The Threat of Simplification

Do the young need as much false reassurance as we are providing?

It is a valiant goal to make the world understandable. Both for oneself and for others. But at what cost? I doubt we give enough attention to this problem. We seem satisfied with “keeping it simple.” Simplicity is not a friend to effective understanding. It isn’t even the “front door.” It seems, however, the “go to” refuge for those of us who want to keep our jobs. We often say it is hard to speak truth to power. It is no less hard to speak complexity to power.

The same goes for education. When education at all levels is a “pull” or “push” through a system that rewards teachers who teach to a test that was designed to be passed, it becomes the servant of oversimplification. It is not just that simplified explanations, leave out “details,” they distort reality. They provide a misleading as well as a shallow understanding of the world, where fewer factors appear to cause more certain outcomes. Student MUST understand the most salient lesson of all: A good “answer” begs a host of new questions. It opens a new world of exploration. It doesn’t “solve” the problem. The last thing that we need in this highly complex world, is generation after generation of people with ironclad certitudes.

This leaves today’s students unprepared for their adult roles in the actual world. Our expanding lived experience of technology, economics and social reality is a great resource, but only if it can be questioned, doubted, and interrogated by minds trained to wrestle with incomplete and contradictory information.

To put it in an unfriendly way, much PowerPoint teaching is high-tech light shows. They provide the “teacher” with evidence for the “higherups” that they have fulfilled their hour of instruction. They keep their job and are safer from reprisals. (The PowerPoints are sanitized as well as simplified.) And the student is one step closer to graduation, and ignorance.

Of course, outside of class (or often within class) the student is “enriched” by social media influencers. How well bites of information, packaged for their intensity, can replace detailed study should be obvious. They create cult-like identities, identities based on a false sense of certainty in this uncertain world.

I realize that I am at risk of being extreme in this criticism. And unlike the small child who called out the fact that the emperor was naked, I am aware of how undignified it is to seriously criticize the well-meaning. Nothing seems to me more deserving of our appreciation than the services provided by our teachers. However, the pressures they are under, the stresses of overwork and underpay, and the compromises that many have to make to keep their jobs, can’t be ignored.

But we can’t help them unless we understand the underlying problems that they face. They must report, with clarity, on a world that is fundamentally incoherent and persuade their students that it is worth the effort to know how much they don’t know and then reach a limited understanding of what they can. As this is a civilization emergency, they must be given all the support we can. They must be seen as the front line in a “war” that we are losing. A war against the oldest and most dangerous enemy of humankind: ignorance.