In the last 50 years, “skills” people have “defined education not as the acquisition of knowledge but the training of minds to observe, reflect, analyze, conclude,” Bauerlien writes.

These people didn’t talk about Hamlet and Tosca. . . . It was all critical thinking and problem solving. They gave lip service to traditional materials—“Of course, we care about Mozart and Shakespeare!”—but Great Books and intellectual history and the Founding didn’t excite them.

. . . The courses that instill these thinking skills need not be tied to any specific content. You can acquire them without reading Tolstoy or listening to Bach. Western civilization is irrelevant. Students can develop those skills by studying contemporary literature or Renaissance painting, ancient Rome or Hollywood, opera or rap.

. . . (Educators) get to “de-center” traditional high-culture content without having to argue against it. They can enable multiculturalism without having to argue for it.

However, “the skills-not-content approach doesn’t produce the learning that its advocates promise,” writes Bauerlein. “Without a body of material which students have first studied and retained and to which they may apply their aptitudes, the exercise of thinking skills is empty and erratic.”

You have to know something before you can think about it.