Fundamentals versus Basics

A recurring phrase in politics with regard to education is "back to basics." Every once in a while, somebody running for office will say that's what schools need to do in order to improve. Some people will nod in agreement, other people will shake their heads. Some people will even push back and say that the obsession with basic skills is the whole problem.

So, what's a reasonable, thinking person supposed to believe? On the one hand, we all know that it takes a lot more than basic skills to make our way in this world. A basic grasp of piano technique might allow one to play Mary Had a Little Lamb so that others can recognize it, but what really excites us is when we get to hear the instrument played by somebody with mastery. On the other hand, any endeavor has to have a starting point. Whether reading, writing, math, science, art, or music, every field and every discipline has its basic principles, and achieving mastery without it is like trying to land a spaceship on Mars without any idea how gravity works.

I'm going to propose a subtle but important distinction which hopefully will make it easier to understand the issue. That distinction is going to be fundamentals versus basics. In reality, these words are used interchangeably all the time, but for my purposes here, I'm going to treat them as completely separate.

Fundamentals are going to be the essential tools, materials, and techniques that everything in a given field depends on for things to work AND the underlying principles that make them work the way they do. The tools, materials, and techniques may change over time as the field develops, but changes in the underlying principles are very rare, and usually cause a big fuss when they happen. For example, architects think up new ways to design buildings and engineers think up new things to make them out of, but regardless of the design or the things used to build them, the building is going to have to deal with the force of gravity. Gravity would be an underlying principle, materials and things used to build would have to do with tools, techniques, and materials. We expect improvements in tools and building design...if gravity started behaving differently, we would all be very surprised.

Basics, on the other hand, are going to be the tasks that we assign to beginners without any knowledge, understanding, or experience. For example, it is quite common when a child is first learning to read and write that we ask them to memorize letters and numbers. We teach them the ABC song to help them acquire the alphabet, and maybe show them video clips of The Count on Sesame Street to help them acquire numbers. Some of this is necessary; sooner or later a person will need to know the alphabet in order to read and write, and know their digits in order to do arithmetic calculations.

After a certain point, however, focusing on the basics becomes counterproductive, whereas fundamentals remain important indefinitely. Once basics have been mastered, reviewing them provides diminishing returns. Revisiting fundamentals from time to time, on the other hand, can be very useful, particularly if they are relevant to new or more complex concepts.