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Classroom Clashes Over Science Education
cheezitmike writes "In a two-part series, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science examines two hot-button topics that create clashes in the classroom between science teachers and conservative-leaning students, parents, school boards, and state legislatures. Part 1 looks at the struggle of teachers to cover evolution in the face of religious push-back from students and legislatures. Part 2 deals with teaching climate change, and how teachers increasingly have to deal with political pressure from those who insist that there must be two sides to the discussion."
Just have the Conservatives provide the peer-reviewed science behind their assertions. If it's actually science, there should be something testable to support it. If it isn't science, it doesn't belong in science class.
Anthropomorphic aspect of climate change is pretty simple: it's when you look at it like a guy who's constantly farting in a locked room, but who keeps eating beans because they taste so nice. Which is a pretty accurate analogy, come to think of it.
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around. That is when I gave up.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
...and promoted as a way to rebel against the dead hand of the "flat earther" Superstitionists.
Teachers can't do this, but if any students are reading this post:
Your conventional authority figures want you to be stupid cattle. They despise reason itself and they want you to be slaves. To them.
The kids in the 1960s were actually right about The Man before most of them sold out and got old and scared.
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings. As you age your physical power and independence will allow you to reject your authority figures as most deserve.
Cultivate a "fuck you" attitude but learn how to mask it lest you be in situations where Bible Thumpers have the power to punish you.
Trust no one. Not me, not anyone.
Learn and use Critical Thinking or you will end up like the retarded fat fucks you see shuffling around Walmart who believe everything Fox News tells them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I don't see how evolution requires sexual reproduction to produce "distinctly different" (whatever that means) progeny. There are ample examples of speciation, if that's what you mean by "distinctly" different, wherein a population of animals are separated and over time, for instance, the two separated populations are no longer able to reproduce with one another. We have strong evidence for this, even if we haven't witnessed the event with our eyes, in the same way that you have incontrovertible evidence that your great-great-great-great grandfather was born, even though you know no one who was present, and there probably exists no written record of the event.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Appeal to authority is not science. It is a logial fallacy.
Teachers should present the evidence and have the students decide for themselves. It would be an excellent exercise.
When it comes to attitude towards modern science, three types of people develop:
Sadly, most of the science teachers in schools gravitate towards the third group.
I guess there are two trends that collide to this sad outcome. One is, as I said above, the complexity and hardness of it all. The other is that politicians in modern democracies dislike educated population. Add to this the lack of motivation from a powerful adversary in the past 20 years or so, and the picture is really bad.
Realistically, you can't. Science is hard and learning about it doesn't pay off in the obvious or self-gratuitous ways that matter to most people. So, the motivation will always be low, lower still if you have to work a job that does not require you to know any science, as most jobs today are.
It is a lost fight, especially in a world in which the future looks increasingly likely to be much bleaker than the past, for everybody.
Actually no, science is easy, we start using it long before we learn to talk as we build up a mental model of the rules governing our universe. Several studies have shown that infants and children attempting to understand a new phenomena generally experiment in a fashion very near the statistically optimal pattern for exploring a new problem-space, it's only later in life that we start expecting things to behave in neat, well behaved patterns and get stymied by counter-intuitive behaviors.
The problem is science classes generally make no attempt to teach science, just scientific knowledge, and much of that *is* complicated. And without an understanding of science itself, the knowledge is just so much trivia that you're being asked to take on faith. Teach real science, do experiments where the answer *isn't* completely known beforehand, and ideally where the answer actually matters, or at least is interesting, and you can start getting students to appreciate that unlike almost every other subject (except math) science is a living, breathing, cutthroat combative subject where theories don't get widespread acceptance without considerable evidence. Once they *really* understand the rules of the game then it becomes clear that science, while still flawed, is far more authoritative than any other field on the planet.
Heck, ideally I'd say hold a class-wide experiment once a month or so to figure something out - students work in small "research groups" attacking the problem from different angles, but by the end of the "research window" (days?, weeks?) everyone needs to reach a consensus on what the "real" answer is, with some sort of prize (pizza party? movie break?) if they're correct within a certain margin of error so that they actually care. Then, once everyone has agreed, bring in a professional who can provide a conclusive answer in an understandable manner to verify the results. Not only would that provide a taste of real science, but it would also provide a periodic reminder of the fact that in the face of an implacable universe the best speakers and most inspiring/popular/attractive students generally aren't the ones you want to be listening to if you want to get it right.
Because, at the end of the day, all you really care about in most pre-university science classes is
(A) giving everyone a general background knowledge of how the world works (they'll soon forget most the details anyway, so the big picture is the important part)
(B) inspiring those so inclined to pursue careers in research or technology (and nothing like an occasional project were you're one of the respected "inner circle" to inspire a lonely nerd)
(C) instill a certain level of respect for scientists in the form of an understanding that, unlike in virtually all other fields of life, when it comes to questions of how the world works within their area of expertise, their opinion really is worth a heck of a lot more than yours.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We've also never seen tectonic plates move thousands of miles, but we have evidence that they have done so. We've never seen the inside of the sun, but we have evidence that hydrogen fuses into helium. We've never even seen a nucleus of an atom either! Science doesn't work by directly observing the phenomena it explains. Science works by making hypotheses about things and making testable predictions about things that we can observe. If we fail to observe what the hypothesis predicts, that's evidence that the hypothesis is incorrect.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
A mathematician can definitely pinpoint errors in reasoning on a variety of topics. I'd trust a mathematician over a specialist in a number of fields -- which is to say, much about all them except physics. Because those fields are run by incompetent hacks.
Recall any great economists? Psychologists? Biologists? Philosophers? Important personalities in much about any field you can think of? You know, the kind that end up in history books. Here's a scoop: most were physicists, mathematicians or (until the early 20th century) studied law. Not all; but more than the whole profession combined in nearly each and every case you'll care to look into -- including artists, I recon. Not saying that, you know, every other education has pupils with a shoe sized IQ on average and that there are occasional exceptions, but... Well, I just did, but I really didn't mean it that way. What I really meant is that you cannot discount their track record.
Oh, and Lang didn't deny AIDS, he questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, and called for more research thereupon; or so according to Wikipedia anyway:
Lang's most controversial political stance was as an AIDS denialist; he maintained that the prevailing scientific consensus that HIV causes AIDS has not been backed up by reliable scientific research, yet for political/commercial reasons further research questioning the current point of view is suppressed.
My default assumption would be that he meant it and that the media sensationalized the whole thing out of proportion. In case this isn't the case, however, I'd stress that no discipline is perfect across the board -- but maths and physics have a knack for bringing their best and brightest at the top of every other field.
Only because you make invalid assumptions about how it must have evolved. Lets start with an amphibian and egg. Now lets say that a mutation causes the exterior to be a bit more rubbery. Initially 10% of hatchlings that could have handled the tougher exterior can't get out, but 10% more eggs survive being trod on by large animals. Except it's not static. Each generation that gets out of the egg has a greater concentration of the genes that give them the strength to escape the tougher egg. Repeat the process a dozen times over the course of a million years. Eventually you reach an equilibrium; the shell can't get tougher because the resources needed to escape it are expensive enough that the animal would have a higher energy burn, and fare poorly in times of drought or famine.
Fast forward a few tens of thousands of years. Another mutation causes the animal to develop one tooth earlier than it should. It's weak, but it allows weaker hatchlings to escape an egg of equivalent strength. The mutation spreads, aided by the occasional drought of famine, where the "weaker" animals survive. Later, another mutation makes this early, poorly formed tooth drop off; it was getting in the way, and it's better to grow strong teeth later. The egg shell toughens more and more, and starts becoming less water permeable as some individuals find a niche laying eggs near the water line where egg eating marine life has less access to it.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Tougher and less water permeable eggs make the eggs survive more often, and in more places. Small changes can be compensated for with existing intra-species variation, but if a novel mutation arises that deals with the costs of the new strategy more effectively, selective pressure will spread it. Follow this chain of events for a hundred million years, and you got from fish to amphibian, and from amphibian to reptile. It's not a whole bunch of lucky coincidences at once, it's one coincidence, adaptation to take advantage of it, then another coincidence and further adaptation, over and over, over the course of millions upon millions of years. It took billions of years to go from single cell life to multicellular life, a hundred million years to go from marine life to amphibians and so on. This is a mind-boggling scale of time; continents circled the globe in the time it took for mammals to evolve from reptiles. You don't see the continents shifting, but it happens all the same.
The tiny changes and recombinations occurring in animals today won't produce many new species "naturally" in your lifetime, but over the next 10,000 years? Million years? 100 million years? I wouldn't bet on animal life remaining unchanged.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
The 77 cents on the dollar argument is based on adding up the incomes of all the working women in the country, dividing it by the number of women in the country, and doing the same for the men. The actual calculation ignores experience, ability, time on the job, nature of the work, etc. Such a conclusion is only possible in the most abstract of discussions - on the personal level it is undetectable.
Does your employer have a men's pay scale and a women's pay scale? No, none do. It's illegal, and every few years we remind everyone my passing ever more regulations prohibiting the practice.
Does it make any sense that if women are paid less than men, why aren't there more women in the workforce, since an all-women workforce (if this were true) would be 3/4ths the cost of an all-male workforce?
A big part of the comparison is also based on the difference between "earnings" and pay rate - women who, on average, work fewer hours at the same rate as a man have less earnings, despite being paid 100 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work.
Ken
Initially? The first two English colonies were not religious, though of course the first one disappeared. The Pilgrims in 1620 were the first religious colony. While Maryland and Pennsylvania were also religious, the Catholics currently accept evolution (I'm not sure about the Quakers).
I definitely qualify as conservative, but as a Catholic myself I see no place for literal Biblical creationism in the classroom.
If you check out analysis of why the Republicans cosy up to religious nutters, its because there are a lot of them and they vote. Broadly speaking they are a reasonable fit to - Small government, rampant capitalism, strongly enforced arbitrary laws and illegal overseas crusades.
Certainly a better fit than to Democratic - Education and health for all, heavily regulated capitalism, updating law in line with societal change, illegal overseas wars just for economic interests.
Certainly that's how it seems from Europe. The religious have been bought by one political party. Basically man its the money, they bought the religious for the votes.
They come with a whole lot of baggage unfortunately, being bat shit crazy that is.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.