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nor this |
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he does agree! |
Leaving aside the argument as to whether facts matter or not (hint -they do) just why is Einstein such a popular figure for educators to (mis)quote? What is it about the German Jewish physicists that appeals to some modern educators? Einstein isn’t popular among all teachers. Instead you tend to see his stuff quoted by teachers who have a strong disposition towards things like creativity, student emotional development and imagination. The kind of teacher who derides tests and wants students to ‘think outside the box’. Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with these ideas .I’m just merely pointing out the odd correlation I’ve noticed between Einstein and beliefs of this sort. I say ‘odd’ because a gifted mathematical genius, smart in the most traditional sense who excelled at school doesn’t strike me as the poster boy for the values being espoused by these teachers. What’s that you say? But Einstein didn’t do well at school! Ah, before we continue, there are a few myths that need debunking. Here’s a quick recap.

Myth: Einstein did badly in school
No, he did really well in school. He aced almost everything except French. He tried to enter university when he was 16 but his French held him back (damn you, French!!)
Myth: Einstein failed maths
Nope, he could do differential and integral calculus by the age of 15 whereas I don’t even know what those words mean.
Myth: Einstein had learning difficulties and was an average student
This one is tricky because Einstein didn’t speak a lot until he was about 5. He did speak though. His biographer Pais (1982) claims that Einstein started speaking in whole sentences between the age of 2-3 and at age nine he was accepted into a prestigious school. It would seem quite odd for an ‘average’ student with learning difficulties to be accepted into such a school. The only ‘learning difficulty’ he seemed to have was in that he hated the way his teachers taught, -i.e. memorising large amounts of data. This to my mind, makes Einstein quite a ‘normal’ child.
Myth: Einstein was dyslexic/autistic
So it seems there are in existence, two distinct Einsteins. There is ‘physicist Einstein’ who was a smart kid, good at school (with the exception of French) and brilliant at maths. This Einstein went on to publish hundreds of ground breaking articles concerning physics and won the Nobel Prize. Then there’s ‘educator Einstein’. A young boy with learning difficulties who was written of by foolish teachers unable to see his potential. He failed at maths and yet went on to become a world-renown genius. He spent much of his later life poised before a blackboard making pithy statements about education to his enrapt students.
While it is true that Einstein trained to be a school teacher and lectured at various Universities, it’s also true that for two years he failed to find a teaching job and his only teaching was at university level. It’s also likely that none of the teachers quoting his thoughts on teaching have any idea how he fared as a lecturer. Was he any good? Did his students like him? Did he teach well? Among Einstein’s hundreds of papers not one dealt with teaching or education. Despite this he’s claimed by teachers as one of their own, there are even (flawed) academic papers speculating about Einstein’s views on teaching
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reverse halo -or ‘Devil effect’. Retweet anyone? |
So why exactly is Einstein popular among some teachers? It would seem that Einstein is a kind of short-hand for ‘genius’. Stick his picture next to a quote and the quote gains 9000 Internet points more of credibility than just a normal quote. This is an example of the cognitive bias known as the Halo effect. This is where one attractive characteristic can lead people to assume more favourable things about a person in general. The halo effect is well known and well studied. It’s what leads to attractive teachers getting better student ratings than less attractive teachers, and to attractive criminals getting shorter sentences than plainer ones. Einstein wasn’t hot, he was smart, but the effect still holds. E = S = T or Einstein = smart = true. Smart guy A says B so B must be true because smart guy A is smart. Of course, this is a non-sequitur. If Einstein was talking about Physics you would do well to listen, but would you want his advice on marriage and dating?
Also odd is that teachers often use Einstein to back up things like creativity, imagination and alternative conceptions of intelligence, focusing on the idea that ‘standard’ definitions of intelligence are not the be-all and end-all of education. Yet Einstein was as ‘traditionally smart’ as they come. He was not smart in a ‘fish climbing trees’ sense, or a ‘bodily-kinaesthetic’ sense but smart in a ‘discover how space and time works through complex maths’ smart. So why do teachers promoting the notion that ‘everyone is clever in different ways’ use the guy who is smart in the most vanilla way to push that point home?
Sure Einstein hated the way he was taught, he hated memorising facts and thought that imagination was important, -but so what? If an idea is good, it doesn’t matter who says it, be it Einstein or Hitler. That is why when vested interested attack, for example, Charles Darwin they are missing the point. Darwin doesn’t matter. The theory of evolution matters. Good ideas are good whether Einstein said them or not, -and bad ideas are bad ideas regardless of who said them. We need to focus on the text, not the image.