What is 21st Century Knowledge?

Today, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to know. There is a significant difference between knowing how to do something and knowing how to learn something. Today's children know how to do many things, when it comes to technology things that most adults can't do. Children can even learn. After all, if they couldn't learn than they wouldn't know things.

But there is a significant difference between being able to learn and knowing how to learn. My guess is that most children learn by trial and error. They try something until they get it right. When they get it right they do the same thing over and over until they want to do something else. Then they try the new thing over and over until they get it right. And the process continues.

If I'm correct, the type of learning that children do, let's call it informal learning, is intrinsically problematic. (To be honest, I'm not sure that I'm correct. The following is thinking aloud.) Informal learning does not provide learners with a foundation upon which they can continuously add new knowledge in a way that enables them to differentiate between more important ideas and less important ideas. When learning informally do students develop the skills to identify central ideas and tangential ideas? Do students develop mental tools for distinguishing between accurate ideas and false ideas? I think not.

Formal learning on the other hand provides tools through which students can think about the structure of ideas. Joseph Schwab explained that there are two differnet types of disciplinary knowledge: substantive knowledge and syntactic knowledge. A syntactic knowledge base includes formalistic rules for learning. The knowledge base explains how disciplinarians determine if ideas are valid. It explains how disciplinarians differentiate between more important ideas and less important ideas. My thought is that learning how to learn within any discipline provides students with important reasoning skills. These reasoning skills are the foundation of information literacy.

I've read on multiple occasions that educators are concerned that students are not learning how to distinguish between accurate and false information on the Internet. Students can't distinguish between what's important and what's trivial. I can't help but wondering if students would better develop these skills if they learned how to use technology for disciplinary purposes instead of technology for its own purposes more often.

What do you think?