Speaking up to help our students in a time of ignorance and outrage

I read Tim Caulfield’s article in Nature this morning about scientists having a moral responsibility to speak-up against pseudoscience and poppycock in the middle of this global Covid-19 pandemic. One of the points he makes is that scientists don’t put enough time into communicating the rights from the wrongs, telling others what’s good, bad or ugly; it’s not the primary goal of research after all… but it is the primary goal of education. We know that the faster feedback is given to students who hold misconceptions, the faster they learn. Allowing students to continue along a path that’s wrong can bring them to a point of understanding eventually, but not always. There are plenty of historical models, theories and public opinions that seemed to provide reasonable explanations or to persist even when they were wrong, harmful or dangerous… I’m thinking of the geocentric model of the universe, the notion that chiropractic can offer treatment for childhood asthma, which Simon Singh worked hard to speak-up against, or the dreadfully mistaken belief that HIV didn’t cause AIDS, which contributed to South Africa’s epidemic.

The faster Dr. Deborah Birx had responded to President Trump’s questions about getting UV light into the body and injecting disinfectant to treat or cure Covid-19, the less damage would have been done. Of course, telling everyone that your boss is wrong on live television, just after he’s finished speaking, doesn’t usually go very well and, as Dr. Anthony Fouci has already said, “it is what it is.” The nation’s top scientists have worked alongside partisan and economic interests for years and are doing what they can from the chairs they occupy to make sure that the right messages and actions get out so that misconceptions and untruths are put to rest.

What’s I find so difficult in the case of the White House Covid-19 briefings is that the conversations that should have been so carefully prepared for ahead of time seem to be happening in front to the cameras; the briefings feel like a rehearsal. It’s disconcerting that the writers of The West Wing and Designated Survivor have a better grip on what leadership should look like and how it should be communicated than the current White House team and Commander in Chief. Another thing I find difficult is that anyone who has graduated from high school should know that shining light into the body and injecting disinfectant into it are two things that will harm the body and have no effect on a respiratory virus; we have allowed someone with less than a high school grip on reality to occupy one of the most powerful offices in the world. Contrast this with Angela Merkel’s scientific understanding which has guided her communication and helped Germany place science at the heart of its response to Covid-19 from the beginning.

The very essence of science is to recognise that you only have to falsify something once to show that it’s wrong. You can repeat the experiment to collect more data, improve the theory or discard it and the hypothesis you were testing, but you can’t keep being wrong. Scientists are always working on the edge of what is known and they enjoy and encourage questions, doubts and attacks on ideas because its how you get closer to the truth. This is the opposite of the way that some others work, particularly those for whom being right and clinging to authority and power are the first resort before seeking to blame or resorting to ridicule or name-calling; these are character traits that most high school graduates have discarded because they have learned that no one likes to work with people who do this. For scientists playing by the rules of one game it’s sometimes difficult to work with people who are playing by other rules. Simon Sinek talks about something similar to this dissonance in The Infinite Game which he wrote to help readers identify people and organisations playing by finite rules so that they could avoid working for them. Because we organise ourselves into specialised communities we become used to playing by our own rules and we tend to communicate for an audience that not only plays by these rules, but also speaks the same language. Sinek’s examples of the detrimental effect this has in the business world are compelling and we are seeing something similar in the difference between politics and science in this Covid-19 pandemic, right down to the certainty of those name-calling, blame-seeking leaders in the business of politics who believe they are so right.

As an educator and a scientist, this is where I see the work we have to do in schools with students and teachers. Not in the delivery of theories and content, but in the development of the curiosity and humility that will be the lifelong antidote to the push button logic of autocratic leaders, dogmatic sages or ignorant and malevolent influencers who would have us all believe what they benefit from claiming to be reality. When high school graduates have the tools and the courage to call out, “but he isn't wearing anything at all” we will know that their education will serve them, and our world, well. At the moment our students need far more adults to be role models for them, and the problem here is that the adults working most closely with them are in schools, where politics, religion and lifestyle are usually kept at the gate if they aren’t the school’s USP.

Rather than taking on an ideology, belief system or politics, we can take on one example of pseudoscience, misinformation or idiocy at a time by looking at truth tests and source evaluation, by making comparisons and by imagining alternative possibilities; all tools that our children need in their life-skills toolkit. This doesn’t happen by accident though and, if left to individual teachers, there is a danger of creating silos and cults within institutions. This is something that requires fearless school leaders to exercise their moral responsibility and use the opportunity and the platform they have with their students and faculty to talk about what’s going on in the world and speak-up against ignorance, hatred, racism, cronyism and the many other maladies inflicting our communities, society and discourse. It’s not easy, particularly with dominant or insidious organisational cultures or in countries where state ideology doesn’t encourage or support some of the freedoms of expression or thought that are essential in a critically aware democracy, but if it were easy we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.