Let's Science
I think I had a small panic attack attack last night. At least, I don't see any reason why my heart should've started pounding when I dreamed about our red car--the one that got stolen, like, years ago. Of course, last night I also dreamed that I read the seventh Harry Potter book (and it wasn't that good) and that Iron Chef Morimoto was going to fry my knitting. Maybe it was something I ate...
Fight global warming--dress like a pirate!
The whole argument behind teaching Creationism/Intelligent Design/whatever in science classrooms is that students should be allowed access to many different points of view. The response is that Jesus/Shiva/The Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't "scientific" and thus doesn't belong in a classroom to teach "science." But I don't think most of the people involved in these debates have any idea what "science" actually is, except perhaps some vague semantic opposite to "religion." And as a result they're missing the real point entirely.
Science is a process. It's a model of knowledge acquisition predicated at a fundamental level on certain assumptions about the universe and human experience. It's a mindset, a methodology--ask a question, think of an answer, and then check it against reality. It's something you actually do--it's a verb.
That's not how it's taught, of course. Like all school subjects, science is taught as a mass of trivia, because that's what you can put on a standardized test. The trivia is the byproduct of the process, of course--the object of the verb, or the derived nominal form--but it's not taught that way. Until you get into high school, sometimes into college, you don't really learn how to make a good hypothesis or structure an experiment to remove potential confounds; instead, you learn long lists of facts that you're not allowed to question and the names of dead guys who "discovered" these facts without any hint of how they did it, beyond cultural mythology like Newton's apple and Galileo chucking stuff off the Tower of Pisa.
In other words, science is taught much like religion.
This is where the fundies get their knickers in a twist, because they see this watered-down parody of science and see it competing with their particular brand of Jesus for the chillun's brain space. They see the two as equivalent and opposite--and so they fight as if they are. And as long as we fight back with the same assumption, we're going to lose, because freedom of religion is protected in the Constitution and freedom of science is not.
The alternative, teaching science as it really is, would require a major restructuring of the educational paradigm; teaching science would become more like teaching math or writing, which we still don't know how to do well. It would also make science (sciencing?) an even bigger threat to the fundies, as well as politicians and advertisers--basically the whole foundation of modern American culture--because it trains the mind to approach all claims with skepticism, to check the data, and to consider reality rather than sophistry as the final arbiter of what is true. But science-as-verb breaks the trivia-oriented paradigm and makes it that much more difficult to suppress: you can object to your kid being taught about Darwin and the Beagle, but it's a bit harder to argue that your kids shouldn't be taught how to think.
Fight global warming--dress like a pirate!
The whole argument behind teaching Creationism/Intelligent Design/whatever in science classrooms is that students should be allowed access to many different points of view. The response is that Jesus/Shiva/The Flying Spaghetti Monster isn't "scientific" and thus doesn't belong in a classroom to teach "science." But I don't think most of the people involved in these debates have any idea what "science" actually is, except perhaps some vague semantic opposite to "religion." And as a result they're missing the real point entirely.
Science is a process. It's a model of knowledge acquisition predicated at a fundamental level on certain assumptions about the universe and human experience. It's a mindset, a methodology--ask a question, think of an answer, and then check it against reality. It's something you actually do--it's a verb.
That's not how it's taught, of course. Like all school subjects, science is taught as a mass of trivia, because that's what you can put on a standardized test. The trivia is the byproduct of the process, of course--the object of the verb, or the derived nominal form--but it's not taught that way. Until you get into high school, sometimes into college, you don't really learn how to make a good hypothesis or structure an experiment to remove potential confounds; instead, you learn long lists of facts that you're not allowed to question and the names of dead guys who "discovered" these facts without any hint of how they did it, beyond cultural mythology like Newton's apple and Galileo chucking stuff off the Tower of Pisa.
In other words, science is taught much like religion.
This is where the fundies get their knickers in a twist, because they see this watered-down parody of science and see it competing with their particular brand of Jesus for the chillun's brain space. They see the two as equivalent and opposite--and so they fight as if they are. And as long as we fight back with the same assumption, we're going to lose, because freedom of religion is protected in the Constitution and freedom of science is not.
The alternative, teaching science as it really is, would require a major restructuring of the educational paradigm; teaching science would become more like teaching math or writing, which we still don't know how to do well. It would also make science (sciencing?) an even bigger threat to the fundies, as well as politicians and advertisers--basically the whole foundation of modern American culture--because it trains the mind to approach all claims with skepticism, to check the data, and to consider reality rather than sophistry as the final arbiter of what is true. But science-as-verb breaks the trivia-oriented paradigm and makes it that much more difficult to suppress: you can object to your kid being taught about Darwin and the Beagle, but it's a bit harder to argue that your kids shouldn't be taught how to think.