Slashdot Mirror
The Case For Teaching Ignorance
HughPickens.com writes: In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled "Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance." Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. "Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer," said Witte, "without ever telling the student that we just don't know very much about it." Now Jamie Holmes writes in the NY Times that many scientific facts simply aren't solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations. According to Homes, presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.
In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist named Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. "This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that "turns your crank," the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation." The time has come to "view ignorance as 'regular' rather than deviant," argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.
In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist named Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. "This crucial element in science was being left out for the students," says Firestein."The undone part of science that gets us into the lab early and keeps us there late, the thing that "turns your crank," the very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown, all this is missing from our classrooms. In short, we are failing to teach the ignorance, the most critical part of the whole operation." The time has come to "view ignorance as 'regular' rather than deviant," argue sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.
It's a very large problem. We teach the students to memorize problem set recipes (aka exemplars), and the paradigm over time extends the exemplars to new observations regardless of how good the fit is. People then go online to criticize competing ideas, oftentimes without any awareness of the details of the debate. It's very rare to observe people running claims back-and-forth between the theorists and their critics -- and that's even though many theorists who disagree with the textbook theories make themselves available by email for rebuttals.
We should teach scientific controversies, and we should be teaching them very differently than the other domains which might not significantly change for another hundred years. Currently, academia simply pretends that many longstanding controversies simply do not exist, and these controversies can predictably act as an innovation bottleneck over time. If all we did was show students that there are competing arguments which oftentimes differ at the point of the initial hypothesis, students would become far better at asking good research questions. And this single change to the way that we teach science could secure our technological lead for another century.
Thank you for posting this article. It's honestly very rare to see here on Slashdot, and yet also very important.
When I was in high school, I found anatomy and biology boring, because it seemed like memorizing a finalized taxonomy of living creatures' details. If I'd had an appreciation for both how insanely awesome living creatures' designs are and that there are lots of mysteries still to be solved, I'd have been far more likely to get into the field. Ditto for chemistry and physics.
And unlike most PhD degrees, this one has numerous career paths!
My 6 year old can explain why something is right or wrong
That's not the same as critical thinking.
That's just because we taught him that it's ok to ask why and we'd explain everything to him even if it took forever.
Asking "why" and getting an answer isn't how you learn critical thinking.
Critical thinking is more like, "We have fact A, B, C, and D. Do these make sense together? Where did these facts come from? Should I trust them? How can I improve my confidence level in these facts?"
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually I also disagree with the title... not because it's wrong but because it will be coopted by the truly ignorant to "prove" that everything they disagree with has no scientific basis. This is the academic equivalent of clickbait, with the unfortunate consequence of being distributed outside the academic community.
I do think that the author has a point in that we are taught "best available" theory as fact. That's not wrong, however, it's only missing the concept that our school system has been ignoring for decades - actually teaching the basis of the scientific method, logic, critical thinking... not to mention applied statistics. All of these are necessary in the modern world to do the one important civic duty that most people exercise in a state of utter ignorance - voting.
I have pursued a rather rigorous scientific training career (MD, PhD) and getting the PhD training really altered my way of thinking about the world, and learning how to ask questions that are appropriate, can be answered, and how to design ways to answer them. I can understand where they author is coming from. I just think that to truly understand what he is saying one needs much more training than lay people get, and this headline just gets me into more trouble when I talk to patients and they refuse to believe me cause they read in the paper that everything science does is bollocks.