Teaching our Students How to Be Productively Stupid

In May of last year, writing for the Journal of Cell Science, Martin A. Schwartz penned a very interesting essay The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.

Schwartz, a Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia, revealed an interesting anecdote about a fellow Ph.D. student. Unlike Schwartz, it seems that she had not completed her graduate science program. Instead, she had dropped out of graduate school and gone on to pursue a law degree at Harvard. The one-time science graduate school drop out was now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization.

Making One Feel Stupid

In telling his tale, Schwartz acknowledges asking her why it was she left graduate school. To his astonishment, she informed him that her graduate science program had made her feel stupid.

In fact, it seems that the program made her feel stupid on a daily basis. And not too surprisingly when one thinks about it, after about two years of feeling stupid, the one time science student was ready to do something else.

However, in telling his tale Schwartz indicates surprise, but his thoughts centered upon a rather unique fact. He writes:

“I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it.

So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way.”

An Explanation

Schwartz notes that one of the reasons he liked science in high school and college was that he was good at it. He goes on to assume, quite correctly I think, that almost everyone who likes science is because they too are good at it.

He acknowledges that can’t be the only reason. But he goes on to add:

“High-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.”

It is only later that Schwartz acknowledges he started to begin feeling stupid about science. Those feelings came when it was time to posture potential hypotheses and do some true scientific research.

At first, the feeling was overwhelming. There was so much he did not know. And doing important research was hard, “a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses.”

But armed with a certain amount of maturity, he soon had a realization:

“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”

And then in a moment of enormous insight he offers this extraordinary assessment:

“We don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about `relative stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t.

“Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.

“No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.”

Two Important Points

Of course, there are two rather interesting, but disparate points being made. The first is the case of his female colleague, exceedingly brilliant in Schwartz’s mind, who dropped out of graduate school.

Anyone seeking to understand the major reason that kids drop out of school at any level, be it middle school, high school, college or graduate, need not look any further than this simple story. In our schools, value is placed upon getting the right answers. In our schools, a person’s place in the pecking order comes from how they perform relative to specific academic standards.

If you cannot measure up to those academic standards, you will eventually become frustrated and angry. You will feel stupid. And if you are made to feel stupid repeatedly, day after day, year after year, well they are very likely to do what the attorney did, drop out.

The second, of course, is that all of us at some point will feel stupid. It may not happen until we are much older, but it will happen. Even those for which school was a breeze.

And it is interesting to note how strongly Schwartz contrasts with the proponents of NCLB and the high stakes testing movement that has swept our country in recent years. Instead , the professor suggests that our schools should focus on big important questions and that teachers should help students feel perfectly fine as long as they learned something each time.

That is certainly a direct contrast to our current structure which offers accolades only to those “students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.”

Flickr photos courtesy of artbandito, Jeremy Wilburn, and Radioflyer007.