ABSTRACT
Alfred North Whitehead (1929) decried what he called “inert ideas”—propositional knowledge that the student could express but not use. Whitehead declared that the central problem of all education was “the problem of keeping knowledge alive, of preventing it from becoming inert.” His view of this problem was essentially a cognitive one; that is, he saw the problem as residing, not in the knowledge itself, considered epistemologically, but in the way this knowledge was represented in the student's mind. The “parroting” problem has long been recognized, the problem of students learning propositions by rote that were intended to be meaningful. But Whitehead saw beyond that to recognize that propositions could be comprehended and still constitute inert knowledge.
