Reading a fascinating article called Serendipity is No Accident by Robert Friedel recently reminded me of the importance of teaching students how to think as much as teaching them what to think. Friedel points to the role of serendipity in science as crucial to many of the discoveries made over time. He discusses serendipity as "the insightful use of deduction-the sort of thing that any reader of the detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle would recognize of Sherlock Holmes, "It's elementary, my dear Watson." He also says, "Insight is every bit as important as the accident. Simply to stumble upon something of value is not serendipity; that requires a mental capacity that goes beyond the obvious." Friedel goes on to categorize different types of serendipity and to explain how it has figured into the history of chemistry.
In an age of rapidly increasing amounts of information, and even more ways to access that information, we know that it's just not possible to know everything. (Not that it ever was for that matter.) For a humorous riff on this, check out A. J. Jacobs' book, The Know It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Man in the World. Nevertheless, with all of the talk of teaching students skills rather than content, we all too often fall into the trap of teaching students as if there's a body of knowledge out there that if they can just learn, they will be set. Our education continues to be set up in this way, and we remain fixed in this mode. Make no mistake, we are improving, and the meter that measures content versus skills has moved from where it was, but we still have a way to go.
Don't get me wrong. Students must have the foundational knowledge and the skills to be able to spot a surprise when it occurs. There are some facts that they need to know, and they need to understand that these facts are immutable and crucial. However, they also must learn that these facts are nothing more than the initial set of conditions. As the historian Barbara Tuchman once discussed, the facts of history are like the wood with which a carpenter builds. They are important, but they are nothing without the carpenter shaping them into something. Or as Friedel says, "But the true combination to science....is in making the surprise fit some larger scheme of meaning."
In addition to teaching students how to solve problems and think, we must help them develop what Art Costa refers to as habits of mind. Students must learn to not only be critical and analytical. We must help them be open to insightful deduction. Like the scientists in Friedel's article, they need to prepare for finding one thing when they are looking for something else and they need to be open to finding something by an alternative route than they originally designed. While this may be unsettling and even frightening, we need to challenge students that this is how science has progressed and assure them that not only is this permissible, but it is imperative.
Perhaps one of the most important traits we can teach students is knowledge based humility. One cannot find something if one is not looking, so we must begin by helping them learn what are the possibilities that are out there for them. After they have learned the first principles, they need to be prepared to move on to the next level, and they must be ready to expend energy and to work long hours to get there. Nevertheless, if they don't realize that there are possibilities that they have never envisioned, they will remain closed to the discoveries that their peers will make. To close with one more quotation from Friedel, "The quintessential joy of serendipitous science lies in its capacity to remind us that, as much as we know, we know only a fraction of what is to be known. As the accidents tell us and the sagacity to use them confirms, we do not even truly know what it is we do not know."
