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At the very time when young brains are gaining mass and learning new skills like judgment, our school system is primarily interested in having students memorize facts that they will probably misremember for the rest of their lives. This is a very bad model of education. Early schooling is all about building skills in language and math. But we shift the focus from skill building to fact accumulation by high school.
Here is the result: We have two or three generations of citizens who can't see what should be a very obvious scam if it sits on their nose. Thousands of Americans give up their banking or PayPal credentials at the merest suggestion in phishing scams, or install malware on their computers by clicking links in bogus email.
Yes, some scams are better than others. And the really good ones fool some pretty savvy people sometimes. But most of the scams are obviously bogus. Scams at a glance that should only take in folks with serious mental deficiencies. The sad truth is that many average Americans lose a lot of money to ripoff artists.
All through adolescence, when the brain is developing critical thinking skills, we leave our youth to fend for themselves in this arena. We teach them superstitious nonsense, wildly inaccurate history, and inadequate sex education. There emotional selves are riding a roller coaster at breakneck speeds with no one but each other for support.
This is a communal failure rather than a failure of individual parents and it has been going on for a damn long time. The writing is on the wall and we are crawling along the floor never looking up. All the while, hoping things will work out. But they won't work out all by themselves.
The powerful forces in society have a vested interested in status quo. The education "system" resists any change at all regardless of the body of evidence pointing out the problems and providing solutions. Businesses built on a gullible public do not want an entire generation who are not easily manipulated. Religions do not want critical thinkers running around loose.
What would the world be like if we raised a generation of skeptics who demand evidence for the long-term effectiveness of social programs? What if every program is experimental until it has enough evidence of success to become a norm? And only remains in place while it is effective. What would it be like if short-term wins were not the measure of success, but long-term gains were?
Maybe it is the nature of human beings to be short-term. A part of our primate nature. But we do not have to live at the mercy of our ancestral natures, we developed a strong ability to be rational and logical. Those are the traits we should be skill-building in high school.
Let us reexamine education from the prospective of building fundamental skills that match the developmental position of the students. Very young, build skills in manipulating the environment, abstracting, solving puzzles. And each step of the way, they learn "facts" needed to master the skill at hand. By the time they are 18, they will be very skilled in detecting BS and very knowledgeable in broad range of topics. And never board out of their minds for 6 hours a day.
Here is the result: We have two or three generations of citizens who can't see what should be a very obvious scam if it sits on their nose. Thousands of Americans give up their banking or PayPal credentials at the merest suggestion in phishing scams, or install malware on their computers by clicking links in bogus email.
Yes, some scams are better than others. And the really good ones fool some pretty savvy people sometimes. But most of the scams are obviously bogus. Scams at a glance that should only take in folks with serious mental deficiencies. The sad truth is that many average Americans lose a lot of money to ripoff artists.
All through adolescence, when the brain is developing critical thinking skills, we leave our youth to fend for themselves in this arena. We teach them superstitious nonsense, wildly inaccurate history, and inadequate sex education. There emotional selves are riding a roller coaster at breakneck speeds with no one but each other for support.
This is a communal failure rather than a failure of individual parents and it has been going on for a damn long time. The writing is on the wall and we are crawling along the floor never looking up. All the while, hoping things will work out. But they won't work out all by themselves.
The powerful forces in society have a vested interested in status quo. The education "system" resists any change at all regardless of the body of evidence pointing out the problems and providing solutions. Businesses built on a gullible public do not want an entire generation who are not easily manipulated. Religions do not want critical thinkers running around loose.
What would the world be like if we raised a generation of skeptics who demand evidence for the long-term effectiveness of social programs? What if every program is experimental until it has enough evidence of success to become a norm? And only remains in place while it is effective. What would it be like if short-term wins were not the measure of success, but long-term gains were?
Maybe it is the nature of human beings to be short-term. A part of our primate nature. But we do not have to live at the mercy of our ancestral natures, we developed a strong ability to be rational and logical. Those are the traits we should be skill-building in high school.
Let us reexamine education from the prospective of building fundamental skills that match the developmental position of the students. Very young, build skills in manipulating the environment, abstracting, solving puzzles. And each step of the way, they learn "facts" needed to master the skill at hand. By the time they are 18, they will be very skilled in detecting BS and very knowledgeable in broad range of topics. And never board out of their minds for 6 hours a day.
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