Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [147]
Eventually, kids grow up and learn the truth about sex and death and chocolate milk. In the interim, though, they live in a world rich with wrongness. I choose the adjective “rich” deliberately. To be sure, childhood errors, like errors more generally, can sometimes be humiliating or traumatizing. Most of us have some early memories of excruciating mistakes (multiple people told me they could still recall their embarrassment at grabbing onto a parent for comfort in a crowded place, only to look up and realize that the “parent” was a stranger), and some children are routinely chided for being wrong. (Chided, or worse: to be “corrected” can mean, among other things, to be subjected to corporal punishment.)
On the whole, though, being wrong when we’re very young is less a series of isolated incidents (as we regard it in adulthood) than a constant process—inextricable from learning, inextricable from growing up. Forming theories about the world, testing them, and figuring out where they went wrong is the very stuff of childhood. In fact it is, literally, child’s play. Scientists, parents, and educators all agree that kids play to figure out the workings of the world. What looks, to an adult, like a game of blocks or a stint in the sandbox is really one giant, joyful science experiment. Moreover, recent work in developmental psychology suggests that error might play the same role in the lives of children as it does in the lives of scientists—inspiring them to sit up and take notice, generate new theories, and try to understand what is going on around them. Being wrong, in other words, appears to be a key means by which kids learn, and one associated as much as anything with absorption, excitement, novelty, and fun.†
As we get older, the learning curve decelerates, and all these things drop off exponentially. We make fewer mistakes, function more efficiently, and come to share with other adults certain baseline beliefs about the world. But we also spend much less of our time in anything remotely akin to exploration, learning, and play. The pleasurable mistakes of childhood disrupt our lives less often, partly because the world is less novel to us, and partly because we don’t seek out whatever novelty remains—or at least we don’t do so with the same zeal (and the same institutional support: classrooms, afterschool programs, summer camps) as children.
There are exceptions, of course. Long after we have left behind the error-rich kingdom of childhood, we find ways to put ourselves in the path of wrongness in order to grow and change. Take the example of travel. Like children, travelers explore the unknown—where, also like children, they routinely make linguistic errors, violate social codes, and get lost, literally and otherwise. This is why every traveler has his or her share of stories about being egregiously wrong: the farther afield you venture, the more you set yourself up for confusion, surprise, and the violation of your beliefs. If we could journey far enough—if, say, we could visit a distant planet subject to different physical constraints and populated by alien life forms—one assumes that we would be even more ignorant, wonderstruck, and error-prone than kids.
The desire to experience this kind of wrongness is seldom the explicit reason people engage in recreational travel, and it’s certainly not the only reason. (We also set out to visit friends, brush up on our Portuguese, see the Great Barrier Reef.) But it is often the implicit one. Sometimes, we want to be the toddler in Times Square. We travel to feel like a kid again: because we hope to experience the world as new, and because we believe the best way to learn about it is to play in it. In traveling (as in other kinds of adventures that we’ll encounter in the last chapter), we embrace the possibility of being wrong not out of necessity, but because