it's really bizarre how often students are like "help i'm stuck on this problem" and when you ask what they're stuck on they reveal that they don't even know the meaning of one or more of the words in it
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like... of course you're stuck on the problem, you don't even know what it's asking! but for some reason it doesn't occur to them to ask "help what does this even mean"
maybe they don't feel like they're allowed to?
cursed school system
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i have a half-baked rant in the works about this and it's not all the way done yet but there's something really fucked up and gaslight-y about how school teaches you to orient towards knowledge
knowledge as what authorities say rather than knowledge as derived from perception
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okay yeah here it is: school teaches you that being gaslit is the *fundamental source of knowledge*
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remembering that story about a teacher who told their students that 1/3 was irrational
one of the best things about being too smart for your own good as a kid, at least, is being disabused of the idea that teachers had any kind of special access to knowledge that i didn't
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(i am thinking about all of this in the context of e.g. how poorly the vaccine rollout is going, how unwilling people are to disobey guidelines and vaccinate people who aren't "supposed" to be vaccinated, the bad situation around covid epistemics generally, etc.)
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I think it's also about orienting towards "knowledge" as being something you just have to beat your head against, instead of, you know, learning. Because when they (often) don't know themselves, the teachers usually tell you to beat your head against it.
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There’s a balance to be struck there though.
Flat earth is the epitome of knowledge by perception (it’s in their charter) and young earth creationism is [the same] by authority.
I’d say critical thinking, power of abstraction and operational intelligence are the synthesis.