Mercurial > dylan

     1 #+title: Science Minus Science 

     2 #+author: Dylan Holmes

     3 #+email: ocsenave@gmail.com

     4 #+description: What's wrong with our current Science Education?

     5 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org

     6 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org

     7 

     8 

     9 From what I've seen, today's science classrooms are remarkably

    10 unscientific. Someone has decided that it is less important to teach

    11 the empirical mindset than to impart our accumulated scientific

    12 knowledge. Thus, because the field is so vast nowadays, teachers are

    13 obliged to be frugal with the facts: they must prune tangential

    14 subjects and pare whatever's left, watering down complicated results

    15 into simplified half-truths. Needs must when the devil drives, of

    16 course--but what is the end result?

    17 

    18 In modern science classrooms, we force-feed students a deluge of

    19 unfamiliar scientific dogma which they must swallow in time to

    20 regurgitate onto an exam. To accomplish this daunting task, they

    21 cannot possibly stop to consider various alternatives which scientists

    22 have methodically eliminated over the course of centuries; instead,

    23 they must simply trust that science has done what it purports to have

    24 done--or, faster, simply stamp out their conjectural, critical

    25 instincts.

    26 

    27 By the end of such a course, students might be able to recite the

    28 tenets of our current scientific creed and might employ those tenets

    29 when answering carefully formulated questions. But even if, by chance,

    30 our students get their facts straight, they will have acquired at most

    31 only our pre-processed truths, and nothing of the empirical machinery

    32 that produced them. In my opinion, such a lackluster result demands

    33 that we re-evaluate our priorities. Surely the shibboleth of the

    34 scientist is not his ability to recount the bleeding-edge depiction of

    35 reality--after all, theories are transient and revolutions expected--but

    36 rather his pervasive inquiries about the world and his methodical,

    37 empirical approach to answering them? Indeed, don't we recognize the

    38 scientist by his lack of allegiance to the status quo, by the way he

    39 scrutinizes even his own theories with utmost irreverence?

    40 

    41 In valuing data absorption over methodical reason, we give our

    42 students a fragmentary and moreover inexplicable impression of

    43 reality. We must ask ourselves: how much of science is left in that?

    44
author	Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date	Fri, 28 Oct 2011 04:56:15 -0700
parents	b4de894a1e2e
children	3ff40c869d1a