Guest blogger Paleni here. I’m going to hijack Tellurian’s blog for a bit to talk about education.

I have a very intelligent, creative, fun-loving scientist friend who was put on the fast track for science at an early age. He’s very smart and highly educated, but he has only ever had cursory education in the humanities. At one point, he expressed distaste for the study of literature, saying that he didn’t see the point in learning about the symbolism in Jane Eyre and so on. I was stricken to realise that he had no idea that that was not the point of studying literature– that he didn’t even understand what the point was, what the whole discipline was about. I explained it to him, and it seemed that no one had ever told him why we study literature, or in fact what the study of literature actually is– that it’s not about learning things about specific books, but about knowing how to read things deeply and understand the metaphors and layers of meaning, as well as how the nuances in what we read (and watch) influence the way we see the world. He didn’t understand that a literature class isn’t meant to teach you dubiously-certain facts about Jane Eyre, it’s meant to use Jane Eyre as a tool to help you understand how to study literature. In all of the lit classes he’d been required to take, no one had ever taken the time to explain to him the point of the discipline or even how it was done.

I’ve seen similar stories from elsewhere– for example, much as I love the webcomic xkcd, the creator really doesn’t seem to take the humanities seriously at all– he seems to think they’re about putting on an intellectual hat and looking smart. My guess is that Randall Munroe simply hasn’t had any humanities classes that did a decent job of teaching him what he was actually studying in the first place. And this is by no means limited to the humanities; if everyone understood the scientific method and why we use it, creationists and pseudoscientists wouldn’t be able to get anyone to believe that their ideas were actually some kind of science.

A friend of mine who was homeschooled said recently that creationists were able to pull the wool over the eyes of homeschooled kids whose Christian parents didn’t teach them how science worked. I replied that it was hardly just a failing of homeschooling– public schools don’t teach the scientific method well enough, either. I went to a public school, and every year we had a little intro where we would go over the steps of the scientific method for a little while; we might even have a quiz on those steps; but it was the same every year, and it always bored me because it was always the same as it had been in previous years. Nowadays I realise that the problem is that we don’t spend enough time on the scientific method– kids memorise the steps, but they don’t understand why each step is important, why the method works, or why something that doesn’t follow those steps– regardless of whether or not we know it’s true by some other means– is not science.

This, I think, is the quintessential “failure of American education” that people go around lamenting and trying to fix via wrongheaded means. Diverting students’ learning time to memorising facts for standardised tests is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing; we need to divert their time back to understanding the fundamental basics of a discipline, the ideas behind it and the reason for doing it, the way it works, and what it actually is. It’s a failure across the board in every subject: very rarely are students taught why they’re learning a subject, or how the experts in that field go about undertaking it and how they learn from the methods they use. The perennial question kids ask, “When am I going to use this?” should be a ridiculous question like asking when they’re going to find it useful to know how to do their laundry. “You’ll understand how things work from this, silly, and you’ll know how to evaluate the world around you better every day.”

Children (and experienced children, aka immature adults) need to understand the motivation for learning, rather than just being told that learning is good; they need to realise how they will benefit. And when they grow up, they have to have actually received those benefits: an understanding of how to apply these disciplines to the world. That is more important than memorizing which atoms bond together to form what molecules, or the ear symbolism in Hamlet; those facts will get them absolutely nowhere if they don’t know what science or literature actually is. Surely, if we want more of our children to be interested in choosing a discipline in which to excel, we want them to understand what they are getting into and why all the long hard study will be worth it. But far more important than churning out little geniuses is to make sure that our next generation can evaluate things better than a confused sheep trying to figure out which flock to tag behind.