This is the central point that I was trying to make… and I should really take more time when trying to make these kinds of distinctions.

The standards system is premised on specific things being remembered. The name of the now not planet is Pluto. It has a weird elliptical orbit. It’s the name of the roman god of the underworld. No matter how you go about it, there has to be a way to identify is someone has remembered a specific something in order to judge the standard. AND, critically, everyone must remember the same something.

In a creative system, it is definitely valuable to know many things. Without knowledge it can be painfully difficult to be creative for a lack of context and things to combine. But it doesn’t particularly matter what those things are. As long as they are part of a general set of things that can be combined, they can be useful. There is no (well… lets say few) particular, individual thing that you need to know.

I once had an argument with a very smart person about whether students needed to remember that the Boston Massacre happened in 1781. He claimed it was part of american history and should be remembered. I argued that any of the individual facts of the matter are not necessary, that anyone with part of the story could get the rest of it. Yes, cover it in school, but the specific facts, each individual fact, are not really necessary to remember.

does that make it clearer?