The Curse of Knowledge

Why Intelligent People Make Unintelligible Teachers

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My mother called me out of the blue last night:

“Hey, when you have a second, can you check the prices for these green tea cleansers for me?”

I didn’t understand the request at all.

“I just want to know whether I should get them online or at Chemist Warehouse.”

I was still confused by such a simple request and asked for the brand of the cleanser. After a 30-second Google search, I found four retailers and sent her the one that offered the lowest price.

“Beautiful. Thank you!”

I hung up the phone, still bewildered by the request. For me, a search like that is common sense. You type in the brand, ignore the sponsored section of the immediate results, find a retailer with good reviews, check that it’s still in stock, and… time out! Because that right there is the curse of knowledge.

I read about this idea from this article by Steven Pinker titled ‘The Source of Bad Writing’. In it, he wondered why intelligent people usually produce unintelligible writing. And his answer cuts straight into why teaching is such a difficult gig: we will always find it hard to imagine that someone else doesn’t know something that we know.

When we’ve mastered something, it’ll simply turn into common sense that is invisible to us. It’s boring, pedestrian and repetitive, so we never bother to revisit the basics. But this lack of attention to what got you here bites you in the ass when you’re cornered to explain the fundamentals. You’d realise that you can’t do it without using jargon. You can’t sustain a clear string of thought, and you can’t even see the blanks your students want you to fill in.

This is why I’ve harboured a particular disdain for university-educated people who complain about how no one’s reading anymore. One of them even said verbatim that the cure for fixing our literacy crisis is just to ‘pick up a book and read it’. This way of approaching education (especially something as delicate as reading) is the curse of knowledge on full display. And just “like a drunk who is too impaired to realise that he is too impaired to drive”, educators are at times too intelligent to teach anything intelligible.

I’d like to call this the graduate bias, and I think it’s a challenge worth bringing to the forefront. Take my work in advocating for literacy, for example, the more I write about reading, the more I realise that the reading skills I’ve gathered from my degree are not common sense at all. I felt uncomfortable when I first practised them, and even after five years in the field, I still find it challenging at times to build my reading stamina, to gloss a poem or to make sense of a philosophical passage. It’s just the case that these skills are so ingrained that I can’t recall who I was before I acquired them.

So, this is a note to educators and me: let’s not punish readers with our forgotten struggles. Remember the stings of confusion when you were a student and turn it into compassion. Revisit the boring basics and communicate them clearly. Also, remember that what you see as common sense might turn out to be a helping hand for someone else in need.

Until next week

Robin