Knowledge-Rich Curriculum as a Human Right: An Interview with Paul Kirschner and Claudio Vanhees

The starting point of the 2025 Springer publication “Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival” is the observation that over time curricular trends have oscillated: at times placing knowledge at the center, and at other times emphasizing skills over knowledge. This pendulum effect, the authors argue, caused inconsistency in educational policy and practice. The book is a response to the renewed interest in knowledge-rich curricula — and aims to provide theoretical grounding, principles, and practical guidance for implementing such curricula with the underlying purpose of promoting equity.

The read is relatively short (approx. 90 pages), and argument-driven. The authors – Tim Surma, Claudio Vanhees, Michiel Wils, Jasper Nijlunsing, Nuno Crato, John Hattie, Daniel Muijs, Elizabeth Rata, Dylan Wiliam, Paul A. Kirschner – bring different academic backgrounds (sociology, psychology, education) to the topic of curriculum design. They use this interdisciplinary grounding to show why knowledge matters, how it scaffolds thinking, and what features a good knowledge-rich curriculum must have – specifically, content-richness, coherence and clarity. In line with the purpose of promoting access and fairness, the book is offered by the authors as an open access publication.

In the interview with two of the authors, we discuss the merit of the opposing view (skills-based focus), the generalizability to different contexts (e.g. varying resource levels, cultural settings, technology environments), the underlying assumptions about teaching and learning that shape curricula, and the question if educational policy should be political.

Video Recording

Watch the full interview recording or read the edited transcript below.

Edited Transcript

Contextualizing the Knowledge Revival

Stefanie Panke: What motivated you to co-author this book, and how does it relate to your work on cognitive load theory and on debunking myths about education?

Paul Kirschner: Let me start with the second half of the question. At face value, it has very, very little to do with cognitive load theory. But if you delve a little bit deeper, you could say it has quite a lot to do with cognitive load theory because, as you might know—or hopefully your listeners know—the basic premise behind cognitive load theory is to minimize extraneous load and keep the amount of load within certain boundaries so that you don’t overload your working memory. And one of the best ways to not overload your working memory is to have a lot of knowledge in your long-term memory. Because if you have knowledge in your long-term memory, you can then access it, bring it into your working memory, make use of it, and it doesn’t overload your working memory.

Now, a knowledge-rich curriculum is aimed at creating a very broad and deep knowledge base for the learner—in other words, to create broad and deep cognitive schemas within their heads. And if you do that, that means that the tasks you give students to learn from will naturally have lower cognitive load and will tax their working memory less because they have more knowledge in well-organized schema in their long-term memories. So that’s how it relates to cognitive load theory.

Debunking myths—you can see it in 10 different ways. I think the best way you can look at how it relates to debunking myths is the major myth of discovery learning as an effective teaching and learning strategy, because a knowledge-rich curriculum is based primarily on explicit teaching or explicit instruction of that which the learner needs to know. Instead of letting students discover things for themselves, we explicitly and coherently create a situation in which they can explicitly learn what they need to learn. So, you could say, in those ways, it relates to both educational myths and cognitive load theory.

Claudio Vanhees: I coordinate the curriculum research at our Center of Expertise, and I’m particularly interested in the link with reading comprehension. So on a personal level, I was initially triggered by the studies published by David Grissmer and colleagues, and the reading studies going on at the Harvard READS Lab, which directly connect to what Paul was explaining—how you can actually build schemas of background knowledge for pupils, which can facilitate reading comprehension in such a way that you can relate what you learn to what you already know about a specific topic.

And of course, the best way to go about that in a structured and coherent way would be to create a knowledge-rich curriculum. So that’s what interested me in the first place. The first author is the director of our center, Tim Surma. Two other colleagues also intensively collaborated, Michiel Wils and Jasper Nijlunsing. And then, of course, our renowned international co-authors who specialize in different fields—going from sociology of education over assessment and curriculum studies, etc.—, which created a very interesting group of authors and also made it possible to really refine the ideasdiscussed in the book.

Paul Kirschner: E. D. Hirsch, who wrote the preface, is maybe the godfather of this: the idea behind educating to be a good citizen is that we all need a shared core of knowledge in order to think and communicate with each other in a democratic society.

The opposing view: Competency-Based Curriculum Design

Stefanie Panke: When I first heard the term “knowledge-rich curriculum,” I have to admit, my reaction was an eye roll. Who would not want knowledge in their curriculum? Isn’t that a strawman debate? So help me understand the opposing side. What is the opposite of a knowledge-rich curriculum, and can you steel-man that position for me?

Paul Kirschner: I think if we look at what is happening all over the world, there’s this idea that we don’t need to have students gain knowledge because they have the world at their fingertips with Google, the Internet, and now ChatGPT and all the other variations of large language models, and also the idea that the skills that you need to function properly in the world, in a job, with other people, are generic—that there is a skill called creative thinking, and there’s a skill called critical thinking, and that there’s a skill called communication, and that you can teach those skills. And so there are a lot of curricula based upon this idea of 21st-century skills, and these are skills without domain-specific knowledge.

But you can’t solve a problem in chess without knowing how to play chess. You can’t creatively solve a chemical problem without knowledge of chemistry. It’s hard to communicate with other people about things if you have no idea what you’re talking about—though there are enough people who try to communicate quite a lot and have no idea what they’re talking about, but that’s something completely different. So the other side, you could say, is a knowledge-poor, skill-rich—generic skill-rich—approach.

And knowledge-rich is often strawmanned in two different ways. The first is that people think it’s only about facts—but that’s an information-rich curriculum, a curriculum made up of unconnected facts. And the other is that if you say “knowledge-rich,” it has nothing to do with skills. But if you read the book, you’ll see that it has everything to do with skills. So I don’t know if that’s your steel man that you’re looking for, but it’s based upon the idea of domain-specific, coherent knowledge that can be used to creatively, critically solve problems, carry out tasks, and communicate about them—the skills within our society.

Claudio Vanhees: If I can add to that, I agree with Paul that indeed the opposing side would be a skills-based or competency-led curriculum, as Paul explained—striving for what is often called 21st-century skills, which are then depicted as generic and transferable from one domain to the other. And I think their main aim—if I were to steel-man the other position—their aim would be that the curriculum should go beyond stacking knowledge, as they would call it, and strive for its application in the modern world. That would be the idea.

However, as Paul signaled, there are some misconceptions there, in the sense that the means and the end are not the same. If you want to aim for these complex cognitive skills—which we also find very important—and you want them to form part of the curriculum, and you really want to strive to obtain them for all children, then it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that they are indeed dependent on domain-specific knowledge. You can’t read a text and deeply understand it without sufficient domain-specific knowledge on the topic. It’s very hard to critically analyze something if you don’t have sufficient knowledge of the specific domain, so those are linked.

And that’s actually where the misconception lies, because they’re often depicted as generic—you can supposedly transfer 21st-century skills from one domain to the other—but research has actually shown that that’s not the case. So that’s why, in a knowledge-rich curriculum, we strive for a content-rich curriculum that is also, at the same time, coherent. The knowledge builds upon each other—it’s layered knowledge—it’s not just stacking knowledge; the knowledge schema’s are expanded and deepened. And the idea is that it will actually help you to build on prior knowledge so that everyone obtains a solid foundation of knowledge that will help you to achieve those complex cognitive skills. So that would be the difference.

Paul Kirschner: There’s a good quote about that by—

Claudio Vanhees: Yes, by Christine Counsell and Steve Mastin.

Paul Kirschner: That a knowledge-rich curriculum is a promise you make to future teachers about what their students have learned. So a teacher in grade 3 knows exactly what the learners had learned in 1 and 2, can build upon it, and can broaden and deepen it. So it’s not only important for the learner, but it’s also very important for the teacher and the school to have that. Because what you often see is that the teacher in grade 4 can assume that a learner learned something in grade 2 or 3 but really doesn’t know if that’s the case. It depends upon the teacher in year 2 or year 3. But in a knowledge-rich curriculum, you can depend upon it—it’s guaranteed that what you’re teaching in grade 4 is building upon or expanding upon—those are two different things—what they’ve learned in the earlier years. You know that that’s the case.

Claudio Vanhees: And that way you can create very clear learning progressions, which you can do with specified knowledge, but which is very hard to do with skills, because creating progressions of skills would quickly lead to very vague categories where many options are possible, and then it’s very difficult to really pinpoint what it is that my pupils already know, and how I can really build on that knowledge.

Stefanie Panke: You argue that the way knowledge is built in a field should not be mistaken for the best way to teach it. Can you give an example for this?

Claudio Vanhees: I would have to refer to one of Paul’s famous papers, “Epistemology or Pedagogy: That Is the Question.” Well, that’s what pops up in my head. And the differences between a novice and an expert. I always like to use the metaphor where you describe it as follows: when you try to create a new piece for a puzzle—which is what scientists do in a field when you’re creating new knowledge in a field—it’s not exactly the same as helping pupils understand the existing pieces of a puzzle. That requires something different; that requires quite some guidance, quite some explanation, some explicit instruction from experts in the field—in this case, the teachers—who will then help students who, until secondary education in many fields, can still be considered as novices, or advanced novices, who can then help them to really understand these different pieces of the puzzle and create an understanding of the most important concepts in a domain or in a field, which is what a knowledge-rich curriculum is all about. You want to create foundational knowledge that is solid, that has been well-proven over time within a discipline by disciplinary specialists. But you don’t necessarily want to teach it in the same way as these disciplinary specialists create new knowledge in the field.

Paul Kirschner: Derek Hodson said it very, very well. He formed my thinking about this in the 1980s, and that you have to realize that a scientist does science, while a student learns science. And those are two completely different things. What a scientist does—doing science—is the epistemology of their field. What a student does when learning science is what the Americans call the pedagogy; what we call—what, Stefanie, you called when you were in Germany, probably—the didaktik, the didactics of teaching. And that’s the major difference there.

Equity Goals

Stefanie Panke: When I first encountered your book, the term “knowledge-rich curriculum” was fairly new to me. But now that I’m primed, I seem to see it all the time, and I often see it in political controversies framed as traditionalist versus progressive in school contexts. Can you explain to me how this debate plays out in different education systems?

Paul Kirschner: My experience is that it’s global. To give you an answer about the progressive—good learning is not conservative; it’s not progressive. Good education is apolitical. And people who try to bring it into the realm of politics are just doing a disservice to teachers and learners. I mean, there are certain paradoxes even involved. Often the policies that so-called progressives make to try to alleviate equity problems more often than not lead to larger discrepancies between the haves and the have-nots. It’s a real paradox, whereas we know that good, explicit instruction closes the gap between the haves and the have-nots—or the have lots and have little, whatever you want to call it. So I can get annoyed at it, but I’ve accepted the fact that this is often used in a very derogatory way to characterize people who think differently. I’m one of the most progressive, left-leaning—politically speaking—people that I know of. But I do think the children should get taught in an explicit way so that they learn better and learn more, and that those with fewer facilities at their disposal—who don’t have parents that take them to museums, don’t have discussions at the dinner table, don’t have shelves of books in the house—I think that gap needs to be filled, and the only way to fill it is early education with a knowledge-rich curriculum. And the great thing about knowledge-rich curricula is that we see that it leads to incredible gains in the children who don’t have those facilities. But it also leads to gains in those who do have—but it closes the gap between them. And that’s the whole idea of equity, and I would think that equity is a very progressive cause.

Claudio Vanhees: It’s a bit of a shame that in many countries this dichotomy exists, but to add something on a positive note, I think in Flanders, Belgium—which is, of course, a small region in the world—but still, I think we’ve been able to overcome this false dichotomy between traditional and progressive, because now both left-wing and more center-right parties actually see the value of a knowledge-rich curriculum. And I think they agree on the fact that excellent and emancipatory education do not really have to mutually exclude each other, and that both can be achieved, as Paul mentioned so well—that you can create more equitable educational opportunities for all, and that will also benefit those who already receive a lot of extra tutoring and additional knowledge from home. But at the same time, you will also help those who don’t receive all that aid, closing the gap—narrowing the gap to a certain extent—but also creating both excellence and emancipation. So it can be done, but then, of course, you also need to overcome those dichotomies that are often situated at a political level. That’s often the problem.

Paul Kirschner: And a knowledge-rich curriculum sets the bar high. And though he’s not my favorite politician—and never was—George W. Bush spoke about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The knowledge-rich curriculum sets very, very high expectations for all students and doesn’t exclude or lower the bar for those who have fewer chances, who are less facilitated in their home and social situation.

What About Skills?

Stefanie Panke: Help me understand how the knowledge curriculum covers, for example, productive learning strategies or value-based education, such as respect, persistence, teamwork. So, if I had to phrase it: collaboration skills, metacognitive skills. Is there space for that in the knowledge-rich curriculum, and how would that look?

Paul Kirschner: A knowledge-rich curriculum is not a way of teaching. It’s a specification of that which needs to be learned, needs to be achieved, and the order in which it’s presented..

Claudio Vanhees: With the knowledge-rich curriculum what you want to do is make explicit what cannot be left to chance—what you want all children to know and to be able to do. At the same time, the knowledge-rich curriculum is not the 100% curriculum – it covers between 50% to 70%, so that still leaves room for other important parts of the curriculum as a whole. It’s not about prescribing how to teach either. If we think about reading, it’s very important to build background knowledge. If you combine building background knowledge with the right reading instruction and the right reading strategies, they will mutually enhance each other, so it’s not as if one thing excludes the other. That’s a mistake people make—that they think we’re, for example, trying to promote a whole-language approach or something, which is definitely not the case. But you do want to go for the optimal combination of different aspects within, for example, reading comprehension: you want to build background knowledge, you want to have good reading instruction, and then reading strategies can form part of that.

Paul Kirschner: I mean, for teamwork, it’s important that all of the team members have the necessary knowledge and skills in order to work together as a team. What you’ll often see is that maybe one student has that, and the others just jump on the bandwagon. So, the idea here is things like teamwork—for example, persistence—those are things that are a part of becoming a socialized person, which is the job of every educational system. It’s definitely not excluded. But people then say things like, “Yeah, but what about all the creative arts and things like that?” But those are also in it, because when you’re talking about Egypt in second grade, you’re also talking about Egyptian arts and hieroglyphics. So, it’s all related to each other. It’s the difference between a knowledge-rich and an information-rich approach. When you want students to—there are periods around the 14th century, you see that there’s no depth perception in paintings, in the iconography of that time. And at a certain point, it evolved—but it didn’t evolve in a vacuum. It evolved within a society, within countries that were also evolving. Now, this whole idea is in a knowledge-rich curriculum—that you can place why a certain way of painting happened at a certain point in time at a certain place, and then spread from that.

Claudio Vanhees: That’s also one of the common misconceptions that you find about knowledge-rich curriculum—that it would be mostly or only about language, mathematics, and sciences. But actually there’s a big part to play for the arts and for the social sciences, because that’s exactly the broad and deep background knowledge that will facilitate language comprehension and that will facilitate communication and teamwork and those kinds of skills. Once again, this also connects a bit to what we said earlier on—the erroneous idea about 21st-century skills being generic, and that you would be able to transfer them from one domain to another. These are skills and strategies which are actually linked to knowledge within a domain. For example, if we were to go back to reading comprehension, there’s quite some interesting research that actually indicates that if you use a certain number of reading strategies combined with sufficient background knowledge, then they mutually reinforce each other. Whereas if you were to consider reading comprehension as a generic skill, and then only practice strategies without sufficient background knowledge, it will be very difficult to get to real deep comprehension. And, as we say, that’s what we aim for—deep thinking, so deep comprehension—so you should combine both.

Paul Kirschner: The name of the book is not The Knowledge-Rich Curriculum, but it’s Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking.

Stefanie Panke: I can think of contextual factors that may have led educators to gravitate towards competency-based and skills-based formulations of curricula and objectives in education. Schools see substantial behavior and social issues that play out in the classroom. So, could it be that what you may call the new curriculum, focusing on skills, is, in this context, easier to implement in a setting with highly diverse learners?

Paul Kirschner: The answer is no. It’s very simple, because it’s more a question of classroom management, independent of what type of pedagogy or curriculum you choose. If the classroom isn’t quiet, respectful, well-managed, well-behaved—in which there are specific rules which need to be followed—absolutely no curriculum will work. A knowledge-rich curriculum, an information-rich curriculum, a competency-based curriculum will not work. So they have nothing to do with each other, and to say, “We have schools with diverse populations and different needs, so let’s go into competency”—someone would have to explain to me how competency-based will solve the problem of a diverse school population, unless you exclude certain students from doing certain things because they’ll never gain the competency, and that’s not my idea of what school is or should be.

Claudio Vanhees: I would definitely agree and add that that’s a misconception, because it’s precisely the clarity and the guidance that a knowledge-rich curriculum offers that will be most helpful to diverse learners, as many of them have different types and degrees of prior knowledge. And by explicitly mapping and being able to build on their prior knowledge with the aid of a knowledge-rich curriculum, teachers will have a very good idea of what it is that they already know and how they can help improve all children. So it’s actually a better approach for diverse learners than if you were to have the misconception that we should then create a competency-led curriculum because the competency leaves room for all—but that’s once again the means-and-ends misconception. And I think a knowledge-rich curriculum is precisely the best way to give that to all learners, and at the same time create a common body of knowledge that also has a democratic perspective.

What About Creativity?

Stefanie Panke: You emphasize in the book coherence and progression as two central characteristics of the knowledge-rich curriculum—of a curriculum that is a promise: these are the things students will know. And the best way to achieve that promise is guided instruction. With unstructured, open play and risk-taking on the decline in childhood, is it an understandable urge to make the classroom education more creative, more playful, or to spend time to explicitly teach social-emotional skills? And is that perhaps an appropriate reaction to changes that teachers observe in their students?

Paul Kirschner: You’d have to ask the teachers that. You can’t teach social-emotional skills. Skills are acquired, and they’re acquired in a context. And in a knowledge-rich curriculum, the context is a knowledge-rich context in which they interact with each other. You acquire the social skills by dealing socially with others in the school including teachers and administrators. You can, of course, make rules for the students—”You don’t talk while another’s talking”—all of those types of things which are part of a social skill, but they need to be acquired within a context and within a knowledge-rich, and not within a free-for-all context.

A knowledge-rich curriculum isn’t a pedagogy; it isn’t how you should teach it. It’s what you should teach and the order in which you should teach it. And if one teacher wants to write a play about the black-plague with the children? It doesn’t exclude that. But in order to write that play about the plague, or whatever, the children need the knowledge about the sewage system and rats, the state of medicine, and the fact that religion was more important than science. And that’s incredibly creative, incredibly open, but based upon knowledge! The play in the playground should strengthen what happens in the class, and what happens in the class should feed what happens in the playground. And nothing can solve the problem of helicopter parents and no free play, and that people, for example, in the United States, can have their children taken away from them because they let them walk to a playground two streets away. Nothing’s going to solve that problem. That’s a societal problem that has happened in the United States, and no curriculum—even free play in the classroom—will solve that problem.

Claudio Vanhees: I definitely agree that classroom education can, at the same time, be creative and playful—definitely. For example, if you think of kindergarten, many of the teachers will use playful pedagogy. But at the same time, it can be very knowledge-rich which creates more depth, more different layers, more context for all children. Then actually your creativity and your playfulness also get more depth. And that’s the beautiful thing about it.

How Much Does It Matter?

Stefanie Panke: My favorite chapter of the book is “Knowledge and the Curriculum,” specifically the curriculum examples that juxtapose a 1954 Belgian national history curriculum for elementary students and a 2025 Welsh national science curriculum. And the difference is really stunning. My question is: how much does it actually matter? How impactful is the curriculum on what teachers are doing and students are learning? Do we just talk in different ways and do similar things, or is this a true shift in instruction that we are seeing?

Claudio Vanhees: I think it’s important to bear in mind here that it’s a very long way from the written curriculum all the way to what students learn in the classroom, and one of the most important mediators there is, of course, the teacher. The teacher and school teams—school leadership is also very important. And, of course, the curriculum as such—if you were only to have a very good curriculum but you have very poor instruction, then, of course, it won’t work. So, at the same time that you need a good curriculum, you also need good instruction and teachers with enough pedagogical content knowledge, strong school leadership.

To go back to your question of how impactful is the curriculum on its own—well, on its own, it won’t make the difference. If you only have a curriculum without good teachers and without good pedagogy, then, of course, the impact will be very limited. But at the same time, if you have a knowledge-rich curriculum and you have it well-aligned, content-rich, and clear, then you will create clarity for the teachers, you will create more collective agency because teachers can build on each other’s work, and that will really help the students to excel, and at the same time create more equitable educational opportunities for all students because you will create a foundation—a foundation of knowledge—for all those children to build on year after year.

If we take a look at, for example, the empirical research on the topic, you can clearly see—for example, in the studies from the Harvard READS Lab—how, year after year, the background knowledge is actually building upon what they were taught before, how the schemas in the heads of the children grow, and how there’s even transfer to other contexts. And that’s really what you want to achieve, which makes them understand texts better, but also improves their results for mathematics education, for sciences. And the interesting thing is that often the intervention, or the curricular intervention, isn’t only about more language classes to improve language results. It’s often about more social sciences, more arts, more science, and that actually helps to create layers of foundational knowledge that really help to have a broad understanding of the world, and that’s what boosts their results. So in that sense, it does really make a difference. But, of course, we should always underline the importance of teachers and school teams in implementing the curriculum.

Paul Kirschner: Curriculum doesn’t replace the teacher. And let’s be honest and serious about this. Often people say that a knowledge-rich curriculum is too prescriptive and doesn’t leave room for the teacher as an artisan to do their work. But let’s look at it seriously. Most of the teachers I know grab the textbook and follow the curriculum that the textbook publisher has decided for them, which is often not a knowledge-rich curriculum. So let’s not idealize teaching in the wild versus a knowledge-rich curriculum. I worked for an educational publisher and I visited them in the United States, and their main goal was to make the method teacher-proof.

Claudio Vanhees: I think that’s a very fair point, because the autonomy you supposedly give to teachers is not necessarily the autonomy that they will also really use in their teaching, because often they will actually rely on textbooks. And then you depend more on commercial parties to determine what it is that children will learn. If we go back to the example you mentioned—the Welsh national curriculum—which is very open and very competency-based, which leaves room for many, many different interpretations, in the end it’s often the textbooks and publishers who create those textbooks who then make the actual decisions.

What About Technology?

Stefanie Panke: Apart from attitudes and thoughts towards education, obviously the technology landscape and the broader society that these two curricula that we talked about are embedded in look extremely, extremely different. So, what role do you think the internet, globalization, and now generative AI play in the change of what and how we teach?

Paul Kirschner: I’d like to not go into that because it’s a whole different can of worms as to technology. I’ll make one statement about that and leave it at that. In 1983, Richard Clark published an incredible paper in Review of Educational Research. And in the end, you can say his message was, “It’s the method and not the medium.” Let’s first concentrate on the method, and then see how to make use of the media.

Stefanie Panke: For teachers who want to embrace a knowledge-rich curriculum: How do I teach it when, at the same time, students have ChatGPT at their fingertips? Or if my school district just bought a new AI assistant that will interject itself in every teaching and learning situation that I create?

Paul Kirschner: I don’t have a real answer for you to that. I mean, how it’s taught and the tools that are used are just a completely different world from the composition of the curriculum—and I use the word “composition” because you compose the curriculum at each grade level and across grade levels. They’re horizontally and vertically coherent. And that’s your basis. And how the teacher—the pedagogy, the didactics—that the teacher chooses, the tools that she or he uses, are, for me, completely irrelevant. You could ask me the same thing: I used to be a cook. I cook every day. And you can ask me the same thing about the most advanced cooking apparatus and making use of a good Sabatier knife—what it all comes down to is what meal I’m making and what the ingredients are, and in which order I add them to the skillet, and what I have ready—mise en place—and what I have to do at the moment in order to do it. And if I do it with a Cuisinart or Magimix or a Sabatier knife, other things determine the tools I’m going to use. And it’s the same here. They’re just two completely different qualities and quantities.

Claudio Vanhees: I do think that initially the whole idea of the internet—”you can Google it”—and now “you can ask ChatGPT, so why learn it?” is indeed an important question because it’s not the same to have information as having knowledge in your long-term memory. So it’s not because you can Google it or ask it to ChatGPT and do cognitive offloading that you will know it yourself. Actually, if you do that from a very young age onwards and don’t create sufficient background knowledge, I do think that’s a real danger, because then you will cognitively offload all your complex processes to a machine. If you don’t have the machine anymore, you can’t write a text, you can’t interpret or critically think about what’s being said, which is also very dangerous in terms of democracy in society. If you’re an older student going to the later years of secondary school and going to university then it becomes more the question of using your aid in mathematics. But I think in primary and secondary education, you should mainly be able to do it on your own without any aid, because that will actually mean that you have sufficient background knowledge to be able to perform those complex cognitive skills.

Old Ways To Equity

Stefanie Panke: Thank you so much! Do you have any closing thoughts?

Claudio Vanhees: As closing thoughts, I would like to say that often it is said that in modern society we need new approaches—new curricular approaches. I would say we need a knowledge-rich curriculum more than ever, because it is the best way to actually create a common knowledge base for all students, to strive for more equitable educational opportunities, and to have pupils that can think critically and can think deeply, right now and also in times of AI. Because that’s, I think, the best way to be able to be critical: if you actually have sufficient background knowledge in your own long-term memory and you don’t need to cognitively offload everything. Which doesn’t mean that you should, under all circumstances, forbid any use of AI ever. But it should be used thoughtfully, because you don’t want to create a situation where you don’t build this broad background knowledge in your pupils, because that’s what actually will give them the foundations they need to strive for those complex skills everybody needs in modern society.

Paul Kirschner: The most important thing that we can give our children is knowledge—knowledge to make them smarter, more social, better citizens, to help them achieve economic security. In my humble opinion, a good starting point is a knowledge-rich curriculum to help them gain the knowledge they need to be good citizens.

Claudio Vanhees: And I think everybody has the right to that. It’s a matter of social justice.

Paul Kirschner: Yes, it’s a human right.