It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts

Learning facts and understanding concepts are two most basic aspects of our students' studying progress. They are complement to each other and both can be interesting or boring. And in term of whether understanding ideas is more important for students than learning facts, I totally support it.

The first reason why I hold this opinion is that understanding ideas and concepts can help us learn facts better. Because concepts is the keystone of understanding facts. And this is why in the class we usually study concepts first then move to other facts rather than the other way around. For example, in the study materials about photosynthesis, the front page is usually the essential ideas and concepts of the progress of photosynthesis, after that some facts about some certain types plants will be presented. If these steps are reversed, it will be hard for students to figure out what the facts is about, since they lack the fundamental concepts to understand these facts.

Secondly. Understanding ideas and concepts is more helpful to the intellectual development of student's brains than simply learning facts, which is mainly about laborious memorizing. The somewhat complicated relationships between elements of a certain idea is a great for students to exercise their brain. Let's take the photosynthesis as an example again. In the progress of photosynthesis, the chemical components, the elements of the photosynthesis, interact with each other at different stages, which might be hard to learn at first. But once you figure out the relationships of these elements, you get the hang of it.

Finally, ideas and concepts sometimes can lead people to discover facts. That's the case with the periodic table of the early versions. There were some gaps left between some certain types of elements which, according to the concepts of the periodic table, should belong to the undiscovered elements. As expected, scientist in later decades actually found those elements and filled them into the gaps one by one. This example should perfectly illustrate why concepts is more important than facts.

Facts and concepts are both essential to our study, but learning concepts should have higher priority for it helps us better understand facts and can exercise our brain better and sometimes can lead us to discover new facts.