“The bucket theory of the mind”. This is a term coined by Popper. It’s the view that our entire education system is based upon, that basically the mind is this passive recipient or a bucket in which you pour knowledge. When we think about it that way it seems obvious that it’s wrong but very few people seem to actually address this problem. Like Popper said “It’s impossible to speak in a way that you can’t be misunderstood”, we’re constantly making guesses about what the teacher says or the coach, etc. Consider the example that you see a tennis player, you can try and copy him in the exact same way and you’ll still suck. Is not by the coach saying “hit the ball before it bounces” that suddenly you’re a good tennis player. It’s by guessing what the coach says and the coach guessing what you’re not getting. But the only way you could improve would be by you wanting to improve, not by the coach wanting you to improve. This view that you can just pour knowledge into the student is an authoritarian view, the teacher knows the truth and the student must shut up and listen. Ironically authoritarianism prevents the growth of knowledge because it implies ideas being held from criticism and that means that any mistakes made can’t be corrected. If a problem arises in an area in which exists authority, the problem won’t be solved because ideas in that area aren’t open to question. The motto of one of the oldest institutions that was founded during the enlightenment, the Royal Society, is “take no one’s word for it”. All knowledge comes from within, not without, through conjecture and criticism. We won’t get new knowledge merely because the teacher want us to (this is, again an authoritarian view), we need to have reasons to why we want that knowledge. It must solve a problem that we have in one way or another, either we want to pass an exam, or it might help us getting with a better understanding of the topic, or simply because it makes our life better. So, the goal of the education system is to make sure every student acquires the knowledge that the teacher is entitled of displaying. But the teacher is the same for various students so this means that students will “get” the same knowledge. And in the final, they will all get a certificate of how they all “have” the same knowledge. This is a complete absurd! One of the biggest insights I got my from interview with David Deutsch (see here) is that all value in society is given by people who are different, not better and not specially the same. It’s crazy to think that we want to create alike physicists, such as any other job. As you might now realise, a good epistemology applies everywhere. If you, in a random area, first contradict the principles of epistemology then you’re automatically wrong, this is why it’s important to have a good and true epistemology (popperian epistemology of course!), you can detect the errors in an area more rapidly and accurately. “If one violates the principles of epistemology then one is wrong” quoting David Deutsch. For example, we can see morality as a subset of epistemology, it tries to respond to the question of “what kind of decisions should we do with our knowledge” but to answer that question, again, we need to have the right epistemology and everything derives from the right epistemology.
There’s only one movement, that I’m aware of, that is based on the application of popperian epistemology. This movement is the very famous Taking Children seriously founded by Sarah Fitz Claridge and David Deutsch. Children are people, not adults but people. While I’m not sure if I agree with the view inside Taking Children Seriously that basically children are full members of the society, children have some advantages comparing to adults. Indeed the children’s creative guessing machine tends to be more active than in adults because they haven’t learned to be ashamed of their guesses, or mistrust them even though they then lack the background knowledge. Taking children seriously describes parenting as giving your kid enough background knowledge so he can sustain himself, so I’m not really seeing anything that is preventing a eight year old from sustain himself. And this seems absurd said in the terms, questions to Sarah Fitz Claridge! Now, I just want to leave a message of optimism ahah. I think people sometimes have this idea that they can’t change things, they can’t make the world a better place, they can’t institutionalise their big innovation, they can’t spread their ideas, and so on. But everything that we see in our current society was made by people that were no smarter than you, you can change things, you can shape them, you can transform them, all you need it to want.