling confusion.

The stronger the knowledge base, the more powerful those approaches become. Without it, even our best instructional techniques start to become less effective.

That feels particularly relevant in inquiry-based schools. In the MYP, meaningful inquiry is central to how students learn. We want students to ask questions, investigate ideas, make connections and wrestle with complexity. I’m not arguing against that, good inquiry can be brilliant, but inquiry works best when students have enough knowledge to make the inquiry worthwhile. I see this all the time during lab experiments, and I have many years of experience of seeing that retention and understanding of an experiment is far better when the knowledge precedes the practical itself. They’re able to apply their knowledge to it in real time.

If students don’t know enough, they’re not really inquiring. They’re guessing or copying from the student next to them; who has written down a misconception… we have a problem now!

We’ve all seen it. Students are given a big question to explore, but they don’t yet understand the key concepts behind it. They find information, but they can’t judge what matters. They collect facts, but they can’t organise them. They make a presentation, but the thinking underneath is thin. It looks independent, but it isn’t always learning.

That isn’t a criticism of the students. It’s a design problem. We’ve asked them to do complex thinking before we’ve given them enough to think with.

Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction are useful here because they remind us that effective teaching usually builds towards independence. Review, modelling, questioning, checking for understanding and guided practice aren’t barriers to deep learning they’re often what make it possible.

That isn’t spoon-feeding, it isn’t lowering expectations; It’s building the conditions for success.

When students have the roots, they’re better able to withstand the winds of challenge. They can cope when the task becomes less familiar, when the question changes shape, or when there isn’t a neat worked example to lean on.

That’s when inquiry becomes powerful. Not because we’ve left students to discover everything alone, but because we’ve prepared them well enough to explore with purpose.

Knowledge first doesn’t mean knowledge only. It means we teach the roots, strengthen the trunk, grow the branches, and then give students something worth reaching for.

What This Means for Teaching

If knowledge is the foundation for understanding, then curriculum matters. Not just what we teach, but the order we teach it in, how often we return to it, and how deliberately we help students connect one idea to another.

Knowledge-rich teaching doesn’t mean talking at students for an hour while they battle to keep their eyes open and their heads up. It means being precise about what students need to know so they can access the next idea. It means teaching vocabulary explicitly, choosing examples carefully, modelling expert thinking, checking for understanding, and giving students enough practice before expecting independence.

It also means revisiting knowledge, because students don’t usually learn something securely just because we taught it beautifully once on a Tuesday. Annoying, but true. Important knowledge, especially the foundational knowledge that everything else depends on, needs to be brought back, strengthened, connected and used again.

Retrieval practice helps with this when it’s used thoughtfully. The idea isn’t to catch students out or turn every lesson into a memory endurance sport. The point is to make important knowledge more secure and readily available, so students can use it to make and hold onto connections when the learning becomes more demanding.

This links to well-being too. There’s nothing kind about leaving students to struggle with work they don’t have the knowledge to access. Confusion can be part of learning, and challenge matters, but persistent cognitive overload isn’t productive struggle. It’s just struggle, and not the useful kind.

If we want students to become confident, independent learners, we have to build the knowledge that makes independence possible.

Coming Back to the Tree

This isn’t about choosing recall over understanding, explicit teaching over joy, or curriculum over curiosity. It’s about being honest about what learning asks of students.

Deep thinking, inquiry, creativity, problem solving and independence are all demanding. They ask a lot of students, and if we want students to do those things well, we have to give them something to stand on.

A knowledge-rich curriculum gives students a way in. It gives them the words, concepts and background knowledge they need to understand properly, not just perform understanding for a lesson and lose it by next week, That, to me, is care.

Care isn’t making everything easy, removing challenge, or pretending students can discover everything by themselves if we just give them enough coloured pens, freedom and encouragement. Care is giving students the roots they need to withstand challenge.

So yes, I want students to analyse, evaluate, inquire, create and solve problems. I want them to ask thoughtful questions and make interesting connections. I want them to think deeply and independently.

But I don’t want them trying to grow fruit in thin air. It might look impressive for a moment, but it won’t hold, and it’s not a long-term solution.

If we want students to face the heavy winds of challenge, the roots of knowledge need to be deep, strong and secure.