Think Again

LEARNING, INTERRUPTED
Looking back on my own early education, one of my biggest
disappointments is that I never got to fully experience the biggest upheavals
in science. Long before it ever occurred to me to be curious about the
cosmos, my teachers started demystifying it in kindergarten. I often wonder
how I would have felt if I was a teenager when I first learned that we don’t
live on a static, flat disc, but on a spinning, moving sphere.
I hope I would have been stunned, and that disbelief would have
quickly given way to curiosity and eventually the awe of discovery and the
joy of being wrong. I also suspect it would have been a life-changing lesson
in confident humility. If I could be that mistaken about what was under my
own two feet, how many other so-called truths were actually question
marks? Sure, I knew that many earlier generations of humans had gotten it
wrong, but there’s a huge difference between learning about other people’s
false beliefs and actually learning to unbelieve things ourselves.
I realize this thought experiment is wildly impractical. It’s hard enough
to keep kids in the dark about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Even if we
could pull off such a delay, there’s a risk that some students would seize and
freeze on what they learned early on. They could become trapped in an
overconfidence cycle where pride in false knowledge fuels conviction, and
confirmation and desirability biases lead to validation. Before you know it,
we might have a whole nation of flat-earthers.
Evidence shows that if false scientific beliefs aren’t addressed in
elementary school, they become harder to change later. “Learning
counterintuitive scientific ideas [is] akin to becoming a fluent speaker of a
second language,” psychologist Deborah Kelemen writes. It’s “a task that
becomes increasingly difficult the longer it is delayed, and one that is
almost never achieved with only piecemeal instruction and infrequent
practice.” That’s what kids really need: frequent practice at unlearning,
especially when it comes to the mechanisms of how cause and effect work.

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In the field of history education, there’s a growing movement to ask
questions that don’t have a single right answer. In a curriculum developed at
Stanford, high school students are encouraged to critically examine what
really caused the Spanish-American War, whether the New Deal was a
success, and why the Montgomery bus boycott was a watershed moment.
Some teachers even send students out to interview people with whom they
disagree. The focus is less on being right, and more on building the skills to
consider different views and argue productively about them.
That doesn’t mean all interpretations are accepted as valid. When the
son of a Holocaust survivor came to her class, Erin McCarthy told her
students that some people denied the existence of the Holocaust, and taught
them to examine the evidence and reject those false claims. This is part of a
broader movement to teach kids to think like fact-checkers: the guidelines
include (1) “interrogate information instead of simply consuming it,” (2)

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“reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability,” and (3) “understand
that the sender of information is often not its source.”
These principles are valuable beyond the classroom. At our family
dinner table, we sometimes hold myth-busting discussions. My wife and I
have shared how we learned in school that Pluto was a planet (not true
anymore) and Columbus discovered America (never true). Our kids have
taught us that King Tut probably didn’t die in a chariot accident and
gleefully explained that when sloths do their version of a fart, the gas comes
not from their behinds but from their mouths.
Rethinking needs to become a regular habit. Unfortunately, traditional
methods of education don’t always allow students to form that habit.