Education / Youth – Page 59

Education Redefined

When I was a young girl growing up in Anderson, Indiana (circa Ice Age), Ball State University, located in nearby Muncie, was sort of a joke. It was a “Teachers’ College,” attended by kids who didn’t have the grades to get into more rigorous or respectable schools.

Over the years, Ball State’s reputation has improved tremendously. It is no longer just a teachers’ college enrolling substandard students. It has become a respectable and respected University.

Or so I thought.

Suddenly, Ball State’s motto–“Education Redefined”–has taken on a whole new meaning. A recent news item was nothing short of appalling.

Ball State University has hired a controversial astronomer who is a national leader in the intelligent design movement (Slabaugh, Muncie Star Press). President Jo Ann Gora approved the hiring of Guillermo Gonzalez as an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy on June 12 at a salary of $57,000. He will start teaching at BSU in August. The hiring occurred after Ball State had launched an investigation into a complaint that another assistant professor in the same department, Eric Hedin, was promoting intelligent design in a science class…

Every court that has considered the propriety of teaching “creationism” or “intelligent design” (interchangable terms, no matter how desperately their proponents claim otherwise) in public school science classes has concluded that intelligent design is religion, not science. That includes Republican judges appointed by conservative Republican Presidents. Among scientists, intelligent design is a joke–not because it postulates the existence of God (many scientists believe in God), but because it is not science. Intelligent design or creationism can be taught in a class on comparative religion, but it simply cannot be taught as science.

Let’s talk about what science is.

Science is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence. It requires the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena. Science is characterized by empirical inquiry.

The scientific method begins with the identification of a question or problem, after which relevant data are gathered, a hypothesis is formulated based upon that data, and the hypothesis is then subject to additional empirical testing.

Development of a scientific theory is a part of the scientific method. It involves summarizing a group of hypotheses that have been successfully and repeatedly tested. Once enough empirical evidence accumulates to support a hypothesis, a theory is developed, and that theory becomes accepted as a valid explanation of a particular phenomenon.

In the scientific method, a clear distinction is drawn between facts, which can be observed and/or measured, and theories, which are scientists’ explanations and interpretations of those facts. Scientists can draw various interpretations from their observations, or from the results of their experiments, but the facts, which have been called the cornerstone of the scientific method, do not change. A scientific theory is not the end result of the scientific method; theories are constantly supported or rejected, improved or modified as more information is gathered so that the accuracy of the prediction becomes greater over time.

Nonscientists use the word theory to mean speculation, or guess—“I have a theory about that.” When we fail to distinguish between our casual use of the term and its very different scientific meaning, we confuse discussions of science education. This has been particularly true of arguments surrounding Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Some religious people (certainly not all) believe that the theory of evolution is inconsistent with a belief in God, and they challenge the teaching of evolution in biology classes because they believe that it is “just a theory.”

In order to be scientific, hypotheses and theories must be subject to falsification.

A falsifiable assertion is one that can be empirically refuted or disproved.

Observing that a woman or a sunset is beautiful, asserting that you feel sad, declaring that you are in love and similar statements may be very true, but they aren’t science, because they can be neither empirically proved nor disproved. Similarly, God may exist, but that existence is not falsifiable—God cannot be dragged into a laboratory and tested. One either believes in His existence or not. (That’s why religious belief is called faith.)

It’s unfortunate that so many people don’t understand the difference between science and religion, but it is inconceivable that an institution of higher education would confuse the two, or allow religious doctrine to be taught as science.

I don’t know what’s going on at Ball State, but apparently that institution is “redefining education” in ways that will return it to its previous status as a third-rate institution.

Jo Ann Gora should be embarrassed, and Ball State alumni–who are seeing their credentials devalued–should be furious.

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It’s About More Than the Fireworks

I hope you all had a happy 4th of July celebration. (For those in my age cohort, I hope you were able to stay up for the fireworks….I’m happy to report that, with the help of an afternoon nap, I made it!) I also hope that at some point during the festivities, you thought a bit about the meaning of citizenship.

I know my periodic diatribes about the importance of civic knowledge often makes me sound like a broken record, so today, I’m ceding my position as annoying sermonizer to this guy.

I hope you take the time to read the whole column. It isn’t long. But in case you are disinclined to click through, here’s the conclusion:

For good or for ill, the education reform movement of the last few decades has achieved a nearly unquestioned consensus that the big picture goal of K-12 education is to ensure that all of America’s children leave school “college or career ready.”

By all means, let’s prime the pump of our economic competitiveness with more college-goers, more science, math and technology graduates. Let’s ensure every child has a shot at a private piece of the American Dream.

But let’s also make sure schools still perform the greatest possible public service: preparing our children to be the informed citizens a stable, self-governing country needs.

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Defining Our Terms

These days, you can’t engage in cocktail party chatter or turn to a “serious” television program without finding yourself in a conversation about education reform. Everyone has a theory, and almost everyone has a culprit–the sad state of education is due to (choose one or more) teachers’ unions, poor parenting, bloated administrations, corporate privatizers, or the ACLU and its pesky insistence on fidelity to the Establishment Clause.

I’m still waiting for one of those conversations to turn to a pretty basic question: just how are we defining education?

Make no mistake: in most of these conversations, we are talking past each other. There is a huge disconnect in what people mean when they criticize education or advocate for changes in education policy. All too often, parents view education as a consumer good–skills they want their children to learn so that they can compete successfully in the American economy. That parental concern is far more understandable than the obliviousness of legislators and educators who want to assess the adequacy of high schools and colleges by looking at how many graduates land jobs.

Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with job training. But job training is not the same thing as an education.

An op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times–The Decline and Fall of the English Major–detailed “a new and narrowing vocational emphasis in the way students and their parents think about what to study in college. As the American Academy report notes, this is the consequence of a number of things, including an overall decline in the experience of literacy, the kind of thing you absorbed, for instance, if your parents read aloud to you as a child. The result is that the number of students graduating in the humanities has fallen sharply.”

What many undergraduates do not know — and what so many of their professors have been unable to tell them — is how valuable the most fundamental gift of the humanities will turn out to be. That gift is clear thinking, clear writing and a lifelong engagement with literature.

Maybe it takes some living to find out this truth. Whenever I teach older students, whether they’re undergraduates, graduate students or junior faculty, I find a vivid, pressing sense of how much they need the skill they didn’t acquire earlier in life. They don’t call that skill the humanities. They don’t call it literature. They call it writing — the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit, even a literary merit, of their own.

As a college professor, I can confirm the abysmal writing skills of most undergraduates. And as a former high-school English teacher, I can also confirm that an inability to express a thought clearly is usually a good indicator of an inability to think clearly. (When a student says “I know what I mean, I just can’t say it,” it’s a safe bet that student does not know what he means.)

People learn to communicate clearly from reading widely. Reading widely introduces students to the human condition, to different ways of understanding, to the importance of literature and history and science, to the meaning of citizenship, to the difference between fact and opinion. Such people–educated people–are also more likely to succeed at whatever they choose to do. But that greater likelihood of success is a byproduct of genuine education, not its end.

Unless the conversation about education reform begins with a discussion of what we mean by “education,” unless we can agree on our goals for our schools, we will be unable to measure our progress.

We will keep talking past each other, and looking for someone to blame.

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A Serious Question

Our ship has crossed the pond, and we are moored in St. Malo, in northern France.

While we browse the walled city (despite the cold and rain), I’d like you to consider a question that I find increasingly pressing—and confounding: what must a citizen know?

In other words, what are the absolute essentials, the basic information and skills, needed in order to be a citizen (as opposed to a resident) of a democratic nation-state? There are obviously lots of things it would be nice if people knew, but I’m looking for the irreducible minimum here. If you could wave a magic wand and require an essential curriculum of your own devising, what would that curriculum contain, and why?

This is not an idle question; I really, really want to know what you think.

I’m leaving now. Talk amongst yourselves.

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Much Better

Yesterday was day two of the We the People competition, and we judged another 14 teams. Although there were a couple of substandard performances, most of the students we saw on Day Two ranged from impressive to phenomenal.

The opening question these teams had to answer was hardly a model of clarity. “In Federalist 51, Madison famously asserted that ‘it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.’ In what ways do the Bill of Rights and the amendments protect individuals from oppression by its rulers?”

In the process of considering that question, we posed such ancillary inquiries as: what did the Founders see as the source of our rights? What is selective incorporation? What was the purpose of the 9th and 10th Amendments? What is the difference between negative and positive rights? What is the difference between procedural and substantive due process? Why are property rights important? and many more.

The best teams answered these and other questions in depth, displaying a highly sophisticated understanding of the philosophical origins and historical context of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. At times, they made genuinely profound observations; one student, in a discussion of Madison’s description of majority and minority factions noted that size alone should not determine whether a faction is a majority or minority–that we should consider as well the power wielded by that faction. Another, during a discussion of incorporation (the application of provisions of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments) opined that such application was particularly important because smaller governmental units can more easily be dominated by special or powerful interests.

Unlike Day One, students on yesterday’s teams didn’t hesitate to criticize court rulings, or even to disagree with what James Madison said in Federalist 51.

Most of the students were high school juniors and seniors. However, after a very good presentation by one team, we discovered that the students in that team were high school freshmen, a fact making their accomplishment particularly impressive. It was obvious that–for all of the students–the process of studying the material, preparing themselves for a public examination of their knowledge, and co-ordinating responses within their teams had sharpened their skills and given them a degree of self-confidence and poise unusual for those so young.

Today, the top ten teams will compete in sessions held at the U.S. House of Representatives. If yesterday’s performance was any indication, it will be very hard to choose an overall winner. On the other hand, all these students are winners, because they understand their country’s history and government far better than most citizens.

These kids already know more than most of our lawmakers.

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