Transitions: education

I got that job. The job is a project with the goal of spreading awareness about the vast amount of money that is available to help kids pay for college. And my first day of class is tomorrow. I'm taking this class with the idea that it might put me on a path to going back to school full time next fall. So I'm at a transition point in my life and the theme is education.

Inspired by the moment, here is a list of things that everyone should learn in school that few people do.

1. How our federal, state, and local governments actually work. Why they are set up that way. How they are different than other current and past systems. What are strengths and weaknesses of those systems, and how different people and organizations contribute. I think this used to be covered in "civics" class. I had the option of taking Government as an Advanced Placement class my senior year but I picked economics instead.
   
2. That the human mind is a product of evolutionary biology. This would require that students have close to a decent understanding of evolution, which is clearly not the case in America. So once you somehow clear that biology education hurdle, you get to use it to answer the really interesting and very useful questions. Why do people act the way they act? Why do they think the way they think? Why do they believe what they believe, and why do they feel the things they feel? I last look a biology course my freshman year of high school. I didn't like dissecting things, and so I never took biology again. I don't think evolution was covered in any academic course I've taken since then, and I was certainly never exposed to ideas from evolutionary psychology. I'm very glad I stumbled upon it on my own. Learning to see human behavior through that lens has probably been the most satisfying intellectual experience of my first 25 years.
   
3. How to win friends and influence people. There's a playbook on how to interact with other people to get what you want from them. Everyone should read it. Social interaction is just one of those things we figure that everyone has to figure out for themselves. And to some extent, most of us do. But considering how important our social lives are to our emotional, financial, and ultimately our physical well-being, shouldn't we address this kind of subject matter in basic education? Absolutely everyone would benefit from reading this book.
4. That observation and sound reasoning are the source of knowledge. Basically we need to train people how to think skeptically. It is much much harder to write a single page of useful, accurate information than to write a volume full of bullshit. And it can take a volume full of accurate information to fully debunk a single page of bullshit. The information we all encounter in our daily lives is fully reflective of that imbalance, and people need to know how to tell the difference. My first semester at UMD I randomly signed up for an honors seminar called "Science and Pseudoscience." I had no idea what I was going to get, but that best I could figure was that we'd be like Dana Scully debunking Fox Mulder's crazy theories. The course was taught by a statistician named Chip Denman, and it was my favorite class I've ever taken. It introduced me to skepticism as a way of approaching the world and gave me some powerful bullshit-detection tools.
   

That's all for now. I listed those off the top of my head, but the thoughts have been building up for a while. I might expand on some of this if I have time in my newly busy schedule.