Two More Things to Unlearn from School

In Three Things to Unlearn from School, Ben Casnocha cites Bill Bullard's list of three bad habits of thought: Attaching importance to personal opinions, solving given problems, and earning the approval of others. Bullard's proposed alternatives don't look very good to me, but Bullard has surely identified some important problems.

I can think of other school-inculcated bad habits of thought, too many to list, but I'll name two of my least favorite.

I suspect the most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don't really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway. One of the most fundamental life skills is realizing when you are confused, and school actively destroys this ability - teaches students that they "understand" when they can successfully answer questions on an exam, which is very very very far from absorbing the knowledge and making it a part of you. Students learn the habit that eating consists of putting food into mouth; the exams can't test for chewing or swallowing, and so they starve.

Much of this problem may come from needing to take three 4-credit courses per quarter, with a textbook chapter plus homework to be done every week - the courses are timed for frantic memorization, it's not possible to deeply chew over and leisurely digest knowledge in the same period. College students aren't allowed to be confused; if they started saying, "Wait, do I really understand this? Maybe I'd better spend a few days looking up related papers, or consult another textbook," they'd fail all the courses they took that quarter. A month later they would understand the material far better and remember it much longer - but one month after finals is too late; it counts for nothing in the lunatic university utility function.

Many students who have gone through this process no longer even realize when something confuses them, or notice gaps in their understanding. They have been trained out of pausing to think.

I recall reading, though I can't remember where, that physicists in some country were more likely to become extreme religious fanatics. This confused me, until the author suggested that physics students are presented with a received truth that is actually correct, from which they learn the habit of trusting authority.

It may be dangerous to present people with a giant mass of authoritative knowledge, especially if it is actually true. It may damage their skepticism.

So what could you do? Teach students the history of physics, how each idea was replaced in turn by a new correct one? "Here's the old idea, here's the new idea, here's the experiment - the new idea wins!" Repeat this lesson ten times and what is the habit of thought learned? "New ideas always win; every new idea in physics turns out to be correct." You still haven't taught any critical thinking, because you only showed them history as seen with perfect hindsight. You've taught them the habit that distinguishing true ideas from false ones is perfectly clear-cut and straightforward, so if a shiny new idea has anything to recommend it, it's probably true.

Maybe it would be possible to teach the history of physics from a historically realistic point of view, without benefit of hindsight: show students the different alternatives that were considered historically plausible, re-enact the historical disagreements and debates.

Maybe you could avoid handing students knowledge on a silver platter: show students different versions of physics equations that looked plausible, and ask them to figure out which was the correct one, or invent experiments that would distinguish between alternatives. This wouldn't be as challenging as needing to notice anomalies without hints and invent alternatives from scratch, but it would be a vast improvement over memorizing a received authority.

Then, perhaps, you could teach the habit of thought: "The ideas of received authority are often imperfect but it takes a great effort to find a new idea that is better. Most possible changes are for the worse, even though every improvement is necessarily a change."

Comments

[Nick Tarleton]

Great post. Here's another take on the scientists-more-likely-to-become-fanatics phenomenon: people who go into the hard sciences think in ways that predispose them more towards literalism.

[Plinius]

So there's an argument for going into the classroom (as a teacher) completely unprepared, stumble through the material, reason things out in fron of the students, go down hopeless calculations for a while, then say "scratch that", "let's see....hmmmmm", etc....Nothing should be clear, the students would have to make huge efforts just to find out what's on the hw. I know some people like this (not by design). I wonder if their students learn some important life-skills though.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Great post, Eliezer (you've earned my approval). I think tied for worst school-nutured habit, along with parroting things back, is emphasis on what we think we know, as opposed to what we don't know. I think school science and history subjects would be a lot more interesting, and accurately presented, if at least equal time was given to all the problems and areas where we don't know what's going on, and for which there are various competing theories. Unfortunately one doesn't usually get this presentation of the state of things until one is working as a research assistant in college or grad school.

[Doug S.]

My father is a college professor and he's going to be teaching an introduction to engineering course to future electrical engineering students. He's planning on making the students learn basic electromagnetic theory by forcing them to try to perform their own experiments with a pile of stuff that would have existed around 1900 or so.

"Today's assignment: In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted discovered a relationship between electricity and magnetism. Replicate his experiment and demonstrate that a relationship exists."

Hopefully, some student will eventually connect a wire up to a battery and put a compass near the wire, causing the compass needle to deflect. (The compass is included in the collection of stuff the students will be given.)

[mk]

Another option is to enforce co-op programs as part of school. Give people some life experience to go with their college bubble experience...

[dearieme]

"..show students different versions of physics equations that looked plausible, and ask them to figure out which was the correct one": I used to do this. Professor Rosencrantz favours this, I wrote, and Dr Guildernstern that. I stopped when we started getting students who didn't know who R and G were.

[Mike]

Re: "Wait, do I really understand this? Maybe I'd better spend a few days looking up related papers, or consult another textbook," they'd fail all the courses they took that quarter. A month later they would understand the material far better and remember it much longer - but one month after finals is too late; it counts for nothing in the lunatic university utility function.

This line of thought reminded me of Robert Frank's The Economic Naturalist: "When students are given tests designed to probe their knowledge of basic economics six months after taking the course, they do not perform significantly better than others who never took an introductory course. This is scandalous."

I gather the goal of Frank's student assignments is to have them think, even if imperfectly, rather than to parrot well.

[Robin Hanson]

It is obvious to most teachers, and to many students, that school tests and rewards are often quite at odds the usual stated purposes of school. It often seems like there are other ways we could teach and test that would be more in line with those stated purposes. You seem to be suggesting such alternatives.

But I think we have to take very seriously the fact that schools have long had the option to switch, and have chosen not to. I conclude that the real purpose of school is somewhat different from the stated purpose, and that the things taught are in fact more useful for the real purpose.

[mk]

Wait, don't leave us hanging! What's the real purpose?

[LP]

A good post, Eliezer, but it brings to mind that quote about the horse, and the water -- you know the one I mean. In my college years (as a philosophy major) it because clear that there were students who actually went through the process of digesting, seeking broader context, checking out other sources, and so on. And there were students who were there to get a BA. I don't recall either group doing much better or worse on exams, papers, etc. But perhaps this is more common in the humanities, where reading is the main activity, than in the sciences...

As far as high school goes, Robin's point about the true purpose of school is on target -- it's obvious that the primary function of high school is keeping rowdy, hormonal, unstable adolescents under control and out of everyone's way until they stop being crazy. Also as a way to fill space between extracurricular activities.

[LemmusLemmus]

Robin,

and what are the stated purposes you're specifically thinking of?

[Robin Hanson]

Possible purposes of school include: 1) babysitting, 2) social mixing, 3) sorting by intelligence and/or consciensciousness, 3) imprinting work habits, 4) learning specific useful skills or knowledge, etc. If you know what general skills tend to be useful in typical office jobs in our economy, you will see relevance of typical work habits imprinted and characteristics sorted in school.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

Robin, good point. At the same time, there might be a large functional vs. optimal gap in the degree to which school is fulfilling its real purposes. Although the best way to optimize it might not be to brainstorm about how to get it closer to its stated purposes -so point well-taken on that end.

[TGGP]

This is a good post.

I don't take nearly as cynical (or is it bitter & angry for seemingly no reason?) a view as Mencius Moldbug does, but you might be interested in his post on grad school.

[David J. Balan]

I'm very sympathetic to the idea contained in the post. In fact, I used to say something similar in my graduate student gig as a freshman orientation guy. But teaching and learning real thought are hard. Can everybody teach it and learn it? Is there any sense in which what goes on now is not optimal, but is (or at least is not too far from) constrained optimal?

[James D. Miller]

All textbooks should contain a few deliberately placed errors that students should be capable of detecting. This way if a student is confused he might suspect it is because his textbook is wrong.

[Joseph Hertzlinger]

One problem with a professor telling students "I may be wrong." is that many of the students will hear that as "You must be right."

[Tobbic]

I see the purpose of BSc or MSc is to learn to be able to make an analysis of a given subject (related to your particular field) and write a structured and coherent report of it. To do this you need to learn how to use the tools of analysis particular to your field (e.g. calculus, physics equations, balance sheet, schools of thought in philosophy etc.). So when you are done with the school and have BSc or MSc if somebody gives you data and a research question you can apply the tools and write a report/essay.

To be a researcher you need to learn how to make/enhance those tools & need to see the problems and limitations with the tools currently in use. This means you need to learn critical thinking, skepticism, to take wider perspectives.. Besides listening and doing you need to learn to ask, propose and argue.

It is a problem that some BSc or MSc (or BA, MA whatever) may never be exposed to this culture of critical thinking and become experts/pundits with narrow perspectives and a lack of skepticism.

[anon]

Can you imagine the reductions in the number of students able to handle coursework if professors actually made their students think rather than memorize.

Unfortunately, it seems that most universities are obsessed with making money and thus need to address the abilities and intellect of a wider audience... not everyone is capable of the upper level critical thinking suggested here.

[Luis Enrique]

University English Lit departments should be closed down for teaching appalling habits of thought to impressionable young people.

You read the books, and then you pick up elements from them and turn them around a bit until they line up nicely to form a pleasing argument. The more tenuous (sorry, 'sensitive') your reading, the more marks you get. The more 'powerful' the story you weave, the more marks you get. Especially if it chimes with the prevailing intellectual fashions. Extra points also for being subversive or challenging the (straw man) orthodoxy. Looking behind the superficial to decode the deeper truth is, of course, compulsory. Marks deducted for anything as neolithic as thinking literature might teach us anything about the human condition.

Never do you weigh the merits of your chosen interpretation against other available interpretations - in fact the question is nonsensical, because there are no criteria for comparison. There is no analog of testing whether your hypothesis is consistent with facts. Never do you consider how the elements of your 'reading' hold together or relate to the real world - that is to say you can employ any half comprehended 'philosophy' without being held to task if that 'philosophy' is a poor description of reality. Internal logical consistency is not required.

Once you learn the tricks, it is child's play to get a first class degree.

Then you go out into the world and start applying your mental habits to the real world. For the results, see newspaper columnists, novelists and playwrights taking on topics such as economics, politics and foreign policy.

I am aware the above might make me look a bit like a nutjob .. perhaps I just had a particularly unpleasant match with my Eng Lit faculty. But I reckon there's something in it.

[Michael Sullivan]

All textbooks should contain a few deliberately placed errors that students should be capable of detecting. This way if a student is confused he might suspect it is because his textbook is wrong.

Starting that in the current culture would be...interesting, to say the least.

I still recall vividly a day that I found an error in my sixth grade math textbook and pointed it out in class. The teacher, who clearly understood that day's lesson less well than I did, concocted some kind of just so story to explain the issue which had clear logical inconsistencies, which I also pointed out, along with a plausible just so story of my own of how the error could have happened innocently.

I ended up being mocked by both teacher and students as someone who "thinks he knows everything". Because of course, we all know that the textbook author not only *does* know everything, but is incapable of making typographical errors.

Oddly, at the time I was remarking on the error to stand up for a classmate who was expressing confusion. She couldn't understand why her (correct) answer to a question was wrong.

[Aaron Haspel]

Eliezer promised us two school-inculcated bad habits of thought, and I count only one.

[Nick Doty]

Though I certainly take your point, I think giving tests to students is actually meant to combat the problem of parroting rather than understanding information. In high school I often complained that we wasted time taking tests when we could be learning new information, but if teachers determined when to move on to new material just by asking students whether we understood, I'm sure we would have always just nodded and parroted back the teacher's sentences. Knowing that you'll have to take a test on material (that you'll be asked to answer different problems using the same methods) encourages students to make sure they actually do understand the material. It might be that the best way to solve the problem of parroting rather than understanding material isn't to get rid of exams but to have more of them, or, really, to have *better* ones.

[Greg]

Is the second thing to unlearn how to count? My traditional, school learned way of counting only finds one thing you want to unlearn, not two.

[rm]

Teach a class about Thomas Kuhn. Problem solved.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Bad Habit #1) Don't notice when you're confused.

Bad Habit #2) All authoritative ideas / all new ideas / all ideas that have a few plausible reasons to support them, are true.

[Garth Wood]

Teach a class about Michael Polanyi.  Problem solved better.   ;-)

[Biomed Tim]

I quote from one of my favorite authors, Jamie Whyte:

Alas, most know next to nothing about the ways reasoning can go wrong. Schools and universities pack their minds with invaluable pieces of information--about the nitrogen cycle, the causes of World War II, iambic pentameter, and trigonometry--but leave them incapable of identifying even basic errors of logic. Which makes for a nation of suckers, unable to resist the bogus reasoning of those who want something from them, such as votes or money or devotion.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think the problem can be alleviated by making the introductory logic course a requirement for all students. Such a course could include elements such as formal logic, inductive reasoning, or more specifically, how the scientific method is practiced. Perhaps it could even include some simple psychology so students can learn about our inherent biases in cognition, and then some statistics so they can learn about how data can elucidate the truth. Does this sound too ambitious?

[James Blair]

Ambitious or not isn't a concern of mine. Instead I'm worrying about the students who will be filled with invaluable pieces of information--about formal logic, inductive reasoning, the practise of the scientific method, perhaps biases in cognition and then some statistics. While they're useful things to know, so is the nitrogen cycle, the causes of WW2, the iambic pentameter and trigonometry. None of these things are the void that we wish to emphasise in teaching.

[Robin Hanson]

Not long ago Doug S pointed us to this article suggesting a general failure of courses that attempt to teach "critical thinking." It's just a lot harder than it might seem.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

It may be a fair question of whether better outcomes result when a substantial portion of the population is taught followign directions rather than to think critically. Sort of like how the Straussians approach religion and how the armed forces approach chain of command.

[Biomed Tim]

Willingham alluded to the fact that critical thinking courses depend largely on the skill of teachers. From my personal experience, some teachers are excellent critical thinkers, but a majority of them are very bad...which is why I disagree with him when he states that critical thinking should not be taught on its own. Willingham proposes that critical thinking should be taught in the context of subject matter but I just don't think we have enough qualified teachers to do this.

[Felix]

I never went to school. Bill Bullard seems to assume that without the indoctrinating influence of school, we'd be prissy self-effacing socialists. He's wrong, because I'm an individualist and I think his first two points are garbage.

[Bruce Britton]

On the propositon that 'knowing that you are confused is essential for learning' there is a structural equation model, tested empirically on 200+ subjects, that concludes that the ability of knowing-that-you-don't-understand is an essential prerequisite for learning, in the sense that people who have that ability learn much better than those who do not. Three other individual difference variables are also involved, but only come into play after the person realizes that they don't understand something. Its called 'Learning from instructional text: Test of an individual differences model' and is in the Journal of Educational Psychology (1998), 90, 476-491.

Another well-known study was of students learning a computer language from a computer tutoring program, in which all their keystrokes during learning were captured for analysis, and the biggest correlation with successful learning was the number of times they pushed a button labeled 'I don't understand.' (John Anderson's of Carnegie-Mellon)

Another famous result was from the notorious California State Legislature-mandated study of self-esteem: in high school seniors, i it was found that students with the highest self-esteem when they graduated -- they thought they already knew everything -- were those with the lowest self esteem the next year-- they couldn't keep a job because -- they thought they already knew everything.

[Gordon Worley]

The best thing about grad school is when you finish taking courses. To make it through the math courses you have to play the game, writing down proofs you know aren't right but that will get you some credit. Once you're done with that, then you can actually step back and learn something. Study only one or two things at a time, set a reasonable pace that will allow you time to think (and will be paced relative to your own speed of thought), and actually gain some understanding. Of course, some students use this as an excuse to be lazy, but a good advisor will know the difference.

[Anonymous]

I agree with the English lit comment. I know someone who went through that and she was able to pass classes without reading the books. In fact, the less she read, the better she did!

[Chapleau]

Is there any profit to opening up a discussion on enlarging the time it takes to get a degree so that the students and the teachers can take the time to explore and learn in depth.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Bruce, thank you for the study reference!

[Joshua Fox]

Not all schools/universities are as grim as all that. I went to a small liberal arts university where research professors taught small classes, and although it wasn't perfect, the students who wanted to learn critical thought were encouraged by many professors to do so.

> trusting authority.
Learning critical thinking of great minds is a decent start on developing one's own, and closer than most students will ever get.

> "Maybe I'd better ... consult another textbook, they'd fail
> all the courses they took that quarter."

I did that occasionally, and passed!

> with a textbook chapter plus homework to be done every week - the courses
> are timed for frantic memorization, it's not possible to deeply chew over
> and leisurely digest knowledge in the same period.

Almost no one would have the mental discipline to use the extra time to digest the knowledge.

And don't put memorization down -- deeper thought needs to complement memorization, but cannot replace it.

> A month later they would understand the material far better and
> remember it much longer - but one month after finals is too late

The ideal approach would have graded work on a course spread out over as long a time as possible: Twice-weekly exercises, weekly quizzes, monthly midterms, semesterly exams, year-end finals, and a summary test at the end of the degree, like many European universities. There would also be papers and reports. All these would have a significant weighting in the final grade.

This would encourage students to continually re-learn the material. Also, tests and other graded work are great ways to learn in themselves -- at least while they are doing them, students are exercising their brains to some extent.

And of course, it would not harm the students' grades, since grades can be made to fall into any curve, high or low as you please, whether or not you make the students re-learn the material.

The main barrier to this proposal is that educators don't want to put the effort into grading.

Eliezer, I hate to raise an ad hominem point, but how do you know what you know about formal schooling?

Joshua

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

As you say Joshua, ad hominem. Since you ask, it's from providing therapy to friends who were damaged by the school system. But nobody here has alleged that I'm off-base in my description (as opposed to suggestions and conclusions), and therefore it doesn't matter how I got an accurate description, only that I did. As I recently told a schooled friend who was taught silly rules, "The first rule of math is that it doesn't matter how you get the correct answer, so long as it is correct."

(I also explained that "Math is what you do when you don't know what to do next. If you already know exactly how to solve a problem, it's not math, it's computation.")

[floccina]

This is related to one of my personal pet peeves. That is that schools are more about testing/grading people than about teaching. Parroting back is much more easily testable.

[Floccina]

Oh to add to my above post, it seems to me that the teachers are too loyal to the over all society and less loyal to the student. They feel that they must grade students fairly and teach them in a manner that keeps that grading fair. If you hire a tutor he will teach you as best he can without much testing and will use whatever method he has at his disposal. A teacher may in a subtle way not want to teach a poor student using any method he has at his disposal. After all if I hire a tutor I would stop paying him if he gave me a poor grade and blabbed it to others. I hire him to teach me what I want to lean not to grade me. IMO Not for profit school exists to grade humans like we grade apples more than to teach! They work of society not for the students!

[TGGP]

floccina, perhaps the real purpose of schools is sorting. Perhaps the idea that children must be formed into educated people by schools is just part of Pinker's "nurture assumption". Schools have an incentive to promote that assumption, as it gives them more reason to exist. However, if they don't actually know how to educate children (and as you note, it is hard to test whether they actually teach), why would we expect them to?

[Johnnie]

St. John's College, in Santa Fe NM and Annapolis MD teaches in a way similar to what is suggested in th is post.