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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.
Finally a subject I can get a PhD in!
Finally a topic where I don't need to read the summary!
I've been prepared my whole life for this!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Too many people will simply be turned off by the name. I fully agree that we are ignorant, but most people refuse to admit their own. We don't teach people to check facts or even show them how. We teach them to "Google" which returns the popular answer and that may not be correct (and probably is not).
I could spend hours discussing "Classical" versus Industrial education. I could spend days explaining why teaching a rounded education is necessary and teaching only specialties runs counter to education. Liberal Arts (PHI) is essential, but most kids get a couple semesters of history instead.. and we wonder why people can't think critically, defend their own position, and perceive that disagreements with their opinions are personal attacks.
Yeah, I got a college age kid so I see what's been happening.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
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.
That boggles the mind. Even something as fundamental to our daily experience as gravity, and we don't know what it is. We describe its effects, and we have a few theories about its cause, but when an apple falls out of a tree, we don't know why it falls to the ground.
The fact of this ignorance should be taught in the first lesson.