How Do You Know What You Know? A Lesson to Eighth Graders
“That’s stupid, Mr. Hall! We can’t go to Africa just to prove it’s there!”
While I was the music teacher and most of my lessons involved, well, music I tend to look for opportunities within one field that can underscore bigger lessons. I may have been inspired by Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control a documentary featuring a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a robotics engineer, and a scientist studying naked mole rats.
Morris gives us a bit of each person, exploring who they are and why they do what they do and plummets us into jump cuts and a mixtape approach of audio and visual elements that slowly tie each person’s passion and obsession which the others. It’s quite remarkable and one of my favorite films ever made.
As I recall, the lesson was about the blues. We talked about the spirituals and field hollers by the early slaves and, at one point, a kid pipes up “How do know Africans have a musical culture?”
I sensed an opportunity. “Do you believe there is a continent we call Africa?”
“Yeah.” More a sneer than an answer.
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s Africa!”
“Have you been there?”
“No. But I seen pictures.”
“Do you know who the photographers were? Do you believe these people you don’t know when they claim the photos are of this fictional ‘Africa’ place? What if they’re lying?”
“Do you believe Africa is real?”
“I do. I believe you should never simply take someone’s word for most things. I believe Africa is real because, in my view, there are multiple and credible sources that attest to the fact that it is real. There are so many people who have either been there, live there, were born there and came here. At some point, after plenty of time looking into things, you have to be able to trust your sources. There’s a West African proverb that I love: The opinion of the intelligent is better than the certainty of the ignorant.
Ignorance isn’t stupidity. Ignorance is the absence of knowledge. The remedy to ignorance is the opposite of certainty.”
These days, some thirty years later, there are two barriers to eradicating ignorance: Disinformation and Misinformation.
I understand the Critical Justice Model that dictates that intent doesn’t matter, only impact, but I believe that to be crap. Intent is every bit as important as impact in almost all cases.
Those who spread misinformation often have no malicious intent. They heard something that sounded credible, didn’t bother to look into it, and shared it with someone else. Like the Coronavirus, misinformation spreads like wildfire, blazing through our democratized social media circles.
Disinformation is intentionally harmful. The point and purpose for disinformation is to skew things in a direction with little regard to any sense of objective fact.
The road to avoiding both is to do your research. If you are absolutely certain of something, it is your responsibility to dig into it to find out if your certainty is justified or rooted in ignorance. Has your certainty been manipulated by disinformation created by those who wish to fool you or polluted by those who are also merely those fooled spreading the nonsense?
I’m happy to say that, in the case of my eighth graders, I probably worked this point into the squishy brains of 10,000 or so kids and hope that at least a thousand embraced the message.
How do you know what you know and are you certain?
