The Most Important Subject Nobody Teaches
The most important subject a person can learn is epistemology: how we know that things are true. And it is missing from every elementary school on earth.
Why it matters, especially now
We live in an age of conspiracy theories, flat earth, supernatural claims and religion. Most people have no tools to estimate how likely a claim is to be true. They believe what is repeated, what is said confidently, or what their group believes.
This matters in personal life. Do cigarettes cause cancer? Does this treatment work? Is this investment a scam? But it matters most at the political level. A democracy is only as good as its citizens' ability to judge a politician's speech, and a public that cannot weigh evidence cannot hold power to account.
So it is astonishing that a subject of such importance to the body politic is not taught to children at all.
Why it isn't taught
Religion
Any serious teaching of epistemology would be seen, correctly, as a threat to religion. Not only to religious authority, but to religious belief at the personal level. A child who learns to ask "how do we know this?" will eventually ask it about scripture. The system knows this, so the question is never taught.
Politicians prefer it that way
As George Carlin put it, the people in charge want a population smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but not smart enough to critically analyze what is being done to them. A public trained in epistemology would scrutinize the actions and ideas of politicians themselves. That is not a public most politicians want.
Teachers were never taught it
Teacher education is abysmal, and teachers themselves are not trained in epistemology. Ask a typical teacher why we know the Exodus didn't happen, and they cannot walk a student through the archaeology, the missing evidence, or how ancient texts were written. They fall back on "the book says so." Teachers who never learned epistemology cannot teach it, and so each generation of teachers is as untrained as the last.
Testing rewards answers, not reasoning
In some subjects, checking the answer is enough. In mathematics, the chance of guessing the right answer is so slim that a correct answer is good evidence of correct reasoning. But in history, social studies and religion, the whole issue is epistemology. "Did the Exodus happen?" has a short answer anyone can memorize. The reasoning behind it is the actual subject, and that is exactly what schools skip.
The name itself
Academia doesn't help. "Epistemology" sounds pompous, like something reserved for philosophy PhDs. In an elementary school it could simply be called "How do we know?" Its core is simple enough for an eight-year-old, and children ask "how do you know?" naturally, until school trains it out of them.
Universities don't fix it either
You can become an acclaimed physicist or an accomplished chemist without knowing one thing about it. Universities require courses in English as a second language and in physical education. They do not require epistemology.
Universities do teach it where a field cannot function without it. History students take courses in historical method, learning to criticize sources and weigh conflicting accounts. But epistemology as a general skill, the skill every citizen needs to understand a politician's speech or a health claim, is required of no one.
Perhaps it isn't the university's job. But once the university knows that elementary and high schools have failed to teach it, it has to pick up the job. Someone has to do it.
Where it belongs
Ideally, though, it belongs in elementary school. That is where habits of belief are formed, and it reaches everyone, not just the minority who go on to university. If children learned how we know things, universities could go back to what they do best: letting people specialize in whatever science or field they choose.
Facts go out of date. The ability to tell what is true never does.