Announcing Maailmantutkija

I have a lot to say about pedagogy, and about the various ways that I think the school system in particular falls vastly short of my vision of what good education looks like.

I’ve occassionally shared those opinions with my friends, but I noticed two problems. First: I couldn’t communicate to others what I had in mind, in a way that they could truly grasp it. Second: it felt unvirtuous to just criticize the current system without actually demonstrating how one could do better. And so I went ahead and materialized my vision.

This is the story of the Maailmantutkija project.

I focus less on what it is, at the content level – for that, simply see the project itself. Instead, I’ll tell you about the deeper visions that the project is a manifestation of, what the project is aiming to achieve and how it was created.

First off: “Maailmantutkija” is a compound neologism of “maailma”, world, and “tutkija”, explorer / researcher / scientist. There’s a way of orienting to the world with active curiosity and desire to explore and understand it. A central aim of the book is to cultivate this way of being, by providing a parent the tools to do so.

To showcase how this really is a non-standard idea, rather than just a platitude, consider how teaching and learning typically happens in the current schooling system. The teacher has content – skills, concepts, knowledge – that they teach to the children. This usually happens through the teacher first giving explanations of the topic at hand, after which the children practice the matter themselves.

For example: The teacher gives explanations of a particular time in history, after which the children answer questions to test whether they have internalized it. The teacher explains the distinction between nouns, verbs and adjectives, and the children are tasked with categorizing words assigned to them. The teacher explains how to calculate the volume of a cone, and the children practice applying this knowledge to various problems.

But I ask: Where’s the mystery? Where’s the puzzle, the uncertainty, the curiosity?

I was never asked what I thought the world was like 10, 100 or 1000 years ago before the answer was spoiled to me in my history classes. I was never asked what I think would be a natural way to categorize words before I was taught of word classes. I was never asked what I would guess the volume of a cone to be before I was told the formula. The movie was spoiled at the first scene.

It would have been so easy to fix it. The first history class could have consisted of the following task: “Here are 50 events spanning the human history. Arrange them in chronological order. Don’t worry, you aren’t supposed to know it all already, just try your best and have fun guessing.”

A grammar class could have consisted of the task: “Here are 50 words. How would you categorize them?” and later on a hint: “Can you think of categorizations that don’t depend on how the word is written, but rather are based on what it means? So that even people speaking different languages would have the same categorization.”

A math class could have started with a demonstration where the teacher shows off a cone and asks: “Everyone, write down what you think the volume of this cone is.” And: “If you want me to do any measurements about this cone I can do with a ruler, say so and I will do them.” And “Okay, the height is 30 cm and the bottom side length is 10 cm. If you want to revise your answer, this is your final opportunity, because I’m going to measure the volume now.”

This is a cornerstone of my philosophy of pedagogy. Don’t spoil the children! Let them enjoy the mysteries! The fact that this is not common practice in education is, in my view, a massive condemnation of what is generally thought of as education.

I’ve of course heard, many times, arguments for why such an approach would be completely impossible to implement in real life. Leaving aside the committed defenders of the status quo, I think for many reasonable people a sticking point is the lack of a vision of what alternative ways of education would look like. This included myself: I had heard of all the nice-sounding phrases like “student-centered learning enables independent problem-solving and lifelong learning”, many times, and while maybe there are educational experts somewhere out there who could explain what it means, I hadn’t heard anyone actually spell. out. the. details.

But having eventually gotten frustrated enough of the people who were too far in the other direction, essentially saying “I can’t see how education could be better, the current version is as good as it gets”, I thought: fine, I’ll show you.

This is one of the things that Maailmantutkija is: hundreds of activities on diverse topics demonstrating how you can make a child think about things independently through games, questions, predictions, conversations, experiments, challenges and stories.

The topics are obviously not confined to typical school subjects. There is a chapter on our place in the universe, one of the grand mysteries. This is something I’m particularly sad about being spoiled to children at a very young age – not even explicitly, but in the passing with little fanfare, as if it’s an unimportant detail – so that they grow up believing that they have always known about it. Thus “How did our world come to be?” no longer looks like a fundamental question; it’s just a silly rhetorical question.

There is a chapter on money and trade. While children find money and various treats exciting, they hardly stop to think how the global economy works to ensure the local grocery store has fresh blueberries for sale round the year. We could all benefit from wondering and appreciating this more, and this is best started at a young age.

And so it goes. The book looks at many of the things we accept as familiar with fresh eyes, like a child encountering it for the first time. Indeed, sometimes a refreshment of the very basics is precisely what one needs. The fact that by thinking about something for longer one can obtain better results, a seemingly obvious fact of psychology, often goes underappreciated. Or, trying to explain to a child just why coordinating among 50 or 5000 people is much harder than among 2 or 5 people reveals a lot about the fundamental principles underpinning many facets of the human civilization.

An inevitable consequence of the exercise is seeing ways in which things we accept as familiar and normal are completely nonsensical. An example from the section on incentives: I was trying to think of a textbook example of a situation with malign incentives. I came up with a story of how teachers would be given pay raises based on how good test results their students had, but those same teachers were the ones designing and grading the tests.

Then I realized that this is exactly what we see in reality in universities, who receive funding based on how many students they graduate and who are in control of their course contents, exam questions and grading of student answers. And of course it’s generally common practice that the teacher is also the one who grades the students’ answers, and so we are poor on data on how well students are actually learning. A critical piece of civilization’s infrastructure, something we spend double-digit percentages of our resources on, has the sort of flaws that are so obvious you would use them to illustrate to a five-year-old what to not do.

Usually when I bring up things like this, half of the people shrug and say “yeah, could be better”, and seemingly don’t think this is an important fact about our society or that this has any implications for anything. The other half gets defensive and says that I’m obviously exaggerating and wrong and explain how This Is Fine, Actually. These are some of the moments I feel most gaslit by the society I live in.

So, if there’s one cornerstone of Maailmantutkija that still ought to be mentioned, it’s this: The world can be understood. You can explore, reason and figure things out. You can learn things by other means than just an adult telling them to you. You can assess what you think is true and what is not. Things are true if they correspond to reality, if they match what you observe, not just because a text or an adult authoritatively says so.

This is a deeply non-obvious attitude. There is a lens from which the scientific revolution was a cultural one, about human culture leaning more towards this perspective, that by carefully studying the world we can understand it. It’s remarkable how long it took for the revolution to start, and just how rare this attitude is still now, centuries after the age of enlightenment. Transmitting such a worldview across a vast cultural gap, within the contents of a single book, is an extraordinary and possibly unsurmountable challenge.

At times I indeed felt discouraged. When producing the book, I had a vague vision of what it should look like, but materializing it was often stumpingly difficult. I would come up with ideas, and my inner critic would reject, reject, reject, for them not being good enough. It is vastly easier to judge and say “this doesn’t meet the bar” than to come up with something that does. And so, most of the time producing the book was spent in a state of being frustrated at my inability to produce satisfactory work.

Countless winter nights ago
A woman shivered in the cold
Cursed the skies, and wondered why
The gods invented pain

I knew that this is a fundamental property of reality, not just a fact about me. Generation is harder than verification, creation is harder than critique. And I knew what to do: just keep firing more shots, think about why they fall short, repeat until success. So I did, with painstaking effort and often frustration.

Aching angry flesh and bone
Bitterly she struck the stone
Till she saw the sudden spark
Of light, and golden flame

The unlit road was long, but the vision was starting to materialize. I shared my thoughts, ideas and drafts with people I knew. And some said that such books exist already, questioned my expertise, questioned my authority, thought that we are good without, didn’t see the point, mocked me for being a try-hard.

She showed the others, but they told her
She was not fit to control
The primal forces that the gods
Had cloaked in mystery

I had heard of the stories of world-renowned authors being critcised in their early days, and understood what this meant for the value of unthoughtful feedback. I compared the criticism I was given with what my inner critic produced, and had no doubt which was better. I understood that they did not properly grasp what I was envisioning. So while I was discouraged, I continued.

But she would not be satisfied
And though she trembled, she defied them
Took her torch and raised it high
Set afire history

I laid the ground work, hastily writing what I had in mind, unpolished sketches, bare minimals, materializing my vision, to have something that stood on its own…

Ages long forgotten now
We built the wheel and then the plough
Tilled the earth and proved our worth
Against the drought and snow

…until all of the obvious ideas were on paper, and came the time to think for real, about something I hadn’t seen before, something that pushed ahead of everything I had ever seen before. Sorting historical events. Coordination. The epistemic disagreement game. Right on the first try challenges. Misleading stories. After long the first draft was completed.

Soon we had the time to fathom
Mountain peaks and tiny atoms
Beating hearts electric sparks
So much more to know

There was little fanfare. I thought the draft was terrible in many ways. There were places where I failed my pedagogical principles. Activities that wouldn’t work in real life. Focusing on irrelevancies. Nonsense. I put it off.

The universe may seem unfair
The laws of nature may not care
The storms and quakes, our own mistakes
They nearly doused our flame

Eventually I got back to it. I thought more. Rejected, revised, rewrote. Designed a website. Improved instructions. Improved examples. Wrote more misleading stories. Misleading corrections to stories. Balance scale puzzles. Physics experiments for toddlers. Probability theory for toddlers. Psychological experiments. Ensuring that the book and web versions are in sync. Designing the web applications to work and look right. Trying out the activities myself to verify they make sense. Designed and created a book cover. Dozens of hours of unpleasant, tedious editing. Hundreds and hundreds of corrections. A hundred thousand lines of code.

Published the website.

All this work during the evenings and weekends to eventually turn the work into publishable form, to achieve what the point was all along: that enthusiastic parents have an easier time providing their children better education.

But all these trials we’ve endured
The lessons learned, diseases cured
Against our herculean task
We’ve risen to proclaim:

Maailmantutkija is a book project by Olli Järviniemi. It’s designed to cultivate curiosity, truth-seeking, scientific outlook, independent thinking and cognitive reflection. It was written in the convinction that education can be drastically improved, that the spark of childlike wonder need not flame out, and that tomorrow can be brighter than today.

Tomorrow can be brighter than today
Although the night is cold
The stars may seem so very far away
But courage, hope and reason burn
In every mind, each lesson learned
Shining light to guide our way
Make tomorrow brighter than today