We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
Memorizing data doesn’t make one smarter… but learning concepts absolutely does.
The classic, “we’ll never need this in adult life” is math like Pythagoras’ theorem, or factoring binomial equations (remember FOIL?). We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life… we learn that math so that grown ass adults don’t think someone using algebra is performing black magic.
Seems silly… but it’s just like how many folks never learned past middle school biology and now think XX&XY are the only chromosomal possibilities.
How about we meet in the middle and say “learning the concept that you might be wrong will help your intelligence”?
My mother who “allegedly” graduated high school has more confidence than anyone I know and will say things like “you can’t divide a small number by a bigger number” or “temperatures don’t have decimals, only full numbers”. Then as you stare at her blankly trying to figure out if she’s joking or not, she’ll tell you you’re clearly not very smart if you don’t know that
IMO you’re just describing a closed mind versus an open mind. Learning the concept that you might be wrong is fundamental to having an open mind.
And it’s difficult if not impossible to be more intelligent with a closed mind no?
(not the op) but yeah, I agree with that.
That said, with the example of your mom, it sounds like it could be insecurity as much as it could be a closed mind. Some people really struggle with the idea that others might think they’re dumb, especially their children. So they assert things as fact, because they want to maintain the image that they have all the answers. Especially when kids are bright, some parents will fight tooth and nail to maintain an air of intellectual superiority, to assert intellectual dominance.
It may seem sad, but it’s pretty understandable, relatable even. - Humans be like that.
I think that kind of thing is more cultural than anything. Probably she doesn’t care very much whether it’s actually true or not, and feels she’d be losing face by being anything but confident about it.
Imo it’s more important that people learn that being wrong can be empowering, and how to have conversations where someone is wrong but not being put down for it, than just learning that they can be wrong.
Very possible. I just couldn’t see myself purposely saying something I didn’t think was true and then doubling up with calling the other person dumb over it. I don’t agree with almost anything she does though so that checks out.
Funny enough, it was an agricultural class where the utility of the quadratic equation hit me. Professor didn’t even call it that, but we used it to calculate maximum efficiency in fertilizer spread.
o shit. Im gonna be expanding my garden next year. Didn’t know Id need my math text book haha
Students asking “why do we need to learn this” or worse graduates who proudly proclaim “Day 19,337 of never using the quadratic equation” are a symptom of teachers who haven’t read their Thorndike.
Learning is an active process. It takes effort to do. People do not like being made to waste effort. Students will be much more effective learners when they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “You never know when this will come in handy” is not good enough. This is Thorndike’s principle of readiness. And especially high school teachers are bad at satisfying it.
Math teachers get it very often, because for some reason we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians. Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples and teach math as a series of rules to be applied to contextless problems, and to the student it feels like years of pointless busywork.
And while I can’t claim to have ever factored a polynomial in my daily life since leaving school, I did recently come up against the order of operations. I calculated the width of some cabinet doors, and I factored in the gaps between them wrong. 3 doors, 4 gaps between the doors. I did door_width = opening_width / 3 - 4 * gap_width. When I needed to do door_width = (opening_width - 4 * gap_width) / 3. In the first case, you end up subtracting all 4 gap widths from each door. I would be better at math today if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12.