Why We Need to Teach from First Principles
In a world that is defined by rapid and constant change, creativity and invention have now become the fundamental building blocks of societal progress. To be genuinely inventive, rather than merely iterative, we ourselves need to learn how to think differently, and our education systems need to reflect this.
By Sophie Fenton and Susan Wu
What could be more powerful than to give children the capacity for truly independent thinking? What could be more revolutionary than to give children the superpower to see that if most of the systems shaping our daily lives are human constructed, they can also be reconstructed?
What is first principles thinking?
Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” First principles thinking is the practice of taking any idea, any concept and then stripping it back to basic, fundamental building blocks that are incontestable, free of subjective bias, and can be universally accepted as facts.
You do this by questioning every assumption you think you ‘know’ about a given problem or scenario and challenging current ‘knowledge’ that is learned, but not essential — and doing this over and over until you get to its most basic roots.
Let’s take the car for example. What do we ‘know’ about cars? Many people would answer in terms of what a car currently looks like today: cars are individual transportation devices with wheels, they require gas (or sometimes electricity), they have engines with moving pistons, they have doors and windows, and they need to get you from A to B.
What does this look like when reconstructed from first principles? What is essential truth and what is assumption? Thinking from first principles, a car is merely a form of transportation that can get you from one place to another. Removing the constraints of its current form factor or of its current role in our daily lives liberates our thinking. Do cars need pistons, fossil fuels, windows? Does each home need a car? No, these are inherited assumptions from the last 100 years.
Thought exercise: What is a living thing? (…are you sure?)
Why does it matter to think from first principles?
Learners who are capable of building from first principles are liberated and empowered to think genuinely, deeply, and inventively. This thinking enables us to thrive in a world that is constantly in the process of being invented, equipping us to think uniquely or creatively so that we can invent new solutions to old problems. Importantly, first principles thinking changes the trajectory of creating, from one of iterating on existing thinking, to one of genuine innovation.
Why should we teach from first principles?
We’re born with extraordinary curiosity and imagination. Conventional teaching typically suppresses these inclinations in favour of learning prescribed methods in order to achieve prescribed outcomes which typically involves just reiterating or mimicking existing ideas (often blindly).
If we are to equip our children to thrive in the world of the future where the majority of their work will be non-routine, cognitive, creative, then they must learn to think from the perspective of invention.
Scientists, mathematicians and philosophers are trained to think from first principles. Their work begins with making observations and forming hypotheses. Philosophers generate foundational, self evident propositions or assumptions that cannot be further deduced, and then use these building blocks to reconstruct systems of knowledge about the world.
We urgently need to apply this type of rigorous and critical thinking to all forms of knowledge, so that children can learn how to discern which systems are human constructed, and understand the intentions underlying these human designs. It’s not just technical and scientific innovation that will be ushering in broad sweeping changes to our near future world. Public trust in societal infrastructure such as government and media have fallen to historic lows, and the very fabric of our civic society may well need to be reinvented and reimagined over the next generation.
Benefits of teaching from first principles
- Children become much more capable of genuinely inventing rather than merely iterating
- Learners are more capable of retaining and using knowledge effectively because they understand the fundamental building blocks and aren’t just memorizing content
- Learners become much more fluent in identifying the pattern language that unites many systems, thereby making it easier for them to apply knowledge from one area to another
- Children become more capable of identifying their cognitive biases as well as developing defenses to resist peer pressure and herd mentality, because they can better understand the mechanics of these systems
How we teach first principles to 6 year olds
Here’s an example of how we’ve been applying first principles thinking at Lumineer Academy this term. We recently kicked off a Learning Exploration with our 6 year old students, exploring how communities, large and small, are constructed.
We started with the first principles question of “What is a home?” Our goal was to build from an understanding of what a home is — a community that 6 year olds interact with everyday — to a larger understanding of how bigger and bigger communities are constructed.
At first, most of the children described their current homes, vividly describing their bedrooms, their yards, their favorite play area.
But we asked them to dig deeper, and presented them with alternative versions of homes — nomadic tribes who travel seasonally, fishing families who live on barges, Aboriginal communities who maintain a strong attachment to traditional lands, cultures who share communal, multi-family dwellings.
Our year 1 students then started to come up with new first principle ideas for “what is a home?”
“where you live”
“a place for living things”
“it can be anything”
“shelter”
In going through this exercise, they started to identify common patterns amongst all of the different kinds of homes in the world. They started to understand how their assumptions of what a home looks like didn’t necessarily hold true for everyone. In broadening their perspective beyond just their lived experiences, they were able to start to identify the common threads that bond all of humanity together: family, connectedness, social interdependence.
As little Scarlett said, “Oh! I get it! A home is anything you want it to be. It’s about what happens within a home that counts.”
From that basis, our 6 year olds are now starting to brainstorm ideas for how to construct communities that can be comprised of groups of people who have very different ideas of what it means to live well together. This understanding will eventually scaffold into learning about systems of governance across large scale populations such as democracy, autocracy, economic coordination, resource allocation, and citizenship.
If they hadn’t started from the first principles question of “what is a home” and instead started with “what are ways we can build better communities”, they may have very well iterated upon concepts they are already very familiar with: neighborhood potlucks, sporting groups, local associations, town councils.
By starting from first principles, they’re able to build towards a much more effective, systemic understanding of how groups of human beings coordinate, and what infrastructure is needed at greater scale beyond our family, school, or neighborhood.
How we think matters — how we think directly influences who we are, our actions, and life outcomes. The conventional and default way we’re taught to think is reasoning by analogy — we’re taught to develop ideas and solve problems based on prior assumptions and taught to build from current ‘knowledge’ as our baseline foundation. Reasoning by analogy can be useful, but extremely limiting.
By learning from first principles, children will be liberated and empowered to think genuinely, deeply, and inventively. First principles thinkers are able to become effective architects, and not merely participants, of their future world.
Sophie Fenton is an Australian National Teacher of the Year, cofounder of Luminaria, and Principal of Lumineer Academy. Susan Wu is a lifelong innovator and a cofounder of Luminaria.
