Educational obscurity

We need to teach kids to gamble. 

I know, but hear me out first. I don't know about you, but I was never very interested in learning about probability and statistics in maths. For my first 10 or so years of schooling, those topics basically involved the same old useless and unrealistic examples over and over again every year. Things like 'what's the chance of randomly taking a blue marble out of a bag...' or 'what is the mean test score in this class of 20 students'. It was not until I got to around combinatorics before things started getting interesting. Now don't get me wrong, I liked all the other aspects of maths, but this was just typically very poorly taught. Many years later, I now see that nothing has really changed and it is still just as boring as ever. 

I propose that we should teach (at least some aspects of) probability and statistics using gambling in a responsible way, such that all of the content is still covered but with a much stronger appeal and connection to real world issues. In the process of learning maths, there are also lots of valuable life lessons to be learnt through gambling. I don't just mean how the house always wins, which is easily shown through even the most basic calculations of the odds, but also things like the Monte Carlo fallacy, sunk cost fallacy, gambling addiction and the gambling industry in general. Even just how card counting or cheating influences the rules and history of games is more interesting than flipping yet another flipping coin. 

The most obvious complaint I can imagine about this idea is that we would be teaching and encouraging more gambling. Firstly, the point of teaching about this is to encourage the exact opposite, because students should learn that gambling is a quick way to lose money. If any reasonable person still decides to gamble after learning about the expected values, then either they are going for a different reason or they think they have some other strategy to win. Either way, it then becomes an informed and intentional choice, so they should be fully aware of the risks and take full responsibility for whatever the outcome is. 

The same concepts apply to other 'taboo' areas that schools hate to talk about. For instance, sex education. For decades, many schools have defaulted to abstinence-only or “don’t ask, don’t tell” approaches, which basically boil down to pretending that kids won’t know about sex if we never mention it, so they won't do it. This is still the strategy used in many places around the world today. There is an abundance of research that shows avoidance doesn’t prevent teenagers from being sexually active. What it does do is make them less prepared when it inevitably happens. Students who receive abstinence-only education are less likely to use contraception, more likely to experience unplanned pregnancies, and more likely to contract STIs compared to their peers who receive comprehensive, honest instruction. 

This is the educational equivalent of the strategy in cyber security called security by obscurity, which is equally well researched and just as bad of an idea. It involves hiding a computer’s vulnerabilities rather than fixing them, and hoping no one ever notices them. Put it another way, this is equivalent to hoping your home is secure as long as no one discovers your spare key under the front door mat, which works very well... until it doesn't.

Similarly, if the subjects of porn, drugs, tobacco and alcohol are left out of the classroom, schools leave kids to pick up their “education” from advertising, peers, or the internet. We all know how those sources tend to frame the story. Media will happily sell the glamour of drinking or the thrill of partying, but it never explains the biology of liver damage, the psychology of addiction, or the way the industry itself profits off dependency. A senior Health class that explains how alcohol affects reaction time is good, but a junior general Science class that tackles the chemical and biological functions of substances (eg. how nicotine hijacks acetylcholine receptors) is more timely and targets what students are less likely to already know. Diving into the fact that a person's first time experiencing strong opioids will be the one and only peak of their entire life doesn’t encourage use, it equips students with the knowledge to recognise the risks.

Mental health is another area where silence backfires. Many schools avoid talking openly about depression, anxiety, or suicide because they fear “putting ideas in students’ heads.” But the reality is that these issues are already present in every classroom. Ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear, it just isolates the students who are struggling and makes it harder for everyone else to recognise the warning signs. Honest, age-appropriate conversations about mental health are not easy, but at least removing the stigma of talking about it is a good start. If anything, the lack of discussion feels less like protecting the students and more like teachers just avoiding responsibility for the problems. It may feel safe for adults in charge, but in reality it leaves students exposed.

Even religion often falls into this category of avoidance. Schools worry that discussing it will create division, so they default to silence or surface-level mentions. Yet students inevitably encounter religious diversity in their communities, the news, or global conflicts. By refusing to engage, students miss the opportunity to practice their critical thinking skills, empathy, and respect for difference in a safe environment. The result is not neutrality, but further segregation fuelled by ignorance.

Whether it’s gambling, sex, drugs, alcohol, mental health, or religion, the pattern is the same. It is security through obscurity applied to education. Pretending the threats don’t exist doesn’t protect students, it just makes them easier targets for misinformation and manipulation. We need more transparency and mature conversations about each topic to equip students with the tools to navigate reality rather than hiding reality from them.