I remember doing really well in high school chemistry. I learned all about the electrons orbiting the nucleous. I take chemistry in university and am immediately told that’s an outdated model from the 1900s nobody uses. Why the fuck did I study it then? Because quantum physics is complicated? So you just teach the wrong thing because the actual truth is complicated?? It’s really no wonder people have no scientific literacy when high schools explain how the world works like nobody has discovered anything new since 1913.
There’s a Pratchett quote that I always think about in this context, about “lies to children”
As humans, we have invented lots of useful kinds of lie. As well as lies-to-children (‘as much as they can understand’) there are lies-to-bosses (‘as much as they need to know’) lies-to-patients (‘they won’t worry about what they don’t know’) and, for all sorts of reasons, lies-to-ourselves.
Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding that biology or physics isn’t quite what they’ve been taught so far. ‘Yes, but you needed to understand that,’ they are told, ‘so that now we can tell you why it isn’t exactly true.’
Discworld teachers know this, and use it to demonstrate why universities are truly storehouses of knowledge: students arrive from school confident that they know very nearly everything, and they leave years later certain that they know practically nothing. Where did the knowledge go in the meantime? Into the university, of course, where it is carefully dried and stored.
I could’ve cut that down more, but I like that whole chunk. I think there is a usefulness in the lies to children approach, if done well. As you highlight though, it can be frustrating when the simplified thing that’s being taught isn’t just simplified, but straight up wrong.
It’s not just high school. That’s just how chemistry is taught because it’s extremely complex and requires many simplifications to be able to teach it to a lay person in any meaningful capacity. Good instructors will mention these simplifications, but it’s likely your current understanding of certain things (especially organic compounds) is also overly simplified. It’s unfortunately the only way to teach it.
I hear people say the phrase “it’s high school biology” a lot. Yeah, high school biology is simplified to the point of being just plain wrong.
I remember doing really well in high school chemistry. I learned all about the electrons orbiting the nucleous. I take chemistry in university and am immediately told that’s an outdated model from the 1900s nobody uses. Why the fuck did I study it then? Because quantum physics is complicated? So you just teach the wrong thing because the actual truth is complicated?? It’s really no wonder people have no scientific literacy when high schools explain how the world works like nobody has discovered anything new since 1913.
There’s a Pratchett quote that I always think about in this context, about “lies to children”
I could’ve cut that down more, but I like that whole chunk. I think there is a usefulness in the lies to children approach, if done well. As you highlight though, it can be frustrating when the simplified thing that’s being taught isn’t just simplified, but straight up wrong.
It’s not just high school. That’s just how chemistry is taught because it’s extremely complex and requires many simplifications to be able to teach it to a lay person in any meaningful capacity. Good instructors will mention these simplifications, but it’s likely your current understanding of certain things (especially organic compounds) is also overly simplified. It’s unfortunately the only way to teach it.