I want you to picture something for a second.
You're sitting at a desk, it's a Tuesday morning,
and your teacher hands back a math test you took
the week before. Oh, yeah. The moment of truth.
Right. You flip that paper over, and right there
at the top, circled in bright red ink, is a percentage.
Say it's an 85%. A very specific permanent feeling
number. Exactly. In that single sleeting moment,
Your entire understanding of this really complex
subject your effort your capability I mean it
all gets boiled down to that one specific number
Yeah, it feels like a foundational law of the
universe or something it really does But the
wild thing is that specific way of reducing human
learning to a percentage. It isn't some ancient
fundamental pillar of education. No, not at all.
It's actually a relatively recent invention.
It was only developed in the late 19th century.
Which is pretty crazy when you think about how
heavily we rely on it now. So today, for our
deep dive, we're unpacking a fascinating article
by Gary Ackerman. It's from Hack Science Education,
and it's titled Essence and Variation. It's a
great read. Yeah. The mission today is to figure
out why we force messy human brains into rigid
mathematical boxes. more importantly, why modern
biology says we desperately need to stop. It
is entirely wild when you realize that something
so ubiquitous, something that literally shapes
our entire trajectory in school, in college,
and our careers is actually just a constructed
metric. Right. It's completely made up. Completely.
We treat that 85 % like it's a law of physics.
But to really understand why we grade the way
we do, we have to dig into the philosophical
bedrock of that 19th century system. Which is?
It's a concept called essentialism. OK, let's
unpack this because I hear a word like essentialism
and I immediately picture like a dense thousand
page philosophy textbook. Oh for sure. But Akron
argues this concept governs almost everything
we do on a daily basis. So how does it work?
Like a cookie cutter approach. That's actually
a great way to put it. To grasp it we have to
go way back. Like all the way back to ancient
Greece. Okay we're going way back. Yeah, specifically
to Plato. He had this theory of forms. Plato
proposed that somewhere out there, in some non
-physical realm, there is a perfect, idealized
version of everything. Like a perfect blueprint.
Exactly. There's the perfect chair, the perfect
dog, the perfect circle. And according to this
theory, everything we see in our physical, messy
world is just a flawed, degraded shadow of that
perfection. So the core, unchangeable identity
of a thing, the absolute minimum required to
make it what it is that is its essence. Right.
So if I strip away the paint color, the type
of wood and the cushions, the fundamental structural
concept of something to sit on, that's the essence
of a chair. Exactly. And anything else is just
superficial or degraded. If we connect this to
the bigger picture, this essentialism isn't just
a school policy. It deeply influences all fields
of human thought. For thousands of years, this
became the default way humans organized the world.
We actively look for the essence of them. Put
them in science. Oh, especially in science. Historically,
essentialist biologists would define the strict
essence of a species. They'd create this perfect
idealized version of a finch or a fern in their
mind. Right, like the ultimate prototype of a
finch. Yes. And any difference from that idealized
essence out in the real physical world, it was
viewed as a mistake, a lesser degraded version
of the species. Wow. OK, I can see exactly how
this maps onto the education system in that red
85%. It maps perfectly. Because if we're operating
under essentialism, then the standard or the
curriculum we create is the Platonic ideal. It's
the perfect shiny essence of what, say, a 10th
grader should know. Which means the student is
just the flawed physical manifestation trying
to live up to that perfect essence. And failing.
I mean, if we are essentially treating students
like degraded versions of a perfect standard,
isn't that incredibly limiting? It's beyond limiting.
It's destructive. And we see it failing constantly.
Ackerman brings up the work of Todd Rose to highlight
this. Oh, from the book The End of Average? Yes,
brilliantly deconstructs the idea that a perfect
essence or an average actually exists in nature.
The most famous example from Rose's work is about
the US Air Force in the 1950s. Right, I've heard
a bit about this. They were having a ton of crashes,
right? A massive number of crashes and they couldn't
figure out why. It turned out the cockpits were
designed for the average pilot based on thousands
of bodily measurements they had taken in the
1920s. Because they believed there was an essential
pilot body type. Exactly. So researchers finally
decided to measure over 4 ,000 actual living
pilots on 10 different dimensions of size. Okay.
Do you know how many of those 4 ,000 pilots fit
the average profile on all 10 dimensions? I'm
guessing a very small number. Zero. Zero out
of 4 ,000. Not a single pilot was average. By
designing the cockpit for the perfect essence
of a pilot, they had literally designed a cockpit
that fit nobody. The essentialist approach nearly
destroyed their air fleet, and Rose argues that
this exact same reductionist practice, you know...
Boiling complex human beings down to a single
mathematical essence, like a grade, is just as
disastrous in education. When you design a classroom
for the essential student, you're teaching a
student who literally does not exist. Exactly.
Okay, but if humans are so terribly prone to
creating these rigid categories that don't actually
fit reality... How does nature handle it? Because
if the Platonic ideal is a total myth, we need
a better model for reality. We have to look at
modern biology. And this is where Ackerman points
to the revolutionary work of evolutionary biologist
Stephen J. Gold. Oh, Gold. He's huge in evolutionary
theory. Massive. He championed a paradigm shift
that fundamentally broke the back of biological
essentialism. He pointed out one of the most
important discoveries in the history of science,
that variation is not a mistake. Variation is
the true nature of life. So how does that shift
the way we see the world? Because to the essentialist,
variation is an error, right? Like the mutant
finch with a slightly longer beak is a corrupted
version of the perfect finch. Exactly. But evolutionary
biology proves the exact opposite. Without that
variation, a species cannot adapt and survive.
Right. Natural selection. Yeah. That longer beak
isn't a degradation. It's an adaptation to a
changing food source. The variety we observe
out in the world isn't a deviation from reality.
It is the reality. There's no hidden perfect
blueprint. No hidden perfect essence floating
out in the ether. There is only endless, constant,
blurry variation. It's the engine that drives
the entire natural world. I have to play devil's
advocate here, though, on behalf of you listening.
Sure, go for it. I mean, I'm fully on board with
embracing variety and complexity, but wait a
minute. How does science even work if there are
no lines and no definitions? That's the big question.
Yeah, if there's no line between what makes a
passing grade and a failing grade or what makes
a bird a bird, doesn't everything just dissolve
into complete chaos? It is a totally valid fiction
point. And Ackerman directly addresses it in
the text. Because he's a researcher himself,
he knows that to run an experiment or study a
problem, scientists absolutely must define their
constructs. They have to draw a line somewhere.
They have to categorize. But, and this is the
crucial distinction, the mechanism of how they
do it is fundamentally different from the essentialist.
Good researchers recognize that they are actively
imposing these characteristics on nature. They
know they're making the lines up. Exactly. They
know the lines are artificial. They are a temporary
grid placed over a messy reality. Think of it
like drawing a map of a mountain range. OK. The
map is incredibly useful. It has grid lines,
elevation markers, borders. But a good cartographer
never mistakes the map for the actual physical
mountain. They know it's just a representation.
Right. They interpret their observations strictly
through the lens of those specific definitions,
and they actually identify the limitations those
definitions create. The essentialist, on the
other hand, mistakes the map for the territory.
Oh, wow. So the education system mistakes the
85 % for the actual intellect of the child. That
is a staggering distinction. The researcher knows
the metric is a flawed tool, while the essentialist
thinks the metric is the absolute truth. So what
does this whole mean? Like on a practical level,
if we take this map knowing it's flawed and we
look at a classroom of 30 distinct human beings,
what happens when we replace the essentialist
view with this variation view? What's fascinating
here is that it completely opens up the domain
of education. Under the essentialist model, the
curriculum is this narrow pipeline. Anything
that distracts from the standard is a degradation.
Right. But if variation is the actual reality
of a biological system, which a classroom of
30 humans absolutely is, then a far wider range
of knowledge, skills, and problems suddenly become
valid. Because the environment is part of this
system now. Precisely. local circumstances, individual
student interests, brand new emerging technologies,
a random historical event that happened that
morning. These are no longer distractions. They're
part of the curriculum. In a variation model,
this variety is not a deviation from what the
curriculum should be. It is a reflection of what
the curriculum actually is, whether we want it
to be or not. That completely flips the script.
It does. And Ackerman argues that accepting this
biological reality allows us to kill off some
seriously outdated educational baggage. Specifically,
the concept of learning styles. Bo, really? Because
I think that might surprise a lot of people.
The idea of being a visual learner or an auditory
learner feels so ingrained in how we talk about
school. It's incredibly ingrained, but it is
fundamentally just a new form of essentialism
in disguise. Wait, how is a learning style essentialist?
Isn't acknowledging that someone learns visually
a way of honoring variation? It seems like it
on the surface, but look at the mechanism. When
we label a student a visual learner, we are just
creating a new slightly smaller box to trap them
in. We're saying your absolute core essence is
visual therefore if you fail an auditory lesson
it's because your essence was violated. It's
still an attempt to find a clean perfect category
to explain a messy human brain. So we're just
making more tiny cookie cutters. Exactly. But
human cognition is highly variable and deeply
context dependent. You might process geometry
highly visually, but you might process poetry
auditorily and physics through kinetic movement.
When we accept true natural variation, the rigid
boxes of learning styles and their shadow learning
preferences, they just become entirely unnecessary.
But this sounds like a terrifying prospect for
a teacher on the ground. I mean, if I'm teaching
a lesson and it completely bombs and I can't
rely on the crutch of saying, well, the kids
are visual learners and I taught it auditorily,
how do I explain the failure? That brings us
down to the micro level of how a classroom actually
operates. Ackerman provides a fantastic example.
of a teacher delivering a lesson on the quadratic
equation. Ah, a rite of passage for every high
schooler. Exactly. So imagine a teacher who has
a highly polished, meticulously designed lesson
for teaching the quadratic equation. They've
used it for five years. It has always, quote
unquote, worked. OK, the golden lesson plan.
Right. But then, on one specific Tuesday morning
with a specific group of students, it just catastrophically
fails. Just totally bombs. Under an essentialist
mindset, This is a crisis of essence. The standard
wasn't met. So the teacher will likely blame
the students for not paying attention, or blame
themselves for a corrupted delivery, or try to
diagnose the students with incompatible learning
styles. They're looking for the one single broken
variable. Right. But if we view that classroom
through the biological lens of variation, the
failure of that lesson makes prefix sense. It
didn't fail because of a corrupted essence. Why
did it fail? It failed because a classroom is
an eco - system. And that ecosystem experienced
an infinite variety of interacting variables
that morning. Walk us through what those variables
actually look like in real time. Because it's
not just the kids were tired. Oh, it's everything.
It's the teacher's specific choices that day.
Maybe they only slept four hours and subconsciously
rushed a critical transition. It's the students'
attention levels, which are fluctuating second
by second based on their own biology. Maybe three
kids skipped breakfast and their blood sugar
is crashing. Right. Totally out of the teacher's
control. Exactly. It's the social interactions
in the room. Maybe two students just broke up
and the silent tension is distracting the whole
row. It's environmental details like the room
being three degrees too hot or a lawnmower running
right outside the window during the most crucial
part of the equation. It's the weather metaphor
all over again. You can't blame a hurricane on
just the humidity. Exactly. It's the interaction
of all these microscopic elements together that
is entirely sufficient to explain the outcome.
It isn't one broken essential part. It is the
natural variation of a complex biological system
constantly reacting to itself. Here's where it
gets really interesting though. You're telling
me that learning at its absolute core is inherently
random, blurry, and highly unpredictable. That's
the reality of it. I hear that and I completely
agree biologically, but systematically. That
sounds like an absolute nightmare for a school
administrator. You can't put random ecosystem
variables on an Excel spreadsheet to justify
a budget. This raises an important question,
and it's the massive friction point Ackerman
highlights. Validating this natural variation
is incredibly difficult for our modern systems
to digest. I can imagine. It is a hard, uncomfortable
truth. Accepting variety means fully accepting
that randomness and blurriness inherently dictate
outcomes. Administrators, parents, politicians,
taxpayers, they desperately do not want to hear
that. They want the factory model. They want
the 19th century certainty. They want an industrial
pipeline where input A always identically equals
output B. They want to know that if they pay
a specific amount in property taxes, the school
will produce a guaranteed standardized amount
of learning perfectly captured in an 85%. The
messy, beautiful, unpredictable reality of biological
variation just destroys that entire comfort zone.
Because it's so much easier to point to that
red 85 on a piece of paper and say, there, that
is the truth. That is the essence of this child
intellect. It's comforting. Right. Acknowledging
that the 85 % is actually just the blurry temporary
result of a thousand tiny interacting variables
from the curriculum design down to the lawnmower
outside the window. That's terrifying. It means
we have significantly less control than we thought
we did. It does mean giving up the illusion of
control. But think about how incredibly liberating
that is for the student and the teacher. Oh,
absolutely. When we stop trying to force humans
into an artificial, essentialist mold that literally
fits nobody just like those Air Force cockpits,
we can actually start engaging with the reality
of who they are and how they learn. We stop treating
deviations as degradations and start seeing them
as the natural engine of growth. We've covered
some serious philosophical ground today, so let's
quickly retrace our steps for everyone listening.
We started thousands of years ago with Plato
and this human obsession with finding the perfect
essence of things. The perfect blueprint. Right.
We saw how that exact philosophy birthed the
rigid 19th century grading system that treats
any deviation from the standard as a failure.
Then, we learned from Todd Rose that designing
for this perfect average essence actually means
designing for absolutely nobody. A literal zero
percent fit. Yeah. Then, we looked to evolutionary
biology and Stephen Jay Gould to realize that
variation isn't a mistake. It's the fundamental
rule of reality. And finally, we brought that
blurry ecosystem -level reality back into the
classroom, realizing that unpredictability in
learning isn't a bug in the system. It's a feature.
It's a feature of the natural world. When you
really absorb it, it is a complete reversal in
how we view success, failure, and human potential.
It forces us to respect the complexity of the
people in front of us rather than judging them
against a ghost. It really does. So I want to
leave you with a final thought to mull over today,
one that extends far beyond the walls of a classroom.
Take a look at your own daily life. Where else
are you holding yourself for the people around
you to an artificial essentialist standard? That's
a great point. Whether it's the perfect essence
of an employee at work, the idealized essence
of a partner in your relationship, or even the
flawless version of your own personal goals,
are you judging your messy reality against a
perfect imaginary shadow? Probably. We all do.
We really do. And what would happen if you stopped
demanding that impossible perfection and started
embracing the natural, unpredictable, blurry
reality of variation instead? That is a question
that could change a lot of lives. Thank you for
joining us on this deep dive. As always, there
is a whole lot more to learn when we start questioning
the systems we just take for granted. Catch you
next time.