I can’t help but agree totally with this article in The New York Times headlined “The case for teaching ignorance”, about the huge importance of teaching not what is already known, but what isn’t. Awareness of ignorance is one of the driving forces behind progress: people who discover interesting things tend to do so precisely because they are trying to find out things they didn’t know. The article offers links to “scholars of ignorance” such as Robert Proctor or Stuart Firestein, as well as to an academic course on the sociology of ignorance.
For many years I have been a teacher of innovation, an important subject because in an environment in which few of us learn anything due to the rapid pace of change, the important thing is to know what is unknown, to understand how concepts work that didn’t exist before, so that we can build on them. Thinking like this can sometimes be very frustrating for my students, who think that the reason they are attending a course is to learn a lot about something, and end up thinking that I haven’t given them the recipe or magic solution to end their ignorance, and instead all I have done is to identify it. The alternative, of course, would be to pontificate with a false sense of security about unknown things, something that obviously I am unable to do, nor would I want to.
