Historian and philosopher Theodore Roszak (1994) minimizes the role of information in human cognition, and he even observes “humans think with ideas, not with information” [emphasis in the original] and affords ideas a central place in the human cognition by continuing, “Information may helpfully illustrate or decorate an idea; it may, where it works under the guidance of a contrasting idea, help to call other ideas into question” (p. 88). For Roszak, the concepts that will organize the curriculum are more important than the examples that may illustrate them. He even suggests “a culture survives by the power, plasticity, and fertility of its ideas. Ideas come first because ideas define, contain, and eventually produce information” (p. 88).

Reference

Roszak, T. (1994). The cult of information: A neo-Luddite treatise on high tech, artificial intelligence, and the true art of thinking (2nd ed). University of California Press.