Intellectual Humility
Intellectual humility is simply recognizing that something that you believe might, in fact, be wrong.
There is an interesting podcast and article series from JSTOR on intellectual humility that I would recommend highly.
The first podcast in the series takes us through the basic definition of intellectual humility and some of the research questions and results that have sprung up in the last 20 years as a result of renewed interest in the concept by behavioral researchers and psychologists.
Intellectual humility is simply recognizing that something that you believe might, in fact, be wrong. Of course, it never feels like it's wrong. We wouldn't believe things that feel wrong, but an intellectually humble person recognizes that many of the things they confidently believe might, in fact, be inaccurate . . .
Almost all of us are far more confident in ourselves than we probably should be. Most people think that they are better than average on most dimensions, which of course is impossible. And we just go through life believing that we're on the side of the truth most of the time. . . .
I've had a lot of people say, I don't want to be intellectually humble because that means I'm going to be a pushover. I'm going to be wishy-washy. I won't take a stand on things. In the research, we don't find that. And I think the reason is that intellectual humility is based on three things.
I mean, why is it that I could be wrong about something? One is that I simply don't have all of the information that I need. The second possibility is that I have plenty of information, but that information may be biased in ways that I don't appreciate. And the third is that maybe I don't have the background or ability to really understand all of the evidence that's involved. There's a lot of things we believe, we believe that some expert told us, and not because we really figured it out. So what happens, I think, with intellectually humble people is when they think to themselves, I could be wrong about this. They go on a search for the validity of the information that supports the belief. They want to know, do I have all the information? Is that information biased? Do I have the ability to understand that information? It's a very logical and rational assessment of the validity of the belief. It's just not caving in because somebody else says that you're wrong.
A few things came thundering into my brain when I heard this first podcast:
It is almost certainly true to say that the primary movement in math education, since at least the mid-80s, has been consistently away from teaching knowledge and toward clumsily trying to pass on ways of thinking, soft skills, character improvement, and general mental aptitudes. It is also probably true to say that a key driver of that movement has been a constellation of (mostly unfounded and under-diagnosed) fears that a focus on knowledge transfer causes students to become cognitively compliant, unwarrantedly certain, competitive rather than collaborative, and unable to communicate or reason effectively.
The treatments that follow on top of these misdiagnoses have been mostly indirect "nudges" (like asset-based language vs. deficit-based language or artificially reducing teacher talk time), architectural changes (like shifting from rows to pods), weak and under-thought immersion therapies (like changing curricula to be almost entirely question-based), and simple pep-rally motivations and incentives. Very few people in education care if these things work, because it's not the goal for them to "work." The goal is to create a way-it-ought-to-be microcosm: dress up the world the way we want it to be, stick kids in it, and by gum they'll grow to be the kind of people we (80% white, female) adults want to see in the world—that evil, limiting world full of people who don't think like us.
So, why doesn't intellectual humility—or something like it—come up? Almost as soon as papers about grit or growth mindset dropped, we heard about them in education. Why not the same for intellectual humility? Certainly from a layperson's perspective, it would make sense that someone high in intellectual humility will generally not have to worry about compliance, false certainty, unproductive competition, or an inability to reason. And implementing some shallow, indirect, good-housekeeping "teaching" around intellectual humility would be a piece of cake. So, why don't we talk about it?
I suspect there are two reasons we don't promote the concept of intellectual humility in education: (a) because it's intellectual and (b) because it promotes humility.
