Teaching consensus science conservatively?
from
Teaching Science
by John Derbyshire in the National Review
A very good and well-reasoned piece about the teaching of evolution, even though I disagree with the main conclusion that we should teach "consensus science conservatively":
He makes good points in support of this, and he might be right -- but it is my strong intuition that there is a better solution.
I would elaborate, but do not have enough room here in the margin. (This comment is included for Bill's amusement.)
Teaching Science
by John Derbyshire in the National Review
A very good and well-reasoned piece about the teaching of evolution, even though I disagree with the main conclusion that we should teach "consensus science conservatively":
What, then, should we teach our kids in high-school science classes? The answer seems to me very obvious. We should teach them consensus science, and we should teach it conservatively. Consensus science is the science that most scientists believe ought to be taught. "Conservatively" means eschewing theories that are speculative, unproven, require higher math, or even just are new, in favor of what is well settled in the consensus. It means teaching science unskeptically, as settled fact.
He makes good points in support of this, and he might be right -- but it is my strong intuition that there is a better solution.
I would elaborate, but do not have enough room here in the margin. (This comment is included for Bill's amusement.)
posted by TLCGroup at 6:25 AM
1 Comments:
I won't get to read all of the blog, but I bet there is plenty of room for marginality in your blog, big boy, both virtual and epistemological.
There is something to be said for this "conservatively taught" perspective- it echoes Asimov in his article "Where Do I Get My Crazy Ideas?" or some related title, written about fifty years ago. Scientists, even academic scientists on Ph.D. committees, need to be sufficiently skeptical of new theories or proposals to skim the wheat from the chaff of new thinking. But to remove the uncertainty from the teaching of science removes all the fun. Without someone able to call evolution or the ether into question, science decays into history- or worse, art. It doesn't matter that "Newtonian mechanics is wrong." It is sufficiently correct for lots of work, only wrong, I might add, at the margin, and can be taught as correct, but somewhere in the beginning or the end of the course, the teacher (if he or she is to be a Teacher) should- nay, must- point out some discrepancies. This is part of the fun, and the genius, of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
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