Why are we afraid to be wrong?
Is being wrong something to fear? Or is it an opportunity to learn something new?
Public Schooling
School from the tender young age of about 4, ends up spending more time with our youth than their own parents. The things taught either explicitly or implicitly will have a lifelong impact for better or worse. The institution itself, the schools, the curriculum, the board of education, they all believe that it is their job to educate the children in the way that best suits their agendas.
What exactly is a four-year-old learning from school?
After a simple internet search, I can pull up a list of expectations for a Kindergarten student. Oral Communication, reading & writing, mathematics, science and technology, creative art, social relationships, health and physical activity, and more.
Out of context it wouldn’t look out of place on a college syllabus, but of course education should be building from day one into the inevitable conclusion of having a new productive individual that can join the work force in some capacity. Why not start them along the most efficient path to that goal, right?
If you want to take an idealist stance about what the goal of public education is for their students, you could assume that they want to help children learn one of life’s must fundamental skills - how to learn. Yes, it’s wonderful to have consumed the knowledge you need to pass a test, but ultimately the better prepared someone is to learn new skills and to consume knowledge, the better educated they are.
What if modern education existed in its current state to do precisely the opposite?
Yes, any semi competent instructor will lead their students through that curriculum with a relatively high degree of success. Their students will learn to read and write, to count, they’ll learn how to interact with their peers, and they’ll likely be prepared for their follow up years of school.
Unfortunately for them, and for you and me, there is something else going on, a different lesson that is being taught. That being wrong is unacceptable and something that must be avoided at all costs. They are taught that repeating what you’ve been told is correct, that it makes you virtuous, and a failure to do so makes you incorrect, bad, lesser then.
Objective truth exists, in fact it’s the underlying reason for us to be spending this time together, but this problem isn’t about the truth, it’s about how a child is shown the differences between being right and being wrong.
When you answer correctly, you are rewarded. When you answer incorrectly, you are punished.
That lesson is one that stays with us and has become a kind of neurosis for many. There’s no way to prove that schooling is the origin of this sentiment, but the problems that arise from a population that simply can’t allow themselves to ever be wrong means that we’re incredibly easy to manipulate. Once you’ve convinced someone of a lie, they will forever defend that lie because it’s easier to remain ignorant than it is to admit you ever made a mistake.
My School Experience
I can remember being an exuberant kid that absolutely loved answering questions in class because I often had the correct answer. It felt good. The positive reinforcement loop of answering correctly was highly addicting, but nothing stung quite so much as getting something wrong in front of the entire class.
I have a distinct memory of eagerly raising my hand to answer a question, being picked, blurting out what was sure to be the right answer, and then being shot down. I was wrong. The class erupted into laughter, and my ears burned from shame as I slunk down into my chair. When I think about that moment, I can remember dozens of details that allow me to relive it to this day.
Is school a competition, or is school supposed to teach?
When you take a test, your score expresses how many things you got right with positive reinforcement, and how many things you got wrong with negative reinforcement. Why?
If the goal of school was to teach and not to indoctrinate, then why is being wrong considered the ultimate sin?
Being wrong about something can only be negative if you continue to allow yourself to be wrong the next time you’re presented with that question. If what's incorrect isn't focused on and corrected, you miss what is a wonderful opportunity to grow. This should be one of the most exciting human experiences. It should be something we seek out. The more confident we are about being correct, the more excited we should be when we find out we were wrong all along.
That’s called growth.
If your test comes back and you have a 70/100 it doesn't mean you're 70% right and 30% wrong, it means that you have 30% to still learn, and that's what really matters in life.
How much you can still learn should be an indication of how much you're being challenged in your life. Curriculum should be accelerated until the student shows a good balance between things they already know, and things they still need to work on. Getting 100% on a test doesn’t show a successful student, it shows a failure of that education system to adequately challenge that student.
The system should be about stimulating growth throughout the entire education process. Instead of associating being wrong with something negative, it should instead be associated with personal development and self-improvement.
The by-product of this shift in thinking would be that when a student that is now an adult, and then has their knowledge of anything shown to be incorrect, then they instinctually feel an opportunity to grow and improve themselves, instead of the shame of being wrong.
It’s a guarantee that no matter who we are we’ve all experienced a situation where someone else was wrong, we were right, but they absolutely refused to listen to us. What if we could fix it?
How we are going to change it
Most importantly, the children are our future. The untainted mind of children will be the long-term solution. A child that has never had this sentiment pumped into their brain could be educated in a way that offered positive reinforcement for learning new things, and not for repeating what they’ve already learned. Ultimately that is how we change the overall societal mentality, fixing the problem by uprooting its origin within the very fabric of the education system.
For us adults unlearning the shame of being imperfect might be a pipe dream. Yes, it’s possible, but we must individually acknowledge how the problem exists within ourselves, and then undo a lifetime of collective mental programming. When we manage to accomplish it, when we remove the ego that we’ve developed about being correct, and then accept that the more fault we find in ourselves the better off we can become, then we can begin to change the world.
What are we going to talk about?
Well for starters we’re going to talk about how I am wrong, how they are wrong, and how you are wrong. Are you excited for it? I know I am. No matter where we are coming from, no matter how many strands of web away from our success we find ourselves, we can keep moving forwards fully aware of our imperfection and relishing our journeys of self-improvement.
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
― Ernest Hemingway
Until next time,
C.C