Posted on January 29, 2022

"We know that the best way to help students change their conceptual outlook about scientific notions is to purposefully increase their cognitive dissonance until they feel so uncomfortable that they themselves seek out more information and new sources to resolve the conflict."

—Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic

I am an advocate for the thought of schooling’s objective is not learning, but learning how to learn. It’s not about the what, it’s about the how and, perhaps more importantly, the why. Here, the author proposes a similar thing. He argues that after a conflict is created—the how—, the student will naturally want to solve it—the why. Now, he suggests that this is a well known fact, but I would argue the opposite. Educators nowadays don’t seem to follow this approach. Instead, they are usually content with putting the information out there and hoping that the students will accept it as their truth. If more people knew this concept, they would either help others by increasing their cognitive dissonance, or even do it for themselves consciously. I’ll do my best to do both, because I want to, and because I can.