Stupidity: Under-Valued
September 27, 2024
We’re taught from a young age that being stupid is bad. The stupid kids don’t move onto higher grades and they’re ridiculed on the playground. We’re also fearful of showing our stupidity, which often goes hand and hand with ignorance. These cause embarrassment and fear, but Math For Love has a different perspective: “The Centrality Of Stupidity In Mathematics.”
Math For Love is a Web site dedicated to revolutionizing how math is taught. They have games, curriculum, and more demonstrating how beautiful and fun math is. Math is one of those subjects that makes a lot of people feel dumb, especially the higher levels. The Math For Love team referenced an essay by Martin A. Schwartz called, “The Importance Of Stupidity In Scientific Research.”
Schwartz is a microbiologist and professor at the University of Virginia. In his essay, he expounds on how modern academia makes people feel stupid.
The stupid feeling is one of inferiority. It’s problem. We’re made to believe that doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers, and other smart people never experienced any difficulty. Schwartz points out that students (and humanity) need to learn that research is extremely hard. No one starts out at the top. He also says that they need to be taught how to be productively stupid, i.e. if you don’t feel stupid then you’re not really trying.
Humans are meant to feel stupid, otherwise they wouldn’t investigate, explore, or experiment. There’s an entire era in western history about overcoming stupidity: the Enlightenment. Math For Love explains that stupidity relative for age and once a child grows they overcome certain stupidity levels aka ignorance. Kids gain the comprehension about an idea, then can apply it to life. It’s the literal meaning of the euphemism: once a mind has been stretched it can’t go back to its original size.
“I’ve come to believe that one of the best ways to address the centrality of stupidity is to take on two opposing efforts at once: you need to assure students that they are not stupid, while at the same time communicating that feeling like they are stupid is totally natural. The message isn’t that they shouldn’t be feeling stupid – that denies their honest feeling to learning the subject. The message is that of course they’re feeling stupid… that’s how everyone has to feel in order to learn math!:
Add some warm feelings to the equation and subtract self-consciousness, multiply by practice, and divide by intelligence level. That will round out stupidity and make it productive.
Whitney Grace, September 27, 2024
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