Education

Thanksgiving and Temporal Bigotry

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(This is a rerun of a 2003 post at Photon Courier. New links added at the end.)

Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)

She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?

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Texas & the Textbooks

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A friend e-mailed this article from the local paper:

Six publishers submitted drafts of their textbooks to the TEA hoping to get in line for selection of the next generation of math books that will be used in Texas public schools next fall.

One publisher, Houghton Mifflin, left more than 86,000 errors in books, 79 percent of the total.

(AP –“School Textbooks Rife With Errors”)

Not that Houghton Mifflin was alone; in the six 109,263 errors were found.

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Virtuous Pride? Virtuous Anger?

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Writers need regular exercise in writing, it seems to me, so fairly often during the semester I give them a subject on which they can develop a few paragraphs in class. Sometimes my anecdotes seem a series of “how not to teach” – but, nonetheless, this exercise often gives both my students and me useful insights. This week I asked them to make concrete and real a description of an abstraction – in this case, choosing to write about one of the seven vices or virtues. The real surprise was that, while many developed interesting narrative examples and useful analogies, their assumptions (in the better papers tempered by a sense of complexity) often assumed those traits on the vice side were virtues and vice versa. This was especially true of pride and humility, but also of anger, which they saw as a justifiable response to other’s bad behavior. And so, as I contemplated the problems of this generation, I woke up to Peter Berkowitz’s “The Insanity of Bush Hatred.”It is difficult for Huck Finn to see the wrongs of slavery when surrounded by authority figures (some of whom were generally good people) who accepted that old institution as a given. Only with difficulty can students, who are regularly exposed to thinking of the kind Berkowitz describes, be led to believe that rationality, objective inquiry, acknowledgement of complexity, respect for an intellectual opponent are virtuous, or even possible. And, without civility and reasoned discourse, how can we have the discussions necessary for a democracy to thrive?

Why We Need Jackasses in the Academy

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 Ginny pointed out something very important in the comments to this post:

One of the arguments in Jonathan Rauch’s “In Defense of Prejudice,” is another dirty secret is that, no less than the rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. “Although this pigheadedness often damages the careers of individual scientists,” says Hull, “it is beneficial for the manifest goal of science,” which relies on people to invest years in their ideas and defend them passionately. And the dirtiest secret of all, if you believe in the antiseptic popular view of science, is that this most ostensibly rational of enterprises depends on the most irrational of motivesambition, narcissism, animus, even revenge. “Scientists acknowledge that among their motivations are natural curiosity, the love of truth, and the desire to help humanity, but other inducements exist as well, and one of them is to ‘get that son of a bitch,’” says Hull. “Time and again, scientists whom I interviewed described the powerful spur that ‘showing that son of a bitch’ supplied to their own research.” Shortly after I taught that essay we went to a family celebration, where one of my husband’s cousins, a geology ph.d. who worked for Exxon, explained to me that he was grateful Exxon had let him work for ten years before he showed he was right and he had found something useful. (I’m no scientist, if he explained it, I didn’t understand it.) But he phrased his explanation in just that manner: Those guys thought I was crazy and wrong; I was determined to show them I was right. In other words, what kept him going was his desire to show those sons of bitches. Of course, there are happier attitudes to have for ten years, but, then, the rest of us can be happy that some of those guys figured out better ways to find oil and to get it out of the ground.

The scientific method is a mechanism for the evolution of thought.  Evolution  depends on conflict and stuggle as its motive engine. Conflict requires competitive personalities. Those personalities are not always the easiest to deal with. QED, most good scientists are jackasses.

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What Do You Think?

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I have a question that some of you might like to ponder: among the people who lived in the twentieth century, who (barring political and religious figures) will people in another hundred years remember from the twentieth century?   Whose discoveries or ideas or work is sufficiently important to represent the twentieth century and affect the twenty-first?   Or, perhaps, whose work that we now consider important is not likely to stand the test of time? This may be a negative effect, as well.

This may be one of my pedagogical ideas that is not likely to work – which is, unfortunately, true of many.   However, most of us find people interesting and I would like some of my students to get a sense of the difference an idea or theory or invention can make.   The paper is supposed to be argumentative and it certainly shouldn’t be mainly biographical, let alone hagiographic. So, I’m asking you all for suggestions.   Or, perhaps, you would like to express doubts that I will be able to prevent such essays from wandering off into he’s a nice guy or he’s a rotten guy. Further description of the course is below the fold if you are interested in the context.

This was inspired by my sense that I don’t know much about Borlaug and it wouldn’t hurt   and I could learn from papers; also, some of my students might be interested in the accomplishments of someone they might conceivably see.

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