Let’s think back to our high school days. For some of us, that takes a bit more effort than for others, but I think we can all remember it fairly clearly. You go to a classroom, you sit and listen to a lecture, you read a textbook, you do some homework exercises, and then you take a test. Each test and homework assignment is graded, and your work is evaluated on a scale of A, B, C, D or F, where the “F” stands for “Fail.”

Our attitude towards academic work is inevitably shaped largely by the tremendous pressure we feel to get the best grades possible. Those who get straight A’s are praised and rewarded, by teachers and parents if not always by their peers. Those whose grades aren’t quite as good are told to work harder, because they’re not measuring up. Even if the grade they get isn’t quite as bad as an F, if they get less than an A, then have failed in some sense.

And let’s not kid ourselves: students are competitive. Even the ones with the “bad attitude,” who make a show of not caring, are responding to the peer pressure they feel regarding grades. They may have given up, they may be rebelling against the system and the whole concept of trying to measure up, but that’s only because they’ve concluded that they have no hope of succeeding, and are just trying to minimize the pain of failure.

So let’s apply a few exercises in Obvious Math. In a school system like ours, 80% of the students are going to perform less well than the top 20%. 90% will fall short of the top 10%. 99% will be “inferior” to the top 1%. For a relatively few people, academic achievement will be an area where their attitudes are shaped by the experience of success and of coming out on top, and for the rest of the class, for the vast majority of the class, the intellectual experiences of public schooling will leave them with attitudes shaped by years of coming in second place, or worse.

Science is hard. Math is hard. For 12 years of a kid’s life, and progressively more so as they near graduation, the feelings they associate with math and science and other hard subjects are feelings they feel in the context of working hard and still failing to compete as well as the honor role students, academically. The good feelings are more likely to arise through the cameraderie and fellowship of commiserating with their fellow average (and/or below-average) students. “The smart guys just make me feel stupid and look bad in front of the teacher, but my friends don’t care about that stuff because it’s not really important.”

And then they graduate, and become part of the voting public.

This isn’t something we can address by making textbooks better, or by improving teacher training. Nor will it feel much of an impact if scientists somehow become better at public relations. Our system of education is inherently going to create a context where most students’ experiences leave them feeling happier joining their friends (i.e. the majority) in denying the importance of something that’s hard and confusing and that has no apparent connection to the life they actually live after high school. What benefit would there be in admitting they tried, and failed, to do as well as the “good” students? Just tattoo the word “loser” across your forehead, eh?

The problem is that our approach to education is built on top of a foundation that was originally designed, not to promote a scientific approach to life, nor critical thinking, nor freedom of thought, but to preserve and promote religion. The first schools in colonial America were founded, not to turn children into skeptics and humanists and scientists, but to make sure that they could read the Bible, and would learn to obey its teachings. The basic model for American education thus is not the laboratory, where discoveries are made, but the catechism, where children learn to repeat stock answers to predefined questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-education. Far from it! My degree happens to be in French teaching, and I’ve always loved being in the classroom even though I’m not working there now. But I do feel that a lot of the problems in our educational system stem from the catechistic approach to teaching, where the goal is to repeat back to the teacher the things that the teacher will accept as being the right answer. This is an approach that is not only ineffective, but unnatural. The way we learn what we really know and believe is by discovery, not by rote indoctrination.

Richard Feynman once wrote that he spent a semester studying biology, just to see what all those biologists were up to, and concluded that much of biology education was a waste of time. The students spent most of their time and energy memorizing the names of things, and being tested on their ability to use the terms correctly. That’s not terribly surprising, and in fact it seems to me that a correct knowledge of the terminology would be very valuable to a biologist. But Feynman’s point was that you can look up stuff like that if you ever need to know it. Thus, as a physicist, it was a waste of time for him to memorize the vocabulary.

I got A’s and B’s in high school science, and I spent a fair amount of time memorizing technical vocabulary, but if you asked me to describe the Krebs cycle, I’d have to look it up. I’m not a biologist, so I rarely if ever need to apply that particular knowledge to my life. Much more important to me is acquiring the skills needed to understand how the Krebs cycle works. And that’s true for everyone. Your success or failure in public education should therefore depend, not on how well you memorize rote answers (the “what”), but on how well you learn to think and to apply what you know (the “how”). A discovery-based educational system would make it possible to make this kind of education possible.

But we can’t fix the current, catechistic educational system to provide this kind of educational experience. It’s fundamentally not the right kind of system, in the same sense that fish are fundamentally not mountain climbers. I haven’t figured out what all the technical details would be in a working discovery-based system, but this is where I’m looking. The old way is broken beyond repair, and until we replace it, we’re going to keep on publishing books about the pervasive anti-intellectualism that will continue to dominate American society.

Science is supposed to be a collaborative activity. Why is it organized (and taught) as if it was a competitive activity? How does that affect science? Negatively, by increasing secretiveness and sometimes outright fraud.

The Web is changing all this. The teenagers already grok that the old selfish notions of intellectual property are going by the way of the dodo. They naturally think in terms of networks, not individuals. And thinking in term of newtorks as opposed to a linear, hierarchical, individualistic focus, is necessary for speeding up the advancement of knowledge and societal good.

In other words, it is not important what each individual knows or does, it is important what the interactions between individuals can do, and how the group or community (or global community) learns and acts upon the knowledge.

Thus, education, especially science education, from Kindergarden through post-doc and beyond, should be organized around collaborations, teaching people and letting them practice the networking skills and collaborative learning and action. Individuals will make mistakes and get punished by the group (sometimes as harshly as excommunication). They will learn from that experience and become more collaborative next time. The biggest sin would be selfish non-sharing of information.