The latest research claims that “learning styles” are a myth but that reading aloud to one another is a good thing. I have to wonder sometimes if educational researchers ever consider their own biases?

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We were punished in grade school for reading aloud or even moving our lips as we read, but even today I prefer to hear each word I read in my head. I was an old woman when I noticed that I move my lips and say the numbers aloud while doing math—whatever the researchers might currently claim about “learning styles” and “learning preferences,” I think I was better at math because I put my entire body into the effort.

There is a huge debate about pre-Clovis sites in the so-called “new world.” Recent finds on the east coast seem to support older finds in Chile and elsewhere that people have been on this side of the world far longer than scientists insisted.

The biases in the scientific community are entrenched.

In archeology, for example, men have long assumed that culture has always been paternalistic. As a student in the 70s, I listened to a physical anthropologist describe prehistoric culture as men going out hunting and women at home in the caves taking care of the children. I raised my hand and suggested that he could not possibly know how that division of labor existed. He countered that he only had to look at “primitive cultures today.” I countered that he was assuming that cultures had remained stable over fifty thousand years? [And that word “primitive” was already known as a pejorative.]

Further, evidence from European and north African cave paintings and such ancient cave paintings elsewhere was already putting the lie to that assumption that hunting was a males-only activity. In both Architecture and Art History classes I had seen evidence that countered that familiar narrative. Today, there is a great deal more, such as studies of tartar revealing the some ancient peoples may have preferred fish to red meat and the likelihood that handprints on cave walls were mostly female. A famous Viking “warrior” was long assumed (because of course) to be male is now known to be female. Labeling it initially as a “warrior” meant it had to be male and no one bothered to confirm that. We should know better. Yet, an archeologist offers the for-instance designed to point out how genetic variability can be influenced by a single event: “Let’s suppose you have a successful population colonizing an area, and then one day, 15 males go out and get eaten by a short-faced bear.” I understand his point, but this sort of scenario is too often presented as a norm and is damaging to a science that requires a more open-minded view willing to let go of assumptions based on current human culture and preferences. It is likely that in a Gatherer-Hunter culture, everyone did everything. In fact, there is considerable evidence of that.

Instead, scientists sometimes focus on proving the obvious.

I recall learning in Psychology classes that pain is stressful—duh! They needed to prove that? Apparently they did. Okay, so what else do we think we know? It is good to prove the obvious, but too often our proofs are themselves entrenched in bias. The long history of medical experimentation only on white males unless the experiment was cruel, in which case on Black men…

Researchers finally admitted that women suffering a heart attack presented with different symptoms than men and that because those symptoms were not taught might be why women were more likely to die from undiagnosed heart attacks? A huge whoops! We need to make physicians and others aware of the symptoms specific to slightly more than half the population, right? And after this was publicized, my bi-yearly Red Cross training reflected this insight? No, when the instructor was asked during that session about the symptoms of a woman having a heart attack, he admitted they were different but he couldn’t recall what those symptoms were. He did go into lurid detail about cutting a bra off a woman in order to give CPR. The men in the training all laughed.

Over and over again, we find that our prejudices get in the way of objectivity. No where is this more apparent than among male scientists assuming they know best.

So back to learning styles (visual, verbal, etc.). The once-new notion of specific learning styles made immediate sense to me decades ago. New research insists those learning styles are mere “preferences.” Whatever. When I was teaching, I assumed that whether preference, habitual, or actual need, I would present my lessons and assignments in every manner both practical and useful. That meant I often I talked them through the purpose, drew diagrams, offered printed instructions, told a story, and reviewed models of the assignment. I moved around the classroom as I told stories, indicating changes of scene. My goal was to impart thinking, reading, and writing skills, and I did that in every way I could. Did girls and boys in my room behave differently. Yes. The girls had often been trained to be more polite; the boys were more likely to assume they were right. Learned behavior or innate? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. I tried my best for all of them as individuals.

I recall attending a party with a colleague who had brought his newborn twins. The girl had been a couple of pounds heavier at birth and was noticeably larger than her brother. Yet the boy was bounced about by the men at the party. The girl was handled gently by the women. Indoctrination begins early. Assumptions impact our behavior, expectations, and demands. They push our lives in directions that might be different had our experience been different.

Tomorrow some educational researcher will shift the known world yet again. As one example: Perhaps noting that the reason girls seem to present less often with autism has less to do with how their brains work than with what is expected and even demanded from girls as opposed to boys. We are too often blind to what we take for granted.

Our assumptions crowd out objectivity.