On Education: Why Knowing Facts Isn’t the Same as Understanding
Four reasons why textbooks are soiled with tears and creativity dies an early death
Recently a photo of India’s 9th grade math textbook with tears on it made rounds on Instagram and Reddit. Many people said that this was their only memory of math they remembered. That is being scolded or beaten by parents, siblings or tutors to the point of tears during what can be considered rather simple mathematics.
This surprised me. For one, I never had any trouble with math. My school, despite a lot of flaws, was above the curve in providing an understanding of subjects. Second, I am amazed that so many educators felt that berating a child would make them better at math. On further analysis, this seems to be a prevalent problem in most, if not all, education systems. We are more concerned with the student knowing the facts and formulas than understanding them.
I recently met with G.R. Sivakumar Sir, former principal of my school, who was the greatest contributor to the understanding-based approach of my school. During the course of the conversation, I realized how fundamentally flawed the education system is. Let’s talk in more detail.
Simple is the Enemy of Correct
My students prefer an incorrect explanation they can understand rather than a correct one they can't understand. — An anonymus teacher.
If you have played around with bar magnets, you would realize that they attract metal on the entirety of its surface. The force is stronger in the centre and slightly weak at the poles. Great, this is exactly how solenoids work(electrical bar magnets).
Then explain to me what is wrong in this diagram which you will find in many, many textbooks.
It shows that the magnetic field only comes out on the poles. This would make the poles the strongest. And that makes no sense, as anyone who has ever played with a magnet would tell you. Even if we solve it mathematically, the strength at the poles is half of that at the middle region. Then why have generations of kids been taught to draw this intuitively and mathematically incorrect diagram? Because it is simple!
As you can see in a magnetic field detector, fields are coming out from every point, symmetrically.
And I can give you many more such examples. Such gross simplifications confuse the students. It doesn’t align with their real-life experiences, and eventually, they are left with no option but to gaslight themselves into believing these lies to be true.
Most of you have also heard the line, ‘gravity is an invisible force’. Pardon me, but aren’t all forces invisible? Or have you ever seen electromagnetism? Or do you see the centrifugal force arrows appear when you see a rotating wheel?
These things may seem harmless at first, but that is because our education system is intentionally designed to prevent us from realizing that what we have is an illusion of understanding. It makes sure we are never asked a question, a problem, or an exercise which casts even a pinch of doubt on the misconceptions planted by them!
Punishing Awareness
Lots of kids who are aware and sharp struggle with chemistry, biology and social studies with no mistake of their own but due to them being aware.
According to the IUCN (2004), the total number of plant and animal species described so far is slightly more than 1.5 million - Biology Textbook(India)
The textbook here states there were 1.5 million species by 2004. In 2020, the medical entrance test of India asked the question, “How many species have been described so far?”
The answer was given as 1.5 million. So you are telling me that the count didn’t increase in 16+ years? The actual answer is 2 million(IUCN), which was one of the options. This meant that the informed child was punished for well, being informed.
Similarly, a question which has been asked multiple times is “The most efficient test for Typhoid is:”
The answer is always “Widal Test”. However, in a clinical setting, Widal test is neither reliable nor efficient. Multiple Widal tests need to be conducted over days to get a typhoid diagnosis. Typhidot is the one which is used in most clinics now. Typhidot uses ELISA technology to get a result with almost 98.8% certainty in 20 mins. And it is easier to perform. But the option ‘ELISA’ is given as wrong.
I know friends whose parents are lab technicians, who through his parents knows about such tests, and who were punished for being updated with knowledge. Something which I think is a trait of a good doctor…
After arriving in India, Mahatma Gandhi successfully organised satyagraha movements in various places. In 1917 he travelled to Champaran in Bihar to inspire the peasants to struggle against the oppressive plantation system. Then in 1917, he organised a satyagraha to support the peasants of the Kheda district of Gujarat. Affected by crop failure and a plague epidemic, the peasants of Kheda could not pay the revenue, and were demanding that revenue collection be relaxed. - History Textbook of India
A common question in the class 10 final exams is “When was Kheda Satyagrah organized?”
The answer from the textbook would be 1917. However, as any resident of Kheda or Ahmedabad would tell you, Gandhi visited Kheda in 1917. The satyagrah started in 1918. This fact is corroborated by Seema Shukla Ojha who was a writer on the very textbook in question. However, despite this error being common knowledge for 20+ years, it is yet to be corrected. This mere confusion in dates may seem nit-picky, but remember students remember history as a story of successive events. When the dates are wrong, the story’s timeline starts making less and less sense. This confuses the students. How could Gandhi be in two places at once?
History also commonly falls in the pothole of trying to assign the ‘morally correct’ side and the villains. For example, the Axis powers or Germany, Japan and Italy are portrayed as villains in the Second World War. USA, UK, France and Russia are painted as the heroes. But we don’t talk about the concentration camps in USA.
After the Pearl Harbour attack, anti-Japanese sentiment grew in USA. Similar to how the Jew homes and shops were raided and the Jews were shipped off to barely livable concentration camps in Germany, Japanese homes and shops were burned and they were shipped off to similar concentration camps. The records of what happened in these black sites have been erased, and their history is censored from textbooks. Or the ‘Operation Legacy’ where the British basically tried to burn the proof of all the genocides and enslavement and their very own concentration camps all taking place in the shadow of the Second World War in Kenya? Or the apartheid where the French, in one incidence, killed 150 students, some as young as 13, for the crime of being black?
Such things are part of history. No nation was innocent. None of them were white knights. But when we want to make a simple narrative, a simple feel-good story of the heroic Allied forces defeating the evil Hitler; such events are conveniently ignored. And the child who dares question the greyness of the war is called disrespectful and scolded and thrown out of the class.
The End Goal is not Knowledge
Dr. Richard Feynman, a Nobel-winning physicist and arguably one of the greatest teachers to step foot on Earth, once was guest lecturing a course on electromagnetism in Brazil.
While teaching polarization, he asked them about Brewster’s angle. The class replied in unison and narrated the perfect definition “Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized. The light is polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection. The tangent of the angle equals the index.”
But when Feynman asked them to use this simply to observe a fact about a pond, they failed. Because these students were encyclopedic. They had a reply stored under “Brewster’s Angle” but nothing under “Look at the pond”.
The students had memorized everything but didn't know what anything meant. This same predicament plagues most education. We know a lot, but like a search engine, we don’t have a shred of idea on how to actually use what we know.
Since last year, I have been teaching a math course. In number theory, I start by proving a lot of rather trivial facts. For example, We can always divide two numbers and get a quotient and remainder or the fact we can always break a number down to prime factors. And I take a sweet time doing so.
The last time I took this class, someone left the class in the middle. And later mailed me that these were obvious facts and that proving them in multiple ways was beneath him. This is what has been ingrained into the minds of kids. That we can take parts of math for granted as it is ‘obvious’. That if we can get the answer without gaining certain knowledge, why gain it?
I have the habit of talking about how incredible the use of math in real life is. And students have criticized me for it, no one will ask us where ‘balanced ternary’ is used. Just give us the damn formula!
Here is a beautiful excerpt from Dr. Feynman on this phenomenon
Imagine a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?" and the student can't answer. Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrrrup" he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek. But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty! What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.
This is the state of science today. We learn more science than ever before but know less. The ‘experiments’ in our textbooks are a disgrace. They don’t account for what are experimental errors. Obviously, the data has errors, it is experimental, but it only has the ‘correct’ type of errors. Errors which lead to the correct answer despite the entire setup being flawed. At least in India, our practical exams are a farce. We are asked to find resistance using a voltmeter and ammeter of which neither are working. When I asked the lab tech about it, they told me that the resistance is 10 ohm and I can manufacture plausible sounding numbers to get the answer…
We are told in chemistry that acid reacts with aluminium to produce flammable hydrogen. And then this is followed by a long list of reasons for the conditions needed for this reaction to occur. How much more fun would it be if, at the end of the class, the student is told that if they put acid and aluminium in a bottle and put a balloon on top, The balloon would give a fireball on burning? This is safe enough to do at home and even if one of the kids did it, they would come to class the next day giddy with joy which they will transfer to the rest of the class. And if a child tried and failed, well we will ask them to describe the setup and tell them which conditions they didn’t account for. The class will remember the reasons and conditions much, much better.
A lot of science was made not by scientists but by curious people. Most of the work on reflection was done by a silk merchant, who wanted to know what else his looking glass could see. Knot theory( a branch of math used to analyze proteins, it was used to make the COVID-19 vaccine) was worked upon by a lawyer who was curious about ways to tie his shoes. Frequency analysis algorithms in Computer science were designed by an actress with nothing to do between shoots. Science has never asked for a fancy degree, it has yearned for a mind which asks questions.
But when the end goal of education shifts from gaining the knowledge to answer questions to knowing facts to solve problems to get marks or get a collage or get a rank or whatever, education stops fulfilling its purpose. The purpose of expanding one’s thinking.
Egos
I have long been a believer that ego is the biggest enemy of growth. They are the biggest fools if one feels that they are correct all the time, that their beliefs are perfect and their knowledge is without holes.
In grade 10, I was reading Richard III as a manga adaptation during a free period. Our English teacher saw this and confiscated my book. Her reason was plain and clear ego. But that is not a good reason for confiscating a book, so by the next day she gave the reason that Richard III was inappropriate and obscene. This is rather strange as Antony and Cleopatra were parts of the school curriculum. Even more so as the school had a performance of Macbeth by the students. Both of which share a lot of themes and have similar scenes as Richard III. She gave excuse after excuse and on the last day of school, I was made to write an apology letter for reading in a free period.
I have had a difficult relationship with English teachers. While I am somewhat good at writing, I don’t use long and flowery words. I feel that writing is supposed to be understood by the reader, and the use of flowery speech doesn’t help. For example, I frequently lose marks in writing formal letters in exams. Let’s say I want to complain about there being construction noise during the night in my area. If you are the head of the department, would you like this complaint
The loud noises of contruction at night cause immense disturbence to the residents and as a result they lose sleep. This hurts their work productivity as well as peace of mind. Therfore, I request you to move the contruction hours to day time and use of noise silencers with the machines.
or would you like to receive this monstrosity
Amidst the nocturnal tranquility that once pervaded our neighborhood, an incessant cacophony of construction has emerged, shattering the serene silence with its relentless clamor. The egregious disturbances orchestrated by these nocturnal enterprises have precipitated an insurmountable disruption to the somnolent repose of the residents, subsequently engendering a pervasive malaise that permeates both their professional efficacy and psychological equanimity. In light of these perturbations, I implore a reconfiguration of the construction schedule to diurnal hours, coupled with the implementation of acoustic attenuation devices on the machinery, to ameliorate the auditory onslaught and restore the erstwhile tranquility.
Teachers feel that they are more experienced, more learned and more powerful than the students they teach, which while true, sometimes makes them dictator-like. They feel that they need to control the class in place of nurturing it. This slowly grows into a disconnect which ends up alienating them from the very class they teach. Like real-world dictators, teachers sometimes start losing their cool when a student questions them in the slightest. When a child points out a mistake. When a child just wants to know more.
All the above points were systemic issues which can simply be solved if the students have curiosity. But in the end, the teacher must be receptive to this curiosity and not quash it to satisfy their egos.
And so, we find ourselves at a crossroads. The tears on a math textbook are not just drops of sadness and hurt but symbols of a deeper, systemic failure—a failure to ignite curiosity, to foster true understanding, and to nurture an environment where deep questions are encouraged rather than stifled.
We live in a world where simple explanations are often preferred over accurate ones, where rote memorization is mistaken for learning, and where the pursuit of marks trumps the quest for knowledge. But this approach only serves to produce generations of students who know a lot yet understand very little. They are like search engines, able to regurgitate information without grasping its significance.
The antidote to this is a paradigm shift in our approach to education. We must move from a model that prizes correct answers above all else to one that values the process of discovery. Imagine a classroom where the awe of blue light appearing on crushing a sugar crystal(try it out, it works!) outweighs the memorization of the definition of triboluminescence. Or one where law classes are not about remembering the definition of “mala in se” and “malum prohibitum” but about reading actual cases and trying to apply our knowledge there(the latter is from Harvard so I guess it works).
But this change requires more than just new teaching methods or revised textbooks. It demands a cultural shift among educators, where humility replaces ego, and the role of the teacher evolves from a dictator of facts to a guide on the journey of exploration. It’s about creating a space where students feel safe to challenge ideas, to make mistakes, and to pursue their curiosity without fear of reprimand.
This shift will not be easy. It requires educators to be open to their own imperfections, to recognize that their authority should be built on respect and understanding rather than on control and punishment. It means embracing a teaching philosophy that sees questions as opportunities for growth, not threats to authority.
In essence, the ultimate goal of education should not be to fill young minds with facts but to light the fire of curiosity that will drive lifelong learning. As we stand at these crossroads, we have the chance to reshape the future. We can create a world where students are not just passive recipients of knowledge but active seekers of understanding. And in doing so, we will not just educate better students; we will cultivate better thinkers, better problem-solvers, and ultimately, better human beings.
As we navigate this path, let’s remember that true education is not about having all the answers. It’s about asking the right questions.
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Thanks for reading,
Warm Reagrds,
Arjun Agarwal.