OK, I admit. I'm on a bit of a kick here. I started with my diatribe against "the basics." I followed with the post on Oprah. Now, today, I'm inspired by what Ira Flatow had to say. In case you've never heard of him, he is the NPR science correspondent and anchor of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday, and author of Rainbows, Curve Balls and Other Wonders of the Natural World Explained and They All Laughed.
In the 9/11/07 broadcast of The Diane Rehm Show, Flatow discussed the issue of how planes fly. According to Flatow, the way we were all told is wrong. We were all told that planes could fly according to the Bernoulli effect, i.e., the shape of an airplane wing is such that air flowing over the top of the wing must travel faster than the air flowing under the wing, and so there is less pressure on the top than on the bottom, resulting in lift. Rubbish, says Flatow -- as does every other expert in the field of aerodynamics.
But wait a minute! Mr. Johnson, my 10th grade physics teacher, said it was due to pressure. He was a disciple of Bernoulli - how could he have been wrong? And can I file a law suit against him?
As Flatow reminds us, "science is a moving target."
So not only is education an issue of memorizing useless bits o facts, it's also frequently an issue of the bits we've committed to memory being entirely untrue, inaccurate, and otherwise wrong. And if you don't believe me, let me ask you this: how many planets are there? 9 or 8? Is Pluto a planet or not?
Moving target, remember?
So how would we approach this reality in our classrooms? How do we teach "facts" while at the same time underscoring their provisional status as "the truth"?
2 comments:
While I agree with some of this, there is a downside to this view. I have just read for my Senior Humanities Class Postman's The End of Education where he sort of undercuts the importance of science precisely because some scientific truths are reevaluated, which suggests that there is no firm scientific truth. But that is nonsense. Nobody doubts the early is basically a sphere, or that earth goes around the sun and not the other way around. Some scientific questions ARE settled, and some, lilke the definition of 'planet' are adjusted, and some, like the 'luminiferous aether' are disproved. For the notion that all science is provisional has played right into the hands of those who deny evolution, global warming and many other firm realities of the world.
Jean - the provisional status of the discourse of science is due to its reliance on language for both formulating and communicating "the truth." This is the classic post-structuralist argument put forward by Foucualt, Derrida, et al.
But I agree that some things are truer than others. Still, we need to inject a large degree of skepticism into learning, even in the so-called "hard sciences." It's somewhat ironc that you note that we all know that the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. But the earth as the center of the universe was an absolute "fact" for a good portion of human history (before Copernicus). And what will science say about the fact of nutrition, for example? Which fats are good for you? Is chocolate good for you or bad for you? I make these points to underscore the heavily contested nature of "facts," and the powerful discourse communities (e.g., drug companies, publishing companies, university research facilities) that all have a stake in the matter of what is fact and what is not.
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