Thursday, September 11, 2008

Why it is so important to teach, correctly, the first time

I enjoyed the TED video by Jonathan Drori on Why we don't understand as much as we think, which is below. He had some good lines. The first I liked was a quote:

"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." Thomas Cardinal Wolsey

The point that both Thomas and Jonathan make is once we develop mental models of how things work, it is almost impossible to change them. Later in the talk Jonathan said:

"We look for evidence which reenforces our models."

Rather than change how we think about the world, most of us will look for "data" and "facts" which confirms what we already believe.

This is why early education is so very, very important. If a child is taught wrong, they may never recover.

This is a good video, well worth the 15 minutes it takes to watch.



Curt said...

Very interesting. I'm glad we started teaching our kids from birth, instead of waiting until they were of 'school age' before teaching them anything.

Anonymous said...

Watching him talking about bad-science vs handson around 8:34 in the video, reminds me of schence projects, which, when done right is very much hands on.