The human brain is programmed to answer this question constantly, and using a very basic method. This is how we survive. What made that noise? A bear made that noise. What caused my hand to hurt? Fire caused my hand to hurt.
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shared by adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
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Children's Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers - T... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...covid-kids-tech-use.html
psychology research social media technology education bias brain science new york times pandemic
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overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media
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are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life.
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that children’s brains, well through adolescence, are considered “plastic,” meaning they can adapt and shift to changing circumstances.
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elling parents not to feel guilty about allowing more screen time, given the stark challenges of lockdowns. Now, she said, she’d have given different advice if she had known how long children would end up stuck at home.
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I probably would have encouraged families to turn off Wi-Fi except during school hours so kids don’t feel tempted every moment, night and day,”
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nine months of 2020, an increase of 82 percent over the year before.
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minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, up from 57 minutes in February, and nearly double the use a year prior
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What concerns researchers, at a minimum, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social and physical development, including physical play and other interactions that help children learn how to confront challenging social situations.
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Dr. Briasouli said. Some days, she said, she watches her son sit with three devices, alternating play among them.
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These are the tools of their lives,” he said. “Everything they will do, they will do through one of these electronic devices, socialization included.”
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said he believed that adults and children alike could, with disciplined time away from devices, learn to disconnect. But doing so has become complicated by the fact that the devices now are at once vessels for school, social life, gaming and other activities central to life.
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Dr. Radesky said that the mingling of all of these functions not only gives children a chance to multitask, it also allows young people to “escape” from any uncomfortable moment they may face.
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How to mitigate the impact of a lockdown on mental health -- ScienceDaily - 0 views
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The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting people's mental health.
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"On the one hand, such drastic changes to daily routines can be detrimental to mental health," explains Professor Andrew Gloster from the University of Basel, co-leader of the study now published in PLOS One. "On the other hand, because the entire population was more or less equally affected during the lockdown, it remained unclear whether this impact would occur."
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Almost 10,000 people from 78 countries participated, giving information about their mental health and overall situation during the Covid-19 lockdown.
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These figures are consistent with other studies addressing the impact of the pandemic on mental health.
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Hong Kong and Turkey reported more stress than other countries;
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Austria, Germany and Switzerland, on the other hand, reported significantly fewer negative emotions
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These differences are likely due to a combination of chance, nation-specific responses to the pandemic, cultural differences and factors such as political unrest.
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attention to people's mental health remains important.
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Supermodel Halima Aden: 'Why I quit' - BBC News - 0 views
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the first hijab-wearing supermodel, quit the fashion industry in November saying it was incompatible with her Muslim religion.
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However she was dressed, keeping her hijab on for every shoot was non-negotiable
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"There are girls who wanted to die for a modelling contract," she says, "but I was ready to walk away if it wasn't accepted."
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But as time went on she had less control over the clothes she wore, and agreed to head coverings she would have ruled out at the start.
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In the last year of her career her hijab got smaller and smaller, sometimes accentuating her neck and chest.
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"I eventually drifted away and got into the confusing grey area of letting the team on-set style my hijab."
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IMG supported her in this and in 2018 Halima became a Unicef ambassador. As she had spent her childhood in a refugee camp, her work focused on children's rights.
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"The style and makeup were horrendous. I looked like a white man's fetishised version of me," she says.
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"Why would the magazine think it was acceptable to have a hijab-wearing Muslim woman when a naked man is on the next page?" she asks. It went against everything she believed in.
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I'm putting my mental health and my family at the top. I'm thriving, not just surviving. I'm getting my mental health checked, I'm getting therapy time."
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We hear what we expect to hear -- ScienceDaily - 0 views
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Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.
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Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.
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the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.
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that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.
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Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.
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Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.
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e have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."
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Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception.
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Memory Notes - ToK - 0 views
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"We can invent only with memory." (Alphonse Karr) “Memory and imagination help [a man] as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates.” (William Morris) “Memory feeds imagination.” (Amy Tan) “Memory is imagination in reverse.” (Stephen Evans) "Memory is deceptive because it is coloured by today’s events." (Albert Einstein)
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Memory is the faculty of the mind by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968).
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A very basic explanation would say that memory is a process of: Perceiving something Information from your perception is sent to your working memory. Information can be retrieved from here (remembered). A fraction of the informati
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People tend to trust their memories more than they should. This comes up a lot in discussions about eye witness testimonies in court. People can be absolutely sure they saw or heard something, which they didn't.
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The Case for Teaching Ignorance - The New York Times - 1 views
www.nytimes.com/...se-for-teaching-ignorance.html
TOK knowledge ignorance Kuhn ambiguity psychology science anomalies curiosity
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She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers
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in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.
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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.
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Discovery is not the neat and linear process many students imagine, but usually involves, in Dr. Firestein’s phrasing, “feeling around in dark rooms, bumping into unidentifiable things, looking for barely perceptible phantoms.”
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As he argued in his 2012 book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science,” many scientific facts simply aren’t solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations.
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People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.
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The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.
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Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.
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Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.
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The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”
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giving due emphasis to unknowns, highlighting case studies that illustrate the fertile interplay between questions and answers, and exploring the psychology of ambiguity are essential.
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The time has come to “view ignorance as ‘regular’ rather than deviant,” the sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey have boldly argued. 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.
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This article makes an excellent case for "ignorance studies" but, ironically, treats "agnotology" as a cutting edge concept when in fact it is an old notion with a long history and a better name: "nescience." Nescience can refer to the Socratic idea of learned ignorance, but the concept was also developed in the eighteenth century, chiefly by Scottish commonsense philosopher Thomas Reid
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"nescience" has considerable advantages over "agnotology". Linguistically, nescience is the precise opposite of "science" (scio: "I know"; nescio: "I don't know"). So why not stick with the Latin root word--and avoid any of the unfortunate connotations "ignorance" has in contemporary parlance? Historically, the word reminds us of the concept's provenance in Socratic philosophy and the Scottish enlightenment. Finally, unearthing the history of "nescience" might yield an unexpected insight into American intellectual history, since many of our founders read Thomas Reid's philosophy in college.
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Our brains on coronavirus (opinion) - CNN - 0 views
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We constantly weigh costs and benefits with thought experiments to imagine what the consequences of different choices might be, and emotion experiments to imagine how different outcomes would feel.
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And this makes relevant a crucial neurobiological factor -- during times of stress, we tend to make lousy decisions.
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"I wouldn't do that if I were you," hopefully convincing it not to do something idiotic. But it turns out that the limbic system influences the cortex as well.
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of the limbic system to talk to the cortex and you get what we'd almost universally view as bad decisions.
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unrecognizably utilitarian; they have no emotional conflict in choosing to advocate sacrificing the life of a stranger (or, equally so, a loved one) in order to save five others
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"We just don't know yet." And in this time, when we need social support the most, the crucially important catchphrase has become "social distancing."
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he most rational decision-making part of your cortex is the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), while the most frothing-at-the-mouth emotional part of your limbic system is arguably the amygdala, a region central to fear, anxiety and aggression.
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class of stress hormones causes the PFC to become sluggish, less capable of sending a "let's not do something hasty" signal to the amygdala
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Extensive research has explored the consequences of this skewed neurobiology, showing that stress distorts our decisions in consistent ways
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up having tunnel vision when it comes to making choices and it becomes harder to consider extraneous factors that may actually not be extraneous, or harder to factor future consequences into present considerations.
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We fall back into a usual solution, and instead of trying something different when it doesn't work, the pull is to stick with the usual,
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. And our decision-making narrows in another sense, in that we contract our circle of who counts as "us," and who merits empathy and consideration. Our moral decisions become more egoistic
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shared by adonahue011 on 03 Nov 20
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Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...21cnd-brain.html
brain science psychology research technology education brain new york times study
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for hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that likely evolved before the brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.
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confirm the central role of the damaged region — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to generate social emotions, like compassion.
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The new study seals the case by demonstrating that a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline.
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Jurors have reduced sentences based on brain-imaging results, and experts say that any evidence of damage to this ventromedial area could sway judgments of moral competency in some cases.
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The new study focused on six patients who had suffered very specific damage to the ventromedial area from an aneurysm or a tumor
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can be lucid, easygoing, talkative and intelligent, but blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward.
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All three groups also strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.
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taking direct action to kill or harm someone (pushing him in front of the runaway boxcar, for example) and serving a greater good.
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were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train (if that was the only option)
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The ventromedial area is a primitive part of the cortex that appears to have evolved to help humans and other mammals navigate social interactions
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The ventromedial area integrates these signals with others from the cortex, including emotional memories, to help generate familiar social reactions.
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This tension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion in part reflects the brain’s continuing adjustment to the vast social changes that have occurred since the ventromedial area first took shape
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transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists are reporting today.
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this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives.
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Fallacies | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - 0 views
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A fallacy is a kind of error in reasoning. The list of fallacies below contains 229 names of the most common fallacies, and it provides brief explanations and examples of each of them. Fallacious arguments should not be persuasive, but they too often are. Fallacies may be created unintentionally, or they may be created intentionally in order to deceive other people
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The vast majority of the commonly identified fallacies involve arguments, although some involve only explanations, or definitions, or other products of reasoning. Sometimes the term “fallacy” is used even more broadly to indicate any false belief or cause of a false belief. The list below includes some fallacies of these sorts, but most are fallacies that involve kinds of errors made while arguing informally in natural language.
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The first known systematic study of fallacies was due to Aristotle in his De Sophisticis Elenchis (Sophistical Refutations), an appendix to the Topics. He listed thirteen types. After the Dark Ages, fallacies were again studied systematically in Medieval Europe. This is why so many fallacies have Latin names. The third major period of study of the fallacies began in the later twentieth century due to renewed interest from the disciplines of philosophy, logic, communication studies, rhetoric, psychology, and artificial intelligence.
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The term “fallacy” is not a precise term. One reason is that it is ambiguous. It can refer either to (a) a kind of error in an argument, (b) a kind of error in reasoning (including arguments, definitions, explanations, and so forth), (c) a false belief, or (d) the cause of any of the previous errors including what are normally referred to as “rhetorical techniques.” Philosophers who are researchers in fallacy theory prefer to emphasize (a), but their lead is often not followed in textbooks and public discussion.
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Consulting the list below will give a general idea of the kind of error involved in passages to which the fallacy name is applied. However, simply applying the fallacy name to a passage cannot substitute for a detailed examination of the passage and its context or circumstances because there are many instances of reasoning to which a fallacy name might seem to apply, yet, on further examination, it is found that in these circumstances the reasoning is really not fallacious.
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Supernumerary phantom limb in a patient with basal ganglia hemorrhage - a case report a... - 0 views
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Supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a rare neurologic phenomenon, in which a patient misperceives an extra limb in addition to the original set of limbs. We report a case of SPL in a patient with a right basal ganglia hemorrhage and review the previous literature about this peculiar phenomenon.
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Two days after the event of a right basal ganglia hemorrhage, a 78-year-old male reported a phantom arm protruding from his left shoulder. He could not see or touch the phantom arm but he felt the presence of an addition arm lateral to his paretic arm. Pain or sensory discomfort were absent in either the paretic arm or the phantom arm. He stated that he could intentionally move the phantom arm independent of his paretic arm. The examination showed that the passive movement of his paretic arm did not elicit any movement of his phantom arm. We diagnosed the SPL as a complication of the hypertensive basal ganglia hemorrhage and treated him with anti-hypertensive medications. His phantom arm persisted for 3 weeks, and it gradually faded away.
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SPL had been reported as a rare complication of various types of cerebral lesions. Right hemispheric lesions were most frequently associated with the SPL. Considering the intentional movement of the phantom arm, we deduced that the SPL might result from the impairment of the sensory feedback system for both internal body image and motor movement.
Tribalism Comes for Pandemic Science - The New Atlantis - 0 views
www.thenewatlantis.com/...ism-comes-for-pandemic-science
TOK expertise pandemic provisional knowledge humility science tribalism
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Technopoly-Ch.11--THe loving resistance fighter - 0 views
diigo.com/0m0g21
technopoly curriculum history religion technology TOK philosophy science meaning coherence education ideas book notes Postman
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As I s_ee it, a reason\lble response (hardly a solution) to the problem of living in a developing Technopoly can be divided into two parts: what the individual can do irrespective of what the culture is doing; and what the culture can do irrespective of what any individual is doing.
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I can, however, offer a Talmudic-like principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of the American _ Technopoly. It is this:
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There are a hundred other. things to remember that may help one to warm to the United States, including the fact that it has been, and perhaps always will be, a series of experiments that the world watches with wonder. Three. such experiments are of particular importance.
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who refuse to allow·psychology or any "social science" to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense;
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You must try to be a loving resistance fighter. That is the doctrine, as Hillel might say. Here is the commentary: By "loving," I mean that, in spite of the confusion, errors, and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United States the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again.
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Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a second great experiment was undertaken, posing the question, Can a nation retain a sense of cohesion and community by allowing into it people from all over the world?
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now comes the third-the great experiment of Technopoly-which poses the question, Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thoughtworld?
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Which brings me to the "resistance fighter" part of my principle. Those who resist the American T echnopoly are people
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perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to 186 Technopoly the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn.
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A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted as part of the natural order of things, that every The loving Resistance Fighter 185 technology-from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer-is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control.
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who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgment, or precision as a synonym for truth;
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In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemol(?gical and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural.
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it is possible that one's education may help considerably not only in promoting the general conception of a resistance fighter but in helping the young to fashion their own ways of giving it expression. It is with education, then, that I will conclude this book.
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t is equally obvious that the knowledge explosion has blown apart the feasibility of such limited but coordinated curriculums as, for example, a Great Books program.
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who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with understanding;
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who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honor, and who, when they "reach out and touch som~one," expect that person to be in the same room;
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who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth;
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who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity's sake;
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it is the best way I can think of for the culture to address the problem. School, to be sur~, is a technology itself, but of a special kind in that, unlike most technologies, it is customarily and persistently scrutinized, criticized, and modified. It is America's principal instrument for correcting mistakes and for addressing problems that mystify and paralyze other social institutions.
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who admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement.
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the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn.
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Modem secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a "course of study" at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects.
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It does not even put. forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses "skills." In other words, a technocrat's ideal-a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.
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I would propose as a possibility the theme that animates Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. It is a book, and a philosophy, filled with optimism and suffused with the transcendent belief that humanity's destiny is the discovery of knowledge. Moreover, although Bronowski' s emphasis is on science, he finds ample warrant to include the arts and humanities as part of our unending quest to gain a unified understanding of nature and our place in it.
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we must not overestimate the capability of schools to provide coherence in the face of a culture in which almost all coherence seems to have disappeared. In our technicalized, present-centered information environment, it is not easy to locate a rationale for education, let alone impart one convincingly.
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the schools cannot restore religion to the center of the life of learning. With the exception of a few people, perhaps, no one would take seriously the idea that learning is for the greater glory of God.
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we must join art and science. But we must also join the past and the present, for the ascent of humanity is above all a continuous story. It is, in fact, a story of creation,
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The first, undertaken toward the end of the eighteenth century, posed the question, Can a nation allow the greatest possible degree of political and religious freedom and still retain a sense of identity and purpose?
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It is the story of humanity's creativeness in trying to conquer loneliness, ignorance, and disorder. And it certainly includes the development of various religious systems as a means of giving order and meaning to existence.
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Some people would have us stress love of country as a unifying principle in education. Experience has shown, however, that this invariably translates into love of government, and in practice becomes indistinguishable from what still is at the center of Soviet or Chinese education.
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is also otherworldly, inasmuch as it does not assume that what one learns in school must be directly and urgently related to a problem of today.
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it is an education that stresses history, the scientific mode of thinking, the disciplined use of language, a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and religion, and the continuity of human enterprise.
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with a few exceptions which I shall note, it does not require that we invent new subjects or discard old ones. The structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable.
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it is a theme that can begin in the earliest grades and extend through college in ever-deepening and -widening dimensions.
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Better still, it provides students with a point of view from which to understand the meaning of subjects, for each subject can be seen as a bat,tleground of sorts, an arena in which fierce intellectual struggle has taken place and continues to take place.
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Thus, the ascent of humanity is an optimistic story, not without its miseries but dominated by astonishing and repeated victories. From this point of view, the curriculum itself may be seen as a celebration of human intelligence and creativity, not a meaningless collection of diploma or college requirements.
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history is not merely one subject among many that may be taught; every subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art. I would propose here that every teacher must be a history teacher. To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know.
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Best of all, the theme of the ascent of humanity gives us a nontechnical, noncommercial definition of education. It is a definition drawn from an honorable humanistic tradition and reflects a concept of the purposes of academic life that goes counter to the biases of the technocrats.
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To teach about the atom without Democritus, to teach about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to teach about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots, about which no other social institution is at present concerned.
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I am referring to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener, in what Robert Maynard Hutchins once called The Great Conversation,
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For to know about your roots is not merely to know where your grandfather came from and what he had to endure. It is also to know where your ideas come from and why you happen to believe them; to know where your moral and aesthetic sensibilities come from. It is to
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I am well aware that this approach to subjects would be difficult to use. There are, at present, few texts that would help very much, and teachers have not, in any case, been prepared to know about ~owledge in this way. Moreover, there is the added difficulty of our learning how to do this for children of different ages
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know where your world, not just your family, comes from. To complete the presentation of Cicero's thought, begun above: "What is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one's ancestors and set in an historical context?
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point of view that will reflect his particular theory of social development. And historians also know that they write histories for some particular purpose--more often than not, either to glorify or to condemn the present. There is no definitive history of anything; there are only histories, human inventions which do not give us the answer, but give us only those answers called forth by the questions that have been asked.
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Thus, I would recommend that every subject be taught as history. In this way, children, even in the earliest grades, can begin to understand, as they now do not, that knowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and a future
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Historians know all of this-it is a commonplace idea among them. Yet it is kept a secret from our youth. Their ignorance of it prevents them from understanding how "history" can change and why the Russians, Chinese, American Indians, and virtually everyone else see historical e:vents differently than the authors of history schoolbooks.
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This does not mean that some particular version of the American, European, or Asian past should remain untold. A student who does not know at least one history is in no position to evaluate others
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it does mean that a histories teacher will be concerned, at all times, to show how histories are themselves products of culture; how any history is a mirror of the conceits and even metaphysical biases of the culture that produced. it; how the religion, politics, geography, and economy of a people lead them to re-create their past along certain lines. The histories teacher must clarify for students the meaning of "objectivity" and "events," must show what a "point of view" and a "theory" are, must provide some sense of how histories may be evaluated.
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the history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the world is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else's shoulders.
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such a definition is not childcentered, not training-centered, not skill-centered, not even problem-centered. It is idea-centered and coherence-centered. It
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It will be objected that this idea-history as comparative history-is too abstract for students to grasp. But that is one of the several reasons why comparative history should be taught
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The teaching of subjects as studies in historical continuities is not intended to make history as a special subject irrelevant
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If every subject is taught with a historical dimension, the history teacher will be free to teach what histories are: hypotheses and theories about why change occurs. In one sense, there is no such thing as "history," for every historian from Thucydjdes to Toynbee has known that his stories must be told from a speci
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To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented, and concrete events is to replicate the bias of Technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts and theories, and to provide them only with a stream of meaningless events
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Technopoly events ought to be included in the "history" curriculum have a somewhat hollow ring to them.
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Some people urge, for example, that the Holocaust, or Stalin's bloodbaths, or the trail of Indian tears be taught in school. I agree that our students should know about s·uch things, but we must still address the question, What is it that we want them to "know" about these events? Are they to be explained as the "maniac" theory of history? Are they to be understood as illustrations of the "banality of evil" or the "law of survival"? Are they manifestations of the universal force of economic greed? Are they examples of the workings of human nature?
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Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one student in fifty knows what "induction" means? Or knows what a scientific theory is? Or a scientific model? Or knows what are the optimum conditions of a valid scientific experiment? Or has ever considered the question of what scientific truth is
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In The Identity of Man Bronowski says the following: "This is the paradox of imagination in science, that it has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination. By that outrageous phrase, I mean that the highest flight of scientific imagination is to weed out the proliferation of new ideas. In science, the grand view is a miserly view, and a rich model of the universe is one which is as poor · as possible in hypotheses."
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Whatever events may be included in the study of the past, the worst thing we can do is to present them devoid of the coherence that a theory or theories can provide-that is to say, as meaningless. This, we can be sure, Technopoly does daily.
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Is there one student in a hundred who can make any sense out of this statement? Though the phrase "impoverishment of imagination" may be outrageous, there is nothing startling or even unusual about the idea contained in this quotation. Every practicing scientist understands what Bronowski is saying. Yet it is kept a secret from our students.
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The histories teacher must go far beyond the "event" level into the realm of concepts, theories, hypotheses, comparisons, deductions, evaluations. The idea is to raise the level of abstraction at which "history" is taught.
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I would propose that every school--elementary through college-offer and require a course in the philosophy of science. Such a course should consider the language of science, the nature of scientific proof, the source of scientific hypotheses, the role of imagination, the conditions of experimentation, and especially .the value of error and disproof.
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I have already stressed the importance of teaching the history of science in every science course, but this is no more important than teaching its "philosophy."
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If I am not mistaken, many people still believe that what makes a statement scientific is that it can be verified. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case: What separates scientific statements from nonscientific statements is that the former can be subjected to the test of falsifiability. What makes science possible is not our ability to recognize "truth" but our ability to recognize falsehood.
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To suggest, therefore, that science is an exercise in human imagination, that it is something quite different from technology, that there are "philosophies" of science, and that all of this ought to form part of a scientific
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common to all of us, and that are avoidable through awareness and discipline--the use of either-or categories, misu~derst.anding of levels of abstraction, confusion of words with thmgs, sloganeering, and self-reflexiveness.
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What such a course would try to get at is the notion that science is not pharmacy or technology or magic tricks but a special way of employing human intelligence.
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It ·would be important for students. to learn that one becomes scientific not by donning· a white coat (which is what television teaches) but by practicing a set of canons of thought, many of which have to do with the disciplined use of language. Science involves a method of employing language that is accessible to everyone. The ascent of humanity has rested largely on that.
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Of all the disciplines tbat might be included in the curriculum, semantics is certainly among the most "basic." Because it deals with the processes by which we make and interpret meaning, it has great potential ~o affect the deepest levels of student intelligence.
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yet semantics is rarely mentioned when "back to the basics" is proposed. Why? My guess is that it cuts too deep. To adapt George Orwell, many subjects are basic but so~e are more basic than others. Such subjects have the capability of generating crHical thought and of giving students access to questions that get to the heart of the matter. This is not what "back to the basics" advocates usually have in mind. They want language technicians: people who can follow instructions: write reports clearly, spelJ correctly.
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I should like to propose that, in addition to courses in the philosophy of science, every school-again, from ele'mentary school through college--offer a course in semantics-in the processes by which people make meaning.
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English teachers have been consistently obtuse in their approach to this subject-which is to say, they have largely ignored it. This has always been difficult for me to understand, since English teachers claim to be concerned with teaching reading and writing. But if they do not teach anything about the relationship of language to reality-which is what semantics studies-I cannot imagine how they expect reading and writing to improve.
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There is certainly ample ev1de~ce that the study of semantics will improve the writing and reading of students. But it invariably does more. It helps students to reflect on the sense and truth of what they are writing and of what they are asked to read. It teaches them to discover the underlying assumptions of what they are told. It emphasizes the manifold ways in which language can distort reality. It assists students in becoming what Charles Weingartner and I once called "crap-detectors."
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Students who have a firm grounding in semantics are therefore apt to find it difficult to take reading tests. A reading test does not invite one to ask whether or not what is written is true. Or, if it is true, what it has to do with anything. The study of semantics insists upon these questions. But "back to the basics" advocates don't require education to be that basic. Which is why they usually do not include literature, music, and art as part of their agenda either. But of course, in using the ascent of humanity as a theme, we would of necessity elevate these subjects to prominence.
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it would be extremely useful to the growth of.their intelligence if our youth had available a special course in which fundamental principles of language were identified and explained. Such a course would deal not only with the various uses of language but with the relationship between things and words, symbols and signs, factual statements and judgments, and grammar and thought.
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The most obvious reason for such prominence is that their subject matter contains the best evidence we have of the unity and continuity of human experience and feeling. And that is why I would propose that, in our teaching of the humanities, we should emphasize the enduring cr~ations of the past.
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The point I want to make is that the products of the popular arts are amply provided by the culture itself. The schools must make available the products of classical art forms precisely . because they are not so available and because they demand a different order of sensibility and response.
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our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own times-its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture, Their knowledge of the form and content of these arts is by no means satisfactory. But their ignorance of the form and content of the art of the past is cavernous.
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there is no subject better suited to freeing us from the tyranny of the present than the historical study of art. Painting, for example, is more than three times as old as writing, and contains in its changing styles and themes a fifteen-thousand-year-old record of the ascent of humanity.
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It is not to the point that many of these composers, writers, and painters were in their own times popular artists.
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What is to the point is that they spoke, when they did, in a language and from a point of view different from our own and yet continuous with our own. These artists are relevant not only because they established the standards with which civilized people approach the arts. They are relevant because the culture tries to mute their voices and render their standards invisible.
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art is much more than a historical artifact. To have meaning for us, it must connect with those levels of feeling that are in fact not expressible in discursive language. The question therefore arises whether it is possible for students of today to relate, through feeling, to the painting, architecture, music, sculpture, or literature of the past.
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It is highly likely that students, immersed in today's popular arts, will find such an emphasis as I suggest tedious and even painful. This fad will, in tum, be painful to teachers, who, naturally enough, prefer to teach fhat which will arouse an immediate and enthusiastic response.
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But our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them. Above all, they must be shown humanity's artistic roots. And that task, in our own times, falls inescapably to the schools.
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The answer, I believe, is: only with the greatest difficulty. They, and many of us, have an aesthetic sensibility of a different order from what is required to be inspired, let alone entertained, by a Shakespeare sonnet, a Haydn symphony, or a Hals painting. To oversimplify the matter, a young man who believes Madonna to have reached the highest pinnacle of musical expression lacks the sensibility to distinguish between the ascent and descent of humanity.
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I want to end my proposal by including two subjects indispensable to any understanding of where we have come from. The first is the history of technology,
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historical development; in which the philosophies of science, of history, of language, of technology, and of religion are taught; and in which there is a strong emphasis on classical forms of artistic expression.
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This is a curriculum that goes "back to the basics," but not quite in the way the technocrats mean it. And it is most certainly in opposition to the spirit of Technopoly. I have no illusion that such an education program can bring a halt to the thrust of a technological thought-world. But perhaps it will help to begin and sustain a serious conversation that will allow us to distance ourselves from that thought-world, and then criticize and modify it.
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In brief, we need students who will understand the relationships between our technics and our social and psychic worlds, so that they may begin informed conversations about where technology is taking us and how.
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The second subject is, of course, religion, with which so much painting, music, technology, architecture, literature, and science are intertwined. Specifically, I want to propose that the curriculum include a course in comparative religion.
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Such a course would deal with religion as an expression of humanity's creativeness, as a total, integrated response to fundamental questions about the meaning of existence. the course would be descriptive, promoting no particular religion but illuminating the metaphors, the literature, the art, the ritual of religious expression itself
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do not see how we can claim to be educating our youth if we do not ask them to consider how different people of different times and places have tried to achieve a sense of transcendence. No education can neglect such sacred texts as Genesis, the New Testament, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita. Each of them embodies a style and a world-view that tell as much about the ascent of humanity as any book ever written. To these books I would add the Communist Manifesto,
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To summarize: I am proposing, as a beginning, a curriculum in which all subjects are presented as a stage in humanity's