1.1 --- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
     1.2 +++ b/org/science.org	Fri Oct 28 00:03:05 2011 -0700
     1.3 @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
     1.4 +#+title: Science Minus Science 
     1.5 +#+author: Dylan Holmes
     1.6 +#+email: ocsenave@gmail.com
     1.7 +#+description: What's wrong with our current Science Education?
     1.8 +#+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
     1.9 +#+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
    1.10 +
    1.11 +
    1.12 +From what I've seen, today's science classrooms are remarkably
    1.13 +unscientific. Someone has decided that it is less important to teach
    1.14 +the empirical mindset than to impart our accumulated scientific
    1.15 +knowledge. Thus, because the field is so vast nowadays, teachers are
    1.16 +obliged to be frugal with the facts: they must prune tangential
    1.17 +subjects and pare whatever's left, watering down complicated results
    1.18 +into simplified half-truths. Needs must when the devil drives, of
    1.19 +course--but what is the end result?
    1.20 +
    1.21 +In modern science classrooms, we force-feed students a deluge of
    1.22 +unfamiliar scientific dogma which they must swallow in time to
    1.23 +regurgitate onto an exam. To accomplish this daunting task, they
    1.24 +cannot possibly stop to consider various alternatives which scientists
    1.25 +have methodically eliminated over the course of centuries; instead,
    1.26 +they must simply trust that science has done what it purports to have
    1.27 +done--or, faster, simply stamp out their conjectural, critical
    1.28 +instincts.
    1.29 +
    1.30 +By the end of such a course, students might be able to recite the
    1.31 +tenets of our current scientific creed and might employ those tenets
    1.32 +when answering carefully formulated questions. But even if, by chance,
    1.33 +our students get their facts straight, they will have acquired at most
    1.34 +only our pre-processed truths, and nothing of the empirical machinery
    1.35 +that produced them. In my opinion, such a lackluster result demands
    1.36 +that we re-evaluate our priorities. Surely the shibboleth of the
    1.37 +scientist is not his ability to recount the bleeding-edge depiction of
    1.38 +reality--after all, theories are transient and revolutions expected--but
    1.39 +rather his pervasive inquiries about the world and his methodical,
    1.40 +empirical approach to answering them? Indeed, don't we recognize the
    1.41 +scientist by his lack of allegiance to the status quo, by the way he
    1.42 +scrutinizes even his own theories with utmost irreverence?
    1.43 +
    1.44 +In valuing data absorption over methodical reason, we give our
    1.45 +students a fragmentary and moreover inexplicable impression of
    1.46 +reality. We must ask ourselves: how much of science is left in that?
    1.47 +