The ideas I’m playing with today involve education’s old model of teaching as content (information) delivery, and the definition of “information” that Yuval Noah Harari puts forward in his latest book “Nexus“.
I’ve often said that I believe the “content delivery” model of teaching is at least partially responsible for the current difficulty of getting eyes on the truth.
When teachers tell students that what they read in the classroom is true, even when the information is packed with subjective judgement and singular perspectives, they may take that belief with them into their adult lives.
“I read it so it must be true” was always a dangerous approach, but it is particularly so today.
Harari takes his readers from the naive definition of information as a “representation of reality” to a more robust understanding of the power of information to connect people and things into groups, whether the information is a TRUE representation of reality or not.
This is why it is so important for teaching to be more than “delivering information” to students.
Teaching is an art. We build our understanding of our students and their learning needs, and then we use our professional skills to address those learning needs, at least in theory.
Teaching our students to ask good questions for learning, and about what they are learning, is essential when information is so abundant, yet truth is so elusive.
According to Harari, people usually associate the word “information” with truth, but most information is not truth. Music, for example, is information. It can’t be true or false. It does help us rethink what information is and does. Information of all kinds connects people – political views, music lovers, Facebook groups. Information is a powerful connector.
But it is not the same as truth.
It’s time to stop pretending that “information delivery” is teaching. Our students need the skills to find truth.
Featured image by alam kusuma on Unsplash
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