Bloom’s Taxonomy, which distinguishes different levels of cognition, is wildly popular in schools, Writes Dr. Paideia on Medium. But it’s become a good idea gone wrong.

Bloom’s pyramid starts with Knowledge (“lower-order thinking”) and works its way up to synthesis and evaluation (“higher-order thinking”).

Many educators think the point of Bloom’s Taxonomy is that knowledge, since it’s “lower order,” isn’t important, he writes. They want a pyramid with no foundation. For example, teachers may be told to ask only “higher-order questions,” regardless of students’ age or knowledge.

Elementary school should focus “on gaining knowledge and, at best, showing a degree of comprehension,” Dr. Paideia writes.

The bottom line is this: you cannot evaluate unless you can synthesize, you cannot synthesize if you cannot analyze, you cannot analyze if you cannot apply, you cannot apply if you cannot comprehend, and you cannot comprehend if you do not know.

Students will get to higher-order questions in time, writes Dr. Paidea. “After all, Romeo and Juliet begs for analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. See Spot Run does not.”

EL Education’s Ron Berger also thinks Bloom’s Taxonomy is misused, but for the opposite reason. It discourages learning by doing, he writes in Education Week.

It creates a hierarchy in teachers’ minds about how we learn. First, we need to remember knowledge, then we can learn to understand, then we can move up to applying that knowledge, and so on, until finally, at the very end, we are allowed to evaluate or create. Based on these discrete steps, teachers, schools, and districts craft curriculum and lessons that separate these skills and assume that students must be proficient in one level to move up to the next one.

That’s not how learning works, Berger argues. “Most of the time we do not first memorize, then understand, then apply. We build our understanding in part through application and creation.”