Educational howl

[mrissa]

So. I'm reading Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. Like her previous book, The Coming Plague, it's a good book: mostly well-written, fascinating information, important topics. Also like The Coming Plague, it makes me want to hide under the desk and never come out. So I'm cutting it with short, light (or, okay, light-ish) mystery novels: first John D. MacDonald's Dress Her In Indigo and now Rex Stout's Some Buried Caesar. This is all for the best for my sanity.

But a line in Betrayal of Trust just hit me. Garrett is talking about health procedures in the Soviet Union -- long-standing effects of totalitarianism including Lysenkoism, and how they've affected the post-Soviet states. She quotes an expert on public health in the region as saying, "The system here is still find the scapegoat and punish them. The focus is always to get the bad guy and throw him in the slammer....So infection control is a bunch of rules, it's not a thought process." (Emphasis mine.)

And that, right there, is the essence of what is wrong with how we teach science in this country. Even the classes that are teaching the scientific method are often teaching "The Six [Four, Eight, who knows?] Steps Of The Scientific Method, To Be Regurgitated On A Test." It is of course a bad thing to teach bad science as dogma. But I can't figure out yet whether it's better or worse to teach good science as dogma. If you teach kids that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the life on earth three weeks ago, okay, that's not so good. But if you teach them that Evolution Created It ("Question 1: What created life? Answer: Evolution") and we know because of Evidence Like Dinosaurs, Dammit, Stop Bugging Me, Kid, I'm not sure that's a step up.

We're teaching Lysenkoism, but with the best answers we can currently find put in place of the ones we know are false. Can I say how depressing I find that?

(Well -- except in those places where the false ones still hold sway, of course. One of you -- an educated and literate person -- had been taught actual Lamarckian theory of inheritance under the name of "Darwinist evolution." In a public school in the United States. It was not her fault, and she had correctly reasoned out the problems with Lamarckian inheritance. But realizing she was taught that in the first place made me want to tear my hair and howl at the moon.)

What's worse, I think we're teaching Lysenkoism across the board -- all knowledge as ideology and rule rather than skill set and approach. You go to gym class because Getting Exercise Is A Good Thing, rather than to learn a skill set in different types of exercise, which muscle groups can be affected, ways they help your body, ways to avoid injury, types of exercise you can still do with various kinds of injury...anything, in short, that might be educational. In the school district where I grew up, someone had decided that we should be taught study skills. And we were by God Taught Study Skills: one teacher taught us that we had to take notes in cursive because it was faster, and if it wasn't faster, it was just because we hadn't done it enough. Another taught us that all note-taking had to take the form of a hierarchical outline. No matter what. Learning French verbs? Time for a hierarchical outline. Calculus derivation of basic laws of mechanics? Hierarchical outline. Because it is The Right Way For Students To Take Notes. Because there is a one true way of note-taking, because there has to be, or how else can we test on this?

Is it more harmful to teach the wrong stuff or the right stuff in the wrong way? I don't know for sure, but I know how many people are convinced that they're no good at math, because they were taught math as a series of dogmas rather than a set of ways to approach problems, and so if they got as far as calculus, it appeared -- it was presented -- to them as a new, fairly unrelated, and entirely confusing set of dogmas, rather than an extension and an application of the skills they already had. (Or should have had, if they were getting A's and B's in geometry and algebra.) I know that people think grammar is a set of genuflections to be made in deference to some people's faith rather than a means of communicating ideas more clearly.

The more I look at this stuff, the more broken it appears. I think more reading is required. If you think I'm being wrongheaded and have reading to combat that, by all means, please recommend. (Or if you think I'm being rightheaded -- how come no one is ever rightheaded? -- and have reading recommendations to expand and/or bolster my rightheadedness. Or something in the middle. Whatever.)

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I'm convinced that so many people are creationists because of the way that evolution is taught: it is taught as dogma, and if the battle's dogma vs. dogma, the win goes to the one that fits with what your parents believe.

John Holt, in How Children Fail, talks about learning in terms of creating mental models of how the world works, and if learning isn't based on that, then it ends up shallow, decontextualized, incoherent...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Decontextualized. Oh yes, exactly.

And then people take the word "context" and think that you mean everything has to be directly and immediately relevant to the kids' lives at the exact moment, and they either do it or argue against it...sigh.

I think there will be a bit of a catch-22 if we had the data on teaching evolution and the rest of science as dogma vs. as, y'know, science: that some people distrust science because it's been taught to them as just another dogma, one that's less trustworthy than the competing dogmas, but some other people distrust science because it refuses to be a dogma. Because "this is as close to the truth as we can figure right now" is a profoundly different thing than "this is the absolute truth forever and ever." And believing in something means two very different things in those two contexts, and some people don't want slippery, just-for-now answers on anything. For some people, "the best we can do for now" is not even close to good enough.

I can't really do anything about them, though, because "the best we can do for now" is all I've got.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

>I'm convinced that so many people are creationists because of the way that evolution is taught...

Ohhh, the number of times I've had the evolution-in-a-specific-direction conversation.

Ohhh, the number of people who have said, "Evolution is this, and that doesn't make sense!" leaving me to say, "Well, no, it doesn't, in part because no, it's not."

[mkille.livejournal.com]

What I've observed--with all the limitations that go with that--is that professionals generally want to do things the truly right way. Librarians, doctors, teachers, coaches, etc. But they are dependent on institutions to have the forum in which to do it, and institutions are dependent on funding and public goodwill, and funding and public goodwill generally come from some ideological motivation. So, our society doesn't generally fund science classes because thinking scientifically is deemed a good thing, but because our society wants a technically proficient pool of future engineers and programmers and researchers for economic reasons, or because having the Best Scientists makes us the Most Civilized, or whatever. If the professionals don't bend to those sorts of pressures themselves, their administrators make darn sure they do.

The other problem I've observed, of course, is that teachers are only as good as the educational system that produces them. An unfortunately large number of teachers in this country just don't know any better, and when they do try to teach things the right way, they make arguably a worse muddle of it than taking the dogmatic approach. (I wouldn't want to venture a guess on how large "large" is, as a percentage or as an absolute number, but I feel comfortable saying that it's larger than it *should* be).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, I think that teaching something you don't really understand is really prone to becoming the dogmatic approach. That's kind of what happens with The Scientific Method In N Steps: you have people who understand that approach is important, but no one ever taught them much about science themselves, and certainly they've never done it themselves.

Your first point can be gotten around if you can convince people that kids who can think scientifically will make better engineers, programmers, researchers, etc. It even has the benefit of being true, so far as I've been able to tell. So if that was the only or main problem, I'd say we were home free, with some careful work. Alas, but I don't think it is.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I don't think I share your optimism about careful persuasive work actually persuading folks. America doesn't seem to work that way, what with the sticky dogmas and soundbite mentality and and and. I mean, yes, in theory, you're exactly right. In practice, I'm not sure.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I think, though--that may be a symptom of the same thing that's being talked about. No?

Because part of teaching people how to think is teaching people how to argue, and part of teaching people how to think is teaching them how to consider and reconsider their own positions.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Right, but chicken and egg: to get better teaching, one must argue with them, but to be able to argue with them, there must have been better teaching.

I'm sure there's a solution, or rather, many different local solutions. I just don't know offhand what it or they are.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

That fits with Ben's experiences in high school the last couple of years. He was doing some research in physics and he has developed a strong tendency to question, and most of that from the science classes.

Some in odd ways. The emphasis here (and the funding)was more in practical application. He kept getting asking, "what is it good for?" as in does it cure cancer or make money?

What I really liked was how it caused him to question other things too, although it is also fair to say that was pretty destabylizing also.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Studying linguistics did that for people I know. (I'd include me, but I already was the questioning sort). Once common sense is not accepted as anything more than fertile ground for initial hypotheses, the world often just doesn't look the same.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes: kind of the flip side of what I was saying about gym and study skills and what oath_of_feanor is saying about history further down: learning something well can strengthen ability to question and reason even if it isn't a field people usually think of that way. (I think people mostly don't think of linguistics accurately in any direction, much less this one. I gnash my teeth when people write "a natural linguist" when what they mean is "a natural polyglot.")

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

You and I grew up in the Dark Ages of science education in public schools. Things look to have changed since then, judging by the curriculum I see in my son's public schools. I'm very happy with the way math and science are taught. Of course with any subject, you do have to start with a set of generalized and somewhat arbitrary rules before you can get into all the exceptions and other interpretations, so I don't have complaints with "These are the five steps of the scientific method" and whatnot. I think the key is how much depth and creativity you include in the analysis. And no matter how much logical thinking is emphasized, some memorization of "rules" is necessary. The biggest educational lie I was ever told was "You don't have to memorize, just understand." Yeah, right, pal. As soon as you give me forty hours to complete my final exam, I'll derive de novo every single derivative, chemical reaction, synthesis, theory of physics, etc. Until then, I'm going to sit down and memorize them so I can toss them back at you in less than 55 minutes. Also, sometimes memorization is the best first step toward understanding.

All this is to say that, yes, we have had terrible problems with bad science education. I think some of it stems from the "feel good flower child" era of the 70's in education where everyone was supposed to have "good self esteem" and creativity was so much more important than those boring math and science skills. But I do see things changing. The educational system is waking up in a big way to the fact that we are important so many scientists and engineers from overseas.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

"...importing so many scientists and engineers from overseas."

Yet another wish that LJ allowed editing of comments. Oh, well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ahh, yes, the huggy hippie liberal days of...the Reagan era in Nebraska. Um.

Sarcastic silliness aside, I hope you're right. I hope your kid's education is typical rather than being a special case because of where you live. I will be very happy if this is true.

The memorization thing is so misapplied. My lablings used to complain if they weren't allowed notecards with equations on them on the test: "Why do we have to memorize this? I can always look it up!" I would tell them, "I just spent three hours on my Mechanics homework, and that was without having to look up Classical Physics I equations every three lines. Spend the time now or spend it later." But for me, sitting down and memorizing equations was never a problem, because we had to use them so damn many times in homework that it got to be ingrained. Same with languages other than math: if I was using the vocabulary words enough, memorizing them came with the use. But if it hadn't, having to flip through a dictionary every time one wanted to say "red" would be annoying and silly.

It seems that every time the paper has a special Sunday editorial section on education, one person is trotted out to say, predictably, "Our kids need to memorize more stuff! Less analysis, more memorization!" And another person is trotted out to say, equally predictably, "Our kids don't need to memorize anything! More analysis, less memorization!" And nobody is pointing out that it is very hard to construct an argument without a basis for it. If you don't know what year the Congress of the Confederation convened and a few other key dates, analyzing its impact on American-British relations during the Napoleonic Wars is going to be much harder. And sure, you can look that up, but the point is, you don't want to have to look up everything in your argument. You can't really get to an argument in the first place that way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So what I mean by that last bit is: more knowledge and more analysis together, organically. Arguing for one or the other is silly.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

It's not just the sciences that have this problem. History is taught as dogma. In nearly all my history classes, even in college, when we used first person sources, we did not actually sit there and figure those sources out. We were taught what the teacher said and how the sources kind of said that the teacher said.

Science seems to do the same thing at times. It doesn't look at Stuff That's There. It looks at Stuff That's Taught.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wish you'd had my college history prof, Eric. He was the best. First day of "England 1399-1688," he said to the class, "If you don't read science fiction now, you'd better start, because that's the mindset you need to cultivate for this class." I did not draw little hearts all over the syllabus, but it was a near thing.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

Similiarly my first history prof, Dr. Nelson. His goal wasn't just to teach us dry facts about the middle ages (which I already knew after to many years of SCA), but how to read between the lines with primary sources. Beowulf was assigned in English class the next semester, and I had a quite a different opionion of it than everyone else.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

One of you -- an educated and literate person -- had been taught actual Lysenkoist theory of inheritance

This is Lamarck, not Lysenko.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You're right. Will fix.