Well I did say that schools should not be fact-free zones. I'm rather glad that someone forced me to chant 7X8=56 a thousand times. It's a fact all right but it's also a building block. My point is that stuffing facts, by worried teachers who always have to watch their backs these days, in order to pass key stage tests or exams provides the danger of utterly quelling all enthusiasm for learning, engendering cynicism even, and worse, produces children with mental sieves, that is, they forget all those "facts" once they've jumped through the hoops. Facts don't exist in isolation. A dictionary is rammed full of disconnected facts, determined only by alphabetical order. For edification through joy, I'd far sooner read Dickens or Jane Austen than a dictionary any day, but that doesn't mean I'll be throwing the dictionary away. All things are interconnected, and the joy of learning is to find the connections. That way you're encouraged to keep enquiring, to keep adding to the never-ending jigsaw. Rote learning, and the force-feeding of pseudo-facts, as happens in all religious instruction lessons, are obstacles to the process. Facts are important, but learning how to learn (how to grab knowledge for yourself rather than have it poured over you, in the words of the great John Seymour) is crucial in enabling us to make sense of the facts. And to stay enthusiastic about learning, the most important thing of all. Quite possibly, it's why we're here.