I don’t think students tend to be particularly shortchanged with respect to that sort of lesson by the current system though. Most students are aware of who the top students are, and that the top students are more reliable in their areas of expertise than the lesser ones.
Should they defer to the top students in matters outside of what they know to be those students’ areas of expertise? Not necessarily; a lot of smart people are not particularly good at getting right answers outside their areas of expertise. For a not-so-smart person, simply trusting that a smarter person knows what they’re talking about on any given subject, even when they don’t know that person to be an expert on the subject, is not a very trustworthy heuristic.
Trusting people who’re more expert than you in a particular field over your own judgment in that field is something that most students already learn. Being unable to assess who’s more expert in domains in which they’re not well trained is natural and probably unavoidable, and students can’t be trained to be expert in everything.
I don’t think students tend to be particularly shortchanged with respect to that sort of lesson by the current system though. Most students are aware of who the top students are, and that the top students are more reliable in their areas of expertise than the lesser ones.
Should they defer to the top students in matters outside of what they know to be those students’ areas of expertise? Not necessarily; a lot of smart people are not particularly good at getting right answers outside their areas of expertise. For a not-so-smart person, simply trusting that a smarter person knows what they’re talking about on any given subject, even when they don’t know that person to be an expert on the subject, is not a very trustworthy heuristic.
Trusting people who’re more expert than you in a particular field over your own judgment in that field is something that most students already learn. Being unable to assess who’s more expert in domains in which they’re not well trained is natural and probably unavoidable, and students can’t be trained to be expert in everything.