I’ve been thinking about this razor or heuristic in education for a while. It needs a catchy name, but it’s goes something like this.

“Every popular trend in education is causing a nontrivial amount of harm.”

A corollary to that is that educators must work to decipher and mitigate that harm as well as determine whether the tradeoff is worth it.

Another corollary is that groupthink, social pressure to conform, and confirmation bias will make that task difficult. However, if one doesn’t speak out then you risk contributing to pluralistic ignorance, where people recognize a harm but assume everyone else thinks it’s fine because no one individual speaks up.

To make matters worse, educators are disproportionately friendly and don’t like “making waves.”

#education #teaching #grownostr