How much can you remove from the school curriculum before the Jenga tower collapses

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 101

In the age of Google you don't need to know things any more, supposedly. Why memorise facts when you can google them? However, removing the memorising of knowledge from the school curriculum (and cancelling homework) is like playing Jenga Towers: how many bricks/blocks can you remove before it all collapses?

Clearly some Jenga towers with symmetrical holes are airy and beautiful. While solid siloed blocks without variation of the vertical layout pattern are unstable (rote learning). Yet, unless you start using an entirely different and novel material (e.g. composite or carbon fibre), you cannot reduce the number of bricks by more than 50%.

Woe betide those who learn too little, as their Jenga tower is bound to collapse. While the Tower of Babel collapsed because there was too much in it (diversity of languages), the Jenga of knowledge collapses when there is too little in it.

Jenga Tower (Source: Wikipedia)