False Public Narratives #1: “Almost Everything I Learned In School Was Unimportant.”
Short: Public narratives hold power over us, for better and worse. One such narrative revolving around school systems needs to be lost or changed. Read why the narrative “Almost everything I learned in school was unimportant” is horribly wrong.
Skipping grand prose on the nature of (modern) human life, lets cut straight to it.
School has to teach us how to read and write, to do calculus, and so on. These are important, rather graspable, and applicable skills. But the largest part of the way we see the world; how we evaluate and act within it; is rather abstract.
Whenever we register input about the world we assign meaning in a complex relational context. Our evaluation of proper behavior or a “way how things should be” is a result of this assignment of meaning to these new inputs.
(Examples: Think of how our evaluation of a masked man changed during the pandemic. Or think of how your feel if a person you are attracted to gives you a smutty compliment, compared to the same remark from a person you are disgusted by.)
There is a fancy term for “the way you think about something”: heuristic. Our heuristics about our society, sciences, nature, love, religion, life, … all of it… are very important to how we see the world; how we evaluate and act within it. In a very interesting abstract-tangible way our heuristics about everything are us. Our identity. What makes us tick.
Heuristics are built by accumulating information about the given topic and connecting these bits of information with each other. Assigning meaning not only by the information itself, but by how it stands linked to and in contrast with, other pieces of information.
(Examples: The bus fair in Tel Aviv,Israel is about 6 Schekels. The transfair rate from Euros to Schekel is VERY ROUGHLY 1 to 4. The bus fair allows you to drive within the city for 90 minutes and to change lanes during that time. A bus fair in Erlangen,Germany costs about 2,5 Euros. — Result of connecting that information: The bus fair in Tel Aviv is cheaper than in Erlangen — Result of acting upon that information: Thinking to use the bus more often when on vacation in Tel Aviv.)
Simplifying a little I state that Heuristics are built automatically by the information we gather. We benefit from more a more broad input of information (e.g. Israel is, on average, a lot more expensive than Germany), but are also reliant to have the information be trustworthy (having me tell you how expensive a Burger in Israel is will not give you a trustworthy answer).
From this simplified context, it is already easy to see why information input needs to be broad and trustworthy.
School education is - very simply put - informatin input. The goal is, among others, to have people be able to build heuristics to see the world. To be able to evaluate and act within it. Especially as we, as a democratic society, believe in the importance to be able to communicate and align our interests and aspirations. In order to be able to understand each other and the complexities that are attached to our challanges, plans, hopes, and dreams we need to have a broad understanding of the world.
When my A-levels asked me to understand and present the copper mining industry in Chile, or argue for emotional aspects of the poem “Der Wanderer”, theses were not tests of something unapplicable to everyday life! Being able to see the important relevant aspects there and then, makes me be able to understand how different business actors in my daily work today are politically and organizationally aligned and how compromise needs to follow from mediation on more than just the technical level. Being able to understand how to argue my view of an intersubjective matter, makes me be more receptive for differences in perception, and how to link discrepancies in a non-objective field.
Potential examples are endless, thats what it means to work with heuristics. They are tools that are applied to everything we think about. And we learned about many of our heuristics in school. Everything we learned then was applied. Nothing was unimportant!
Thank you for reading. Stay beautiful <3
