Lecture
As pedagogy notes, the entire body of existing knowledge should be passed on to the younger generation, but since this is impossible, and even more so with respect to each individual student, the school curriculum provides for a minimally necessary body of knowledge about the objects being studied. This body of knowledge characterizes the completeness of knowledge, measured by the amount of curricular knowledge about the object being studied.
Completeness is a relative concept, first, because knowledge about the world is constantly being added to, and second, because the school curriculum provides for only a part of the knowledge known to society. In turn, at each stage of education the completeness of knowledge about one and the same object also differs.
At the same time, the ability to identify all the features of a concept and their connections with one another is characterized as the completeness of knowledge.
Note that the completeness of knowledge presupposes the assimilation not only of knowledge about facts, but also about the connections between them. Without this, it is impossible to assimilate facts. Consequently, it is important to teach students to distinguish the essential and non-essential connections of any individual object with others, as well as essential and non-essential phenomena or their classes and the connections between them. The totality of essential connections between correlated pieces of knowledge that students have become aware of characterizes the depth of knowledge — another quality of it.
Completeness does not coincide with depth, since completeness allows for knowledge to be isolated from one another. Depth, on the other hand, presupposes the essentiality of connections: the more essential these connections are, the greater the depth of knowledge.
Let us note that wherever it is possible for students to establish connections independently, this should be used. At the same time, it should be taken into account that they find it more accessible to systematize connections that are already known but scattered.
Example of the completeness and depth of knowledge
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