It starts early, almost certainly before school age for most. And when it begins, it stays, prising open every utterance and action like a lexical crowbar. Whereas before you could take a shower, make dinner, admonish, ask and dictate without question, suddenly there is a toddler at every turn asking you, simply and innocently, “Why?”

While it may be frustrating for parents to have to explain the rationale for their every move in each different context, the asking of “why” is a crucial step in the development of thought and it should also go on to have a fundamental role in how we teach children. But, disappointingly, too often it doesn’t. Because the concept of asking “why” has become very muddled in the ideological wars currently raging between teachers.

Knowledge is having a comeback in schools, riding into classrooms on the shoulders of cognitive science. While many have embraced it, some have fought back - particularly for primary age groups - and proclaimed knowledge as being “just pub quiz facts” fed to defenceless young children. These critics have repeatedly asked why those facts have been “picked”, as if this is a useful argument against knowledge.

But actually, asking why those facts have been chosen - and also why they are viewed and used in a certain way - is part of knowledge: a hugely important part.

It is just a part that, despite children’s natural curiosity, is often being ignored or misunderstood. And it is time we did something about it.

It turns out there’s a lot to know about knowledge. First of all, we have to learn that knowledge includes “knowing how” (procedural knowledge) as well as “knowing that” (declarative knowledge).

Then we need to understand how knowledge underpins understanding, which involves an appreciation of the role of schemata, the sophisticated thinking structures crafted from connected knowledge that enable us to think critically and creatively.

When you’ve finally got to grips with all of that, then you get to the final challenge: to understand the difference between substantive and disciplinary knowledge and, more importantly, why this matters.

Substantive knowledge is the “stuff” that we know: the facts, concepts and rules that form the building blocks of the various subjects. So, knowing that the equals sign means that what is on the left of the sign is equal in value or amount to what is on the right; that evaporation is the process by which liquids turn into gases; that the Battle of Hastings happened in 1066; or that you need to put a full stop at the end of a statement.

This “substance” is central to being able to think mathematically, or scientifically, or historically, or to communicate clearly - it’s not so you can win the £50 kitty at a pub quiz.

Disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge about how the decisions behind what knowledge “makes it” into the accepted corpus of each subject are made, and, just as importantly, how accepted knowledge can be challenged, superseded or rendered obsolete. It is about asking “why” - why the geocentric model of the universe is no longer accepted as true, or why historians disagree about the extent and rate of economic growth in England during the Industrial Revolution. It is understanding why, in history or science, you can’t just make stuff up whereas in creative writing, you not only can but should.

It is disciplinary knowledge where the anti-knowledge argument most clearly trips up - where critics show their lack of understanding - but it is also where teachers, particularly those in primary schools, most urgently need to be better.

The pursuit of truth

Christine Counsell, affiliated lecturer at the University of Cambridge, describes disciplinary knowledge as “a curricular term for what pupils learn about how that knowledge was established, its degree of certainty and how it continues to be revised by scholars, artists or professional practice. It is that part of the subject where pupils understand each discipline as a tradition of enquiry with its own distinctive pursuit of truth”.

This is not new. Neil Postman articulated this well back in the 1970s in his book Teaching as a Conserving Activity: “Biology is not plants and animals. It is language about plants and animals. Astronomy is not planets and stars. It is a way of talking about planets and stars.”

In the same way, history is not “the past”; it’s a specific and rule-governed way of talking about the past, just as geography is a specific way of talking about places and music is not just noise but a rule-governed way of sequencing and combining specific noises.

These disciplinary ways of talking have certain typical features. In science, for example, its normal to use diagrams, graphs and formulae, while highly abnormal to use poetry. The situation is reversed in English. Maps aren’t a typical feature of most music lessons and geographers don’t often worry overly about rhythm.

How well have these rules been taught, elaborated upon and made transparent in schools? There have been two contrasting but equally wrong-footed views about disciplinary knowledge in primary.

The first predominated in schools prior to the 2014 national curriculum. Science was obsessed with fair tests - in some primary schools, almost to the exclusion of all else. Primary history, in a strange rerun of well-documented problems in secondary history practice 20 years earlier, was often fixated on atomised, reductive “source skills”, such as hunting down anything that whiffed of bias.

While both form valid aspects of the disciplinary knowledge of each subject, there is far more to both than just those aspects. Disciplinary knowledge in science involves knowing about how empirical experimentation is used to test if hypotheses about physical reality can be corroborated or disproved. It involves knowing how scientists go about testing, what might count as corroboration or disproof, and the specific ways scientists communicate their ideas, for example by using diagrams. Disciplinary knowledge in history requires engagement with the writing and practice of historians, and a careful, constructive process of establishing evidence from sources, not just writing them off for bias.

Too much of what happened before 2014 still happens in schools.

The second error is to believe that disciplinary knowledge can be used as a way to teach substantive knowledge. Actually, learning disciplinary knowledge makes no sense unless accompanied by swathes of substantive knowledge. It would be like trying to understand the complexities of a football match purely through the application of the offside rule. Primary school teachers, in particular, are prone to thinking that children can learn concepts in science by doing lots of experiments. However, in reality, experiments are often not an effective method for teaching substantive knowledge.

As Ofsted explains: “The misconception here is that ‘working scientifically’ becomes the mechanism for teaching knowledge and concepts. However, approaching the teaching of science in this way leads to a recurring problem that pupils are engaged in these lessons, but it is the experiment that is memorable and not the underlying knowledge intended to be learned.”

In the same way, analysing a source is not a good way to learn about a historical period. That is putting the cart before the horse. First, children need to know quite a lot about the period they are studying. Once they know something, then they might be in a position to think about what specific sources can and can’t tell them - and, importantly, what historians themselves think about what questions these sources may be able to answer.

In short, substantive content needs to be firmly in place well before children are ready to apply that knowledge. It is only by knowing substantive content that we can begin to ask intelligent questions of sources - knowing the facts means we can properly ask “why”.

Riddle me this

Is this not all a bit irrelevant for younger pupils? Are these abstractions better suited to A-level classes and undergraduate study?

It might seem alarmist to say that to think that way is dangerous. However, I believe it is dangerous to leave our children ignorant of the ways in which the truth of the matter is established, revised or refuted. It leaves them vulnerable to fake news and unable to question “whose knowledge?”. It would be to ignore the same question posed by detractors of knowledge: “Why this and not that?”

Admittedly, knowing these things might not be our top priority for children aged 5. But that does not mean we can afford to wait until children are 15 to begin to teach them. Our youngest children already want to know “why” and, as teachers, we should be looking to build children’s understanding gradually, year on year. The curriculum regarding disciplinary knowledge gradually unfolds over time in much the same way that the teaching of substantive knowledge does. If we ignore this at primary, then children have no foundation to build upon later.

What should this look like? One of the earliest concepts for very young children to begin to understand is the difference between imaginary and evidenced or, in simpler language, between pretend and real; for example, understanding that The Tiger Who Came to Tea is a pretend story about an imaginary tiger, whereas in your hand you might hold a photograph of a real tiger that actually exists.

Teachers help children develop this distinction when, for example, they make it clear they are taking on the voice of Little Red Riding Hood while telling a story and when they are back to being Ms Smith, the Year 1 teacher, once more.

What we need to do is build upon this and push it further as children progress through the year groups. It is about teaching children that how we look at a flower depends on whether we are looking at it as an artist or a scientist. Shading, colour and perspective might be important in an art lesson, but this is not how scientists look at things. Here, when we look at a flower, it is more about looking at the structure and recording that as simply and clearly as possible. One way of looking is not superior to the other; it is just that context matters. Different disciplines have different ways of looking. And we need to teach these differing ways explicitly.

In addition, we need to show our thinking. When we are teaching history in key stage 1, we might start our sentences with “Historians who have studied this period think that …” or “Historians are not quite sure if …”, rather than asserting something as if the truth of the matter is beyond all dispute and an irrefutable fact, delivered by the all-knowing omniscient teacher. Unless we reference the evidence behind the story - the diary, the maps, the archaeological evidence - how are young children to realise that the story of the Great Fire of London is not just the same sort of story as Little Red Riding Hood?

A barrier to working this way is that primary teachers are used to planning cross-curricular topics. For example, Ancient Greece might be explored through learning some of its history, its art, its literature and its geography. This approach, done in a way that honours the subject progression of each contributing subject, can be very fruitful.

However, it is often done badly, with one subject - in this case, probably history - leading the way and the other subjects shoehorned in to fit with the topic.

Thus Ancient Greek pottery might be studied not as part of some well-thought-out sequence that develops skills year on year and exposes children to a deliberately chosen different set of art forms but as the mere servant of a history topic. The geography studied might be limited to the locational aspect rather than going beyond that to look at how its location affects its physical or human geography.

Teaching this way also runs the risk of a version of what historians call “presentism”, the ahistorical and anachronistic judging of the past by contemporary standards. In history, we might well want to judge the past; we just need to be aware that we are not being historians when we do so: we are being moral philosophers. Historians may weep when they visit Auschwitz but they do so as human beings, not as historians.

An example of this in another subject is as follows: it is common and completely appropriate for children to study plastic pollution in geography. They might do field work to count how many items have washed up on a beach, and learn about currents, tides and the likely origin of the plastic. It is also appropriate for children to try to persuade people to reduce their use of plastic and to recycle more.

But the two activities come from different disciplines and this needs to be brought to the children’s attention. Campaigning is part of the lexicon of citizenship, not geography. Geography gives us information about the sorts of things we might want to campaign about - it is not about campaigning.

So, not only do we need a great appreciation of disciplinary knowledge in primary but we need to be better at teaching and using it, too.

This is not to say we shouldn’t explore moral questions or seek active solutions to real-world issues, but that we should be clear which tools we are using for our thinking.

History, geography and science are disciplines for establishing truth: disciplines don’t prescribe the “ought” that is what we do about them, only the ethical “ought” of truth-seeking itself. We play with that at our peril. This is exactly what totalitarians of all stripes do - bend history to fit with whatever ideology they are intent on imposing.

Take it to the limit

So, let’s make space within our curricula for thinking about those “oughts”: the ethical challenges of working out how to use the knowledge gained through science, geography, history and the rest. As we become better at acknowledging the limits of what disciplines such as history and geography can and can’t do, this might highlight the need to think about where discussion of spiritual, moral and social issues fit into the life of our school, and into our curricula, in a more coherent way.

This does not mean teaching three new subjects, each with their own weekly slot. But it does mean thinking properly about how and where we build spiritual, moral and social capital. As important as it is to ensure we are building cultural capital, we need to also build our pupils’ capital in these areas, too.

This can be as simple as the conscious swapping of one way of looking at something for another; for example, telling the class “now we are going to take off our history glasses and look at the situation through our moral philosophy/citizenship glasses”, explicitly signalling the switch from one discipline to another.

It is so important that we get this right. If we can properly incorporate disciplinary knowledge into primary teaching, the benefits are wide ranging, as I hope I have shown. Detractors of knowledge have the right question in asking “why”, but they misunderstand that this is not a reason to restrain knowledge but, rather, is the very core of what knowledge should be all about - even for our very youngest pupils.

Clare Sealy is head of curriculum and standards for Guernsey

This article originally appeared in the 11 October 2019 issue under the headline “A matter of fact?”