A Curriculum of What Schools Refuse to Teach
Here is a list of subjects that are almost entirely absent from schooling and should be central to it. I am not proposing to replace mathematics or literacy — I am proposing that the following are at least as important and receive essentially no time.
Epistemology
How we know what we know should be a primary subject, taught from early on, not an elective for philosophy specialists.
Children are taught an enormous quantity of facts and almost nothing about how facts are established, how confidence should scale with evidence, what distinguishes a well-supported claim from a plausible one, or what to do when authorities disagree. They leave school with a large database and no query language.
Statistics, and the Statistical Nature of Reality
Every regularity in the social world is statistical. Exceptions are not rare curiosities; they are abundant, expected, and usually the interesting part.
School currently teaches the opposite lesson, and teaches it implicitly, which makes it harder to dislodge. Euclidean geometry creates the impression that reality is governed by clean laws admitting no exceptions — that a proof settles a matter permanently and universally.
That is true of geometry and almost nothing else. It is the exception, not the model. Reality — especially social reality — is complicated, does not follow simple rules, and yields to statistical description at best. A student who has spent years on proofs and no time on distributions has been systematically misinformed about what most knowledge looks like.
Chess is a useful illustration here: a tiny rule set, complete information, and still no simple maxims that survive contact with actual positions.
Cognitive Bias
Why we think what we think. Why our nature pushes us in particular directions. And therefore when to be suspicious of our own conclusions.
This is teachable, there is a solid literature, and it is directly useful in a way that most of the curriculum is not.
Self-Deception
The mechanisms by which we lie to ourselves, and why we do it. Rationalisation is a load-bearing feature of ordinary psychology — it lets people live with things they have done and beliefs they half-know are false. Nobody is taught to recognise it in themselves, and it is not obvious without instruction.
Why Grammar Rules Are Stupid
Words have no fixed meanings and never could. Prescriptive grammar is a set of conventions with a social history, presented to children as a matter of correctness.
Teaching the distinction — between conventions worth following for practical reasons and laws of language, which do not exist — would inoculate students against a great deal of nonsense later.
Why Your Teachers Usually Do Not Know What They Are Talking About
A demonstration rather than a lecture: ask your physics teacher what mass is.
The answer is genuinely difficult, contested at the foundations, and most teachers will produce a definition that dissolves under one follow-up question. The point is not to embarrass anyone. It is to establish early that the person at the front of the room is transmitting a simplified account they may not have examined — which is true of nearly all teaching, including this list.
Why Most Arguments Go Nowhere
Talking past each other, disputing definitions while believing you dispute facts, defending a position because you announced it rather than because you hold it. All common, all recognisable once named, and all currently learned by accident if at all.
How to Disrespect Authorities
Philosophers, teachers, holy books, institutions. Not reflexive contrarianism, which is its own trap, but the specific skill of evaluating a claim independently of the status of whoever made it.
This is the one that will not be taught, for obvious institutional reasons — a school system cannot easily run a course on why the people running it may be wrong. Which is precisely why it belongs on the list.