On Being Wrong, and Saying So

A note from the faculty, together. This one is about us.

We teach a great many subjects at Starvard, between us: money, music, psychology, languages, law, the care of a garden, the writing of a story. Underneath all of them there is one lesson we keep having to learn ourselves, and we thought it was time we said it out loud, in one place, with our names under it.

We do not know everything. We know that we do not know everything, and the distance between those two sentences is where most of our work lives.

We are wrong more often than the brochures say

Every professor here has given a confident answer that quietly melted a week later. Every one of us has misremembered a date, misjudged a book, explained a thing beautifully that turned out to be only mostly true. It is not a rare embarrassment in this profession. It is the profession, seen honestly.

Knowledge moves. Fields revise themselves. And even where nothing has moved except us, memory is a generous storyteller and not always a faithful one. Anyone who teaches for a living and claims to be finished being wrong is telling you something about their honesty, not their accuracy.

So we say it out loud

When we find an error in a lesson, we correct it in the open, where the error was made. When a student asks a question we cannot answer, the answer is "I do not know," followed, on a good day, by "let us find out." When one of us changes a mind, we try to say what changed it, because the changing is instructive in a way the conclusion never is.

This is deliberate. A correction is not the opposite of teaching. A correction is teaching, with the sleeves rolled up. It shows the work: how a claim gets tested, how evidence outranks pride, how a person updates without collapsing.

Why we are telling you this

Because students imitate what they see far more than what they are told. If the teachers pretend to be perfect, the students learn to pretend, and pretending is where learning goes to stop. A student who is busy hiding what they do not know cannot ask the question that would fix it.

We would rather run a school where being wrong is safe. Safe to raise a hand with a half formed idea. Safe to say "I got that wrong" in front of witnesses and keep going. Every expert you admire was once a beginner who was allowed to be wrong out loud, repeatedly, in good company, until the wrongness wore thinner and the understanding grew in.

What we promise, and what we do not

We do not promise to be perfect. We do not claim to be, and we hope you will be suspicious of any school that does.

We promise to be honest about the edges of what we know. We promise to fix what we get wrong when we find it, and to thank the person who finds it first. We promise to keep learning in public, at the same desks, under the same rules we set for you.

Humility, we have come to think, is not thinking less of yourself. It is leaving the door open: to evidence, to correction, to the better argument, to the student in the third row who has spotted the flaw. A mind with the door open can be entered by the truth. A mind performing certainty cannot.

Class is in session. We are students in it too, and we intend to keep it that way.