Why Schools Should Teach Skepticism Above Obedience | Lawrence Krauss | Big Think

Why Schools Should Teach Skepticism Above Obedience

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"You can get more information in your cell phone now than you can in any school, but you can also get more misinformation," says American-Canadian theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss. And he’s right: we’re in an era where any human can access a previously unimaginable wealth of knowledge. This access has grown faster than our ability to process it critically, however, and what we lack is any decent filter to weed out erroneous or partisan information. Children are the most susceptible to this, and Krauss argues that teaching children how to question information—essentially, how to make children skeptics—may save humanity from a dumbing-down. Lawrence Krauss' most recent book is The Greatest Story Ever Told -- So Far: Why Are We Here?

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LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS

Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist who is a professor of physics, and the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing. He is an advocate of scientific skepticism, science education, and the science of morality. Krauss is one of the few living physicists referred to by Scientific American as a "public intellectual", and he is the only physicist to have received awards from all three major U.S. physics societies: the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Lawrence Krauss: One of the biggest surprises of the Internet is we thought when the Internet came out it would provide everyone new fundamental tools to learn about the world around them, and it would actually remove the censorship and information that we get. Before the Internet we used to get our news from three TV stations and it was carefully edited and carefully described, and after the Internet came out you could search news sources from around the world—great! The problem is the Internet also became a source of misinformation. There's that very famous cartoon that says, “On the Internet no one knows if you're a dog," with a dog typing on a typewriter. You don't know the source of your information, which is the beauty of it. It was the reason it was actually created by particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, or at least CERN the laboratory where that now is, because thousands of physicists needed to communicate with information without caring about where the source came from.

But the fact that the source is shielded is, of course, a great concern nowadays in the political world among other things, and so we have to think about ways that we can address that.

Now, of course, information providers can try and work on that too, but we basically all have our own responsibility to become our own filters. And that's why it seems to me the educational system has to provide those tools, those filtering tools. And that's one of the reasons why I think science is so important because of its built-in filtering tools.

It recognizes that we all want to believe, and as Richard Feynman said, "The person you have to question most is yourself.” Knowing that you want to believe when you read something that validates your beliefs, you should be skeptical of it and your beliefs and you should look out for other sources.

So we have to train people that one source on the Internet is not good enough, you have to search broadly to see if it's validated. More over, you have to empirically test those ideas. If claims are made, you could look out and look at the data to see if those claims are validated.

We all have this new responsibility, because we have a sudden wealth of information, to become our own filters. And I can't see any way that we can move into an Internet-guided world where democracy remains vibrant if the public doesn't have the tools to distinguish sense from nonsense. And for me that's one of the reasons why I talk about science, because I think it provides us one of the key tools to do that.

One things seems very clear to me: education should not be left to private enterprise anymore than police or fire or military or in my opinion health because they're fundamental rights of people. And in a society that has the financial resources to provide individuals a safe and secure environment, which is really what government is all about, part of that is to educate young people. It's a right for every young person in a society...

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