By expressing his mixed emotions and his uncertainty about how to judge the woman, Christian signaled his willingness to rethink the situation and encouraged others to rethink their own reactions. You might even be experiencing some complex emotions as you read this.

It shouldn’t be up to the victim to inject complexity into a difficult conversation. Rethinking should start with the offender. If the woman had taken responsibility for reevaluating her beliefs and behaviors, she might have become an example to others who recognized a bit of themselves in her reaction. Although she couldn’t change what she’d already done, by recognizing the complex power dynamics that breed and perpetuate systemic racism, she might have spurred deeper discussions of the range of possible steps toward justice.

Charged conversations cry out for nuance. When we’re preaching, prosecuting, or politicking, the complexity of reality can seem like an inconvenient truth. In scientist mode, it can be an invigorating truth—it means there are new opportunities for understanding and for progress.

CHAPTER 9

Rewriting the Textbook

   Teaching Students to Question Knowledge

    No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.

—Grant Allen

A decade ago, if you had told Erin McCarthy she would become a teacher, she would have laughed. When she graduated from college, the last thing she wanted to do was teach. She was fascinated by history but bored by her social studies classes. Searching for a way to breathe life into overlooked objects and forgotten events, Erin started her career working in museums. Before long, she found herself writing a resource manual for teachers, leading school tours, and engaging students in interactive programs. She realized that the enthusiasm she saw on field trips was missing in too many classrooms, and she decided to do something about it.

For the past eight years, Erin has taught social studies in the Milwaukee area. Her mission is to cultivate curiosity about the past, but also to motivate students to update their knowledge in the present. In 2020, she was named Wisconsin’s Teacher of the Year.

One day, an eighth grader complained that the reading assignment from a history textbook was inaccurate. If you’re a teacher, that kind of criticism could be a nightmare. Using an outdated textbook would be a sign that you don’t know your material, and it would be embarrassing if your students noticed the error before you did.

But Erin had assigned that particular reading intentionally. She collects old history books because she enjoys seeing how the stories we tell change over time, and she decided to give her students part of a textbook from 1940. Some of them just accepted the information it presented at face value. Through years of education, they had come to take it for granted that textbooks told the truth. Others were shocked by errors and omissions. It was ingrained in their minds that their readings were filled with incontrovertible facts. The lesson led them to start thinking like scientists and questioning what they were learning: whose story was included, whose was excluded, and what were they missing if only one or two perspectives were shared?

After opening her students’ eyes to the fact that knowledge can evolve, Erin’s next step was to show them that it’s always evolving. To set up a unit on expansion in the West, she created her own textbook section describing what it’s like to be a middle-school student today. All the protagonists were women and girls, and all the generic pronouns were female. In the first year she introduced the material, a student raised his hand to point out that the boys were missing. “But there’s one boy,” Erin replied. “Boys were around. They just weren’t doing anything important.” It was an aha moment for the student: he suddenly realized what it was like for an entire group to be marginalized for hundreds of years.

My favorite assignment of Erin’s is her final one. As a passionate champion of inquiry-based learning, she sends her eighth graders off to do self-directed research in which they inspect, investigate, interrogate, and interpret. Their active learning culminates in a group project: they pick a chapter from their textbook, choosing a time period that interests them and a theme in history that they see as underrepresented. Then they go off to rewrite it.

One group took on the civil rights chapter for failing to cover the original March on Washington, which was called off at the last minute in the early 1940s but inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march two decades later. Other groups revised the chapter on World War II to include the infantry regiments of Hispanic soldiers and second-generation Japanese soldiers who fought for the U.S. Army. “It’s a huge light-bulb moment,” Erin told me.

Even if you’re not a teacher by profession, you probably have roles in which you spend time educating others—whether as a parent, a mentor, a friend, or a colleague. In fact, every time we try to help someone think again, we’re doing a kind of education. Whether we do our instruction in a classroom or in a boardroom, in an office or at our kitchen table, there are ways to make rethinking central to what—and how—we teach.

With so much emphasis placed on imparting knowledge and building confidence, many teachers don’t do enough to encourage students to question themselves and one another. To figure out what it takes to change that mindset, I tracked down some extraordinary educators who foster rethinking cycles by instilling intellectual humility, disseminating doubt, and cultivating curiosity. I also tested a few of my own ideas by turning my classroom into something of a living lab.

LEARNING, INTERRUPTED

Looking back on my own early education, one of my biggest disappointments is that I never got to fully experience the biggest upheavals in science. Long before it ever occurred to me to be curious about the cosmos, my teachers started demystifying it in kindergarten. I often wonder how I would have felt if I was a teenager when I first learned that we don’t live on a static, flat disc, but on a spinning, moving sphere.

I hope I would have been stunned, and that disbelief would have quickly given way to curiosity and eventually the awe of discovery and the joy of being wrong. I also suspect it would have been a life-changing lesson in confident humility. If I could be that mistaken about what was under my own two feet, how many other so-called truths were actually question marks? Sure, I knew that many earlier generations of humans had gotten it wrong, but there’s a huge difference between learning about other people’s false beliefs and actually learning to unbelieve things ourselves.

I realize this thought experiment is wildly impractical. It’s hard enough to keep kids in the dark about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Even if we could pull off such a delay, there’s a risk that some students would seize and freeze on what they learned early on. They could become trapped in an overconfidence cycle where pride in false knowledge fuels conviction, and confirmation and desirability biases lead to validation. Before you know it, we might have a whole nation of flat-earthers.

Evidence shows that if false scientific beliefs aren’t addressed in elementary school, they become harder to change later. “Learning counterintuitive scientific ideas [is] akin to becoming a fluent speaker of a second language,” psychologist Deborah Kelemen writes. It’s “a task that becomes increasingly difficult the longer it is delayed, and one that is almost never achieved with only piecemeal instruction and infrequent practice.” That’s what kids really need: frequent practice at unlearning, especially when it comes to the mechanisms of how cause and effect work.

In the field of history education, there’s a growing movement to ask questions that don’t have a single right answer. In a curriculum developed at Stanford, high school students are encouraged to critically examine what really caused the Spanish-American War, whether the New Deal was a success, and why the Montgomery bus boycott was a watershed moment. Some teachers even send students out to interview people with whom they disagree. The focus is less on being right, and more on building the skills to consider different views and argue productively about them.