Today most incoming college students don't seem to know any history at all.
One of my pet peeves is the assumption that students knew more history in the past. It may be true for some decades - possibly the 50s and 60s, though I haven't seen any stats on that - but it's not an assumption that should go unquestioned. I don't know if anyone here clicked through on the link I posted in the comments to Yglesias' post, but the New York Times in 1943 ran an expose on the shocking lack of history knowledge among college freshmen.
My department tends to count a course on anyone dead as fulfilling the history requirement, as long as the focus is more or less on explaining, rather than responding to, the person's ideas.
I am guilty on Gelernter's charge, but there's only so much room in this brain; I don't think it's a failure of the educational system or evidence of bias, exactly, because there's quite a lot I don't know that is from all over the ideological divide.
It may be problematic to the extent, however, that whatever history I've had always seemed to stop ('because we're running out of time') around 1860 and pick up again around WWI.
A course at my dept on a very recently deceased philosopher (a relation of someone who appears on Zorn's The Big Gundown) was counted towards the history requirement. Everyone I talked to seemed to find this shocking, but it must have had some support.
I mean, gaps in knowledge are problematic, but I'd personally be more worried about all the journalists who manage to get their degrees without learning to write or recognize logical fallacies.
learning to write or [to] recognize logical fallacies.
Parallelism!
"To avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes: is equalle to: I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or gemowe lines of one lengthe: ======, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle."
"…the way in which discussions of academic issues (diversity and pedagogy in particular come to mind, as well as the 'haven of leftists!' complaint) often implicitly privilege some departments or areas over others, which leads to a view that manages to make sense of only a narrow slice of the university."
The disingenuous synechdote, unfortunately a common ruse.
In the 1950s, incoming college freshman had already gained what we would now consider a doctoral-level knowledge of a wide variety of fields. Most had some acquaintance with at least six foreign languages and a passable facility with calculus-based physics and set theory. The high achievers had memorized all of Homer, in the original Greek. Sporting events were also characterized by much better sportsmanship and self-discipline.
Then they desegregated schools and everything went to hell.
(I sometimes think that all the critics of contemporary education are on the verge of saying that last sentence, but they realize they can't.)
Well look, David Gelertner may not be the ideal spokesman for liberal learning, nor the examples he adduces the most compelling evidence of its decline, but is it not depressing if graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, or literature are basically ignoramouses about Western culture broadly? One needn't know who Robspierre is to do great work in neural networks, or whatever. Yet such a person is nonetheless plainly an ignoramus.
What is bad about being an ignoramus? Do we really need to have this conversation?
[likewise on history textbooks. Is it not possible that Gelertner is right about their abominable quality and bias? Having just spent 10 minutes failing try to find the standard US history textbook for Southern CT, I can't comment on Gelertner's precise claim. Friends who work in the text book industry, however, confirm the general picture of intellectual decline. Isn't that bad?]
I'm not as concerned with the question "Do you know what the Dreyfuss Affair is?" as I am with the question "Do you have the skills to find out and place it in some kind of meaningful context?"
the addition of "graduate students" added nothing beyond "people who have been to college."
I don't think that's true if you read "graduate student" as a way of saying "college graduate who we can reasonably expect is more interested than average in scholarly pursuits." That is, being a graduate student is probably a pretty good indicator that one requires less arm-twisting to learn stuff.
That said, the Gelernter article is pure silliness.
I'll agree with baa for once, or halfway anyway. I'm frequently appalled by the ignorance of historical context displayed by well-educated professionals, including academics.
The mention of Dreyfus was unfortunate, since this isn't a question of specific details, but of the presence of any historical context at all.
It's so bad that a book trying to bring a historical awareness back into philosophy ("How History Made the Mind" -- my review comes up in Google) displays a rather haphazard knowledge of some of the historical periods most critical to its argument.
People often wonder out loud about at the motivation for my frequent rants about analytic philosophy. It comes from analytic philosophy's apparent conviction that all questions discussed philosophically before about 1950 have either been solved by analytic philosophy, or are being worked on by analytic philosophy, or have been assigned to a science such as linguistics or brain science, or else have been shown to be meaningless and not worth bothering with. That's a large, arrogant claim, and I think that it's not true, and that it's a very damaging error.
I won't defend today's history textbooks - my high school aimed the history books at B students (at least this is what one of the teachers told me outright when I complained) - but I guess I'll link to excerpts of the 1943 Times study again (scroll past the Hanson quote). I hesitated to do so because I feel like I'm becoming an internet crank about this (see also). I agree that ignorance is a problem, but it's been quite a persistent one, and since it's been a problem in the past it doesn't seem very helpful to say, "Things were better in the past, let's recover that."
Also, Gelernter actually frames it this way
History has (predictably) been much harder hit. In the early 1970s, many good students took a year--long college--level ("Advanced Placement") survey course in modern European history, and another in American history. Since then, modern educational techniques have worked an outright miracle. Today most incoming college students don't seem to know any history at all.
There's a "many" to "most" problem here. Today it's still true that many students take AP History, but most incoming freshmen don't know history all that well. I suspect most high school students don't take AP at all. So do most AP students know history worse than previous AP students? Could be true, but I'd like to see the data. Do people who would have taken AP not take it now? Could be true, but it seems more likely that college-bound students today would try to take as much AP as they can.
Yeah, I took gradaute students to mean "people who went to college, weren't retarded, and were fairly bookish." (and while these two groups are non-identical, I would argue that the first is, by and large, a subset of the second)
At least half of your New Year's wish is already granted, SCMT -- this Celtics team is just appalling. And Paul Peirce is shooting fricking 49% percent from the floor! The man is a goddamn hero.
And on your link, I claim complete intellectual consistency.
No, baa, I think you're cheating. G is making a point about educational systems, not about the general degeneracy of the contemporary mind. If so, the problem has to be curricular, not personal, hence "fairly bookish"-- if it suggests outside reading-- is a fudge.
I don't mean to be cranky about this; I hope you know it's all said with a wink. Appearances of crankiness come from my negative attitude toward the idea that smart people who like general learning should go to grad school-- if there's overlap, that's suggestive of a problem. (Go to grad school because you love neural networks more than anything, not because knowing a little about a lot is your goal, etc. etc.)
Also, baa, to stay on your good side I note that as far as curricular matters go, I'm part of the Great Books Reactionary Underground here. No chance of making headway, but by god we'll go down swinging.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen documented that high school history textbooks provide what he describes on his website as "an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation." (http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/ ) Great book. The problem with history textbooks isn't their "left-wing bias," as Gelernter claims, but (inter alia) that they present everything the United States has ever done as wonderful. Reading high school history textbooks, one is not told, for example, that we were at war with the "Indians" continuously for 200 years (nor of our abysmal, genocidal treatment of them), or that within a few decades after the Civil War, blacks were treated about as horribly in the South as they were under slavery (yes, they were treated pretty badly in the North, too). These textbooks also have little if any discussion of American imperialism, our sponsorship of right-wing dictators, or any other reason that people in other countries might have for not liking us.
Now I'm not sure what it is we disagree about, Fontana. I certainly agree that not every bookish smart guy should go to graudate school. Hell, I tried to get Wolfson to take a job at the Carlyle group.
The pro-Gelertner claim that seem to me defensible is that the average US (non-science) grad student possesses broader general education than the average US college student. If that's because the US college population contiains a bottom quarter who can't be expected to read or retain anything, that's as may be. Basic point: if grad students at University X are ignorant, it's a fair assumption that the undergrads at university X are yet more ignorant.
1) There is quite a lot of world history that I was taught in high school that I, as a soon-to-be ex-graduate student (pessimistically), simply no longer remember. I happen to remember that we never covered anything about Europe in the 1890s, but I doubt that my rather good grasp of European and American history has remained since my last formal history course. It would be wrong to conclude from that, however, that my high school (decent public) didn't adequately teach history, any more than my inability to remember all of second-level calculus means that my math education was inadequate.
I took AP Euro and American and placed out of both in college; if anything, that's hurt my knowledge of history since my last history class was completed when I was sixteen.
I'm rusty. (And I'm also a lot dumber than I was when I was sixteen.) But that's not the fault of the schooling system, unless the proverbial schooling system back in the day had a method for perfect memory retention that we've lost.
2) Gelernter's claim that missing knowledge about the beginnings of the Zionist movement, in graduate students, amounts to leftist bias is just absurd.
There was a question on the AP Exam of the plight of European Jews in the late 1800s; I remember it because my memory likes to fuck with me, and because I compared Catherine the Great and Stalin instead. It's true my high school didn't teach it, because we ran out of time while preparing for the AP Euro exam, but look, it was on the test. This was in 1996.
Now maybe the non-leftists control the exam board but the leftists chose the curriculum that's based on the exam.... but the reasonable explanation is a lot simpler. We always, in every history course I took, ran out of time by the end of the school year, at which point it was a choice, in European history, to cover the 1850s-1890s, or to skip that and move on to WWI and II.
As an also soon-to-be ex-graduate student, but one who would specialize in late 19th century American and (sort of) European history, your stories are breaking my heart.
baa, your claim in 28, that graduate students generally possess greater broad knowledge (related: should they?) just seems false. People who end up pursuing graduate school tend to be the sort captivated by one specific field, often to the exclusion of all else.
No, no, I think you're right, cala, I think only one of my high school history courses - on China and Japan - covered the whole assigned period. The rest were, well I don't remember what the rest were. I think 20th century US history might have consisted of PBS documentaries and some lectures, and my first semester freshman history course was in a room full of stoves and ovens, taught by someone who had taught cooking and home ec for 25 years but, because she had a history BA and the school was understaffed that semester, she was assigned to teach history for the first time that year. So all the nonpolitical/nonpoliticized constraints were there.
I'm just sad that the late 19th century gets skipped over; this happens in "US from the Civil War to the present" courses too, when the teacher decides to speed into the 20th century. I don't remember any late 19th century history from high school.
Oddly, that happened in my high school too; in the U.S. history classes, we study the Civil War in great detail (all forgotten, too), study the Reconstruction, and at about 1880, we skip ahead until we get interesting and start to pwn t3h w0rld.
My grad school experience seems to back up 35 and 24. Maybe I'm an outlier too, but I've heard quite a lot grad students make statements of the type "I'm so not interested in X" even where X was an acknowledged important subject. People at the dreary place I worked before grad school seemed to have a wider variety of interests, and a number were considering, but ambivalent about, going to graduate school.
Maybe am I a statistically outlier, but I learned about our mistreatment of the Indians from somewhere, and I didn't have a course in college on history..... so where did it come from? (We didn't tackle it in elementary school, but who studies genocide when they're seven, anyway? If there is a time to be upbeat about being American, it's when you're little.)
And my high school history book had a chapter called "The American Empire." It was generally upbeat about it, but it did describe the expansion to California and the Pacific Northwest while mentioning a lot of the problems that it caused.
Just to be clear, Cala, you can be right that grad students are more likely to be specialists than generalists, and it can nonetheless be true that grad students are on average, more likely to possess broad education than undergraduates.
Consider the simplified equation
I = S + D Where:
I = # of students without broad liberal education
S = those who have passionate, but narrow, intellectual interests
D = those who have no intellectual interests
My claim would be that even if the S% among grad students is greater than the S% among undergrads, the D% among undergrads is much higher than among grad students.
I see what you're saying, sort of. All else being equal, graduate students will have had a broader education than undergrads, so they're the best measure of the 'best' our system can put out. Fair enough.
I think this claim is wrong for the factors I mentioned; I was a great generalist through high school, and later I specialized, and the lack of knowledge is due to attrition over time rather than lack of exposure to historical knowledge.
In short, I don't think that equation helps because S and I interfere with each other; I'd be a better generalist if my brain power weren't finite and being sucked up by a graduate program (that is probably going to kick me out.)
Let B = those with intellectual interests broad enough to include knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair
It would be interesting to know if the B% would be higher among grads or undergrads. For all S where S does not include interest in a topic for which knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair is important, I suspect that S and D are similarly unlikely to know what it was.
I have probably mangled the language of logic and math in this comment.
Well that attempt at clarification obviously failed. My bad. It's not so much that the grad students are the best we breed, as far as general education goes, but rather that they are less likely than undergrads to be totally out lunch, with respect to intellectual endeavor. And I think that difference is large enough to swamp any factors (like an emphasis on specialization) that tend to disfavor the level of general knowledge among graduate students.
To put it even more simply, the "D" in the equation above stood for drunk...
Management consulting can be a nice option if you a) don't quite know what you want to do, and b) have the flexibility/desire to travel and work long hours. It's a good overall business education, and it serves as bogus credential for what you want to do next. Getting in the door is the trouble. What was your MA in?
M.A.'s philosophy; undergrad had a minor in computery business stuff (don't remember any of that either but I can still pretend). Do have a year of work experience in consulting.
Arg. I hate school and work. Someone make me a millionaire. Then I'll have time to read about the Dreyfuss Affair.
I'm skipping a lot of posts here, but I don't quite understand why ignorance=leftist bias. There is a great deal that I would bet Gelertner doesn't know about, say, labor history, and I would be willing to bet that the student who never heard of Dreyfuss has also never heard of the Triangle fire. My high school history textbooks told me nothing about mass deportation of Japanese Americans during World War 2, and that was back before they were supposed to have deteriorated so badly.
And here I thought the value of a historical education was that one avoided tendentious analogies!
Seriously though, mcmc raises an important point. There are (at least) three kinds of historicla ignorance at issue here. Ignorance that arises from simple negligence (poor pedagogy, laziness, whatever), ignorance that arises from political bias, and ignorance that arises from different (non-political) conceptions of the practice of historical education. I suspect #1 is the main source, and is (at least immediately) uncontroversial.
The later two are more interesting (at least to me), and they often interact. For Gelertner, I suspect, some aspect of the correct approach to history at the highschool level is bound up in teaching things like the Dreyfus affair: major political events in Western great powers. There are a couple of choices here -- the idea of a common intellectual culture, the idea of the centrality of the West and of Europe, a focus on 'big events' -- that are both intellectual and political judgments. These are hard decisions to escape -- even if one assumes scrupulously unbiased treatment and thinks only in terms of level of attention. Which should get more pages, the Missouri Compromise or the Seneca Falls convention? Or neither of these in favor of an account of everyday life as a poor farmer in 1830s Connecticut?
It's hard to answer that question without some idea of what one is trying to accomplish with the high school study of history. Is one trying to inform citizens, instruct humanists, or make a particular point?
Forgive me for stepping in where sensible people would fear to tread, but as a visitor from a parallel universe of discourse this all seems a bit angels & pin head.
What we're trying to do is create a shared system of symbols and meanings, a culture; a shared reality; create enough areas of agreement about what was/is/can be that we can sustain a civilization.
Such efforts are *always* contested. Whether it's a contest over the meaning of sex, or the place of religion in politics, or whether rock&roll inevitably causes moral decay, meaning is contested. That obviously includes contesting the meaning, the importance, the substance of history.
So statements such as "different (non-political) conceptions of the practice of historical education" look like gibberish to me, because there ain't no such thing as a non-political conception of history. History, or what we decide should be the substance of history, reflects a judgement over what has meaning and import, and that's always a political question. Any question of what is admitted to our shared reality is a political question, a question of how to sustain civilization.
reflects a judgement over what has meaning and import, and that's always a political question
If you want the word "political" I'll give it to you, but I'd like to keep some sort of a distinction between my deliberations about value and my subscription to the People's Daily Worker.
Let B = those with intellectual interests broad enough to include knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair
I have knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair, but it's not because of the breadth of my intellectual interests. I can't even remember how I learned about it. Probably from my parents.
*Of course* these discussions "implicitly privilege some departments or areas over others". That's inherent in the contest. We're fighting over what should be privileged, what's important, what has meaning and what doesn't. Over what it means to be civilized.
Jefferson believed one couldn't be civilized without an understanding of the architecture of Palladio. Now I'd bet that name doesn't appear in most syllabi. Seventy five years ago one couldn't get out of most high schools without being at least exposed to, if not actually profficient at, wood and metal working. Now I'm sure there are graduate students who couldn't tell a lathe from a milling machine, nor have a clue how to operate either. Forty years ago the idea that high school students should have an opportunity for direct experience with computers was unusual. Nursing started as an avocation, became a trade, and then turned itself into a profession (as did law and medicine). All that happenned because of discussions implicitly privileging some areas over others.
*Of course* this "leads to a view that manages to make sense of only a narrow slice of the university." That's the nature of univerwsties, and cultures. They usuall don't make sense as a whole, because as any moment your seeing something that's in the middle of a transition, with holdovers like a body's appendix, and battles half-fought with both (or all) sides still on the field. Culture, being actively contested, is never a sensible integrated whole.
How can you distinguish "between my deliberations about value and my subscription to the People's Daily Worker?"
Don't you subscribe to the Daily Worker as a result of a deliberation about value? Don't actions reflect (or embody) values? I'd say that the subscription was at least as good evidence of your deliberations about values as whatever you might say about those deliberations.
Sorry, I not only think slow, I'm not good at multitasking.
I'd suggest that if you know about the Dreyfus Affair it does reflect the breadth of your interests.
If I may toss in an usupported assertion: people are much more likely to remember things that interest them, things that are important to them. Whether the interest (or importance) was intellectual, as opposed, for example, to remembering the Dreyfus Affair because you heard it from someone in whom you had a strong sexual interest, I couldn't say. I'm not at all sure I know the distinction between an intellectual interest and other kinds of interests.
And here I thought the value of a historical education was that one avoided tendentious analogies!
No, I'm pretty sure that history is philosophy teaching by examples. You can call that tendentious if you like, but you'll have to pick a fight with Thucydides, not me.
I'm with Cala about the forgetting factor. This may not be supportable, but I don't think the problem is that the "system" doesn't teach broad materials, but the it doesn't do so in a memorable way. I took an advanced European History course in high school that lasted two years and culminated in a 6-hour examination on which I did probably better than most other test I've taken. I don't feel like I'm some kind of connoisseur of European history, now, though I do have minimum knowledge of the Dreyfus affair.
The other things is you're not really forced to learn much in college, at a lot of schools. I took one history course (which I don't remember much of except for Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, for some reason, even though I loved the class and the prof), and tested out of the other one. So if I hadn't taken that class in high school (which was not required), I would have had no opportunity to know anything about what when on in Europe, ever. So.
I learned my European History in high school the pre-WWII German way from a pre-WWII German: lecture and rote memorization. We covered l'Affaire Dreyfuss, bien sur! And, since I remember it pretty damned well all these years later, I've tended to give credit to Herr. C for his teaching.
However. I went to my high school reunion last week and reminisced with some other students about Herr C. They remembered virtually nothing from the class--not even his startling (yearly, penitential) admission about his short time in the Hitler Youth. I remember what I remember from his class because I continued to read history.
For the "O Tempora; O Mores!" crowd: Herr C. also prepped me for the European History AP. I wanted to take it, although a specific class for the test hadn't been given at my HS for about ten years. Herr C. shook his head at my progress: "It is a very difficult test," he warned me. "I do not think you are ready." He was a little horrified, I think, when I got a five. Declining standards? Maybe.
You've nailed the structure of the problem, baa (while Gerlernter knits baskets out of copies of the Dreyfus court records), but you leave us without a concrete opinion. What should we cover?
Many proposals (usually ones upset that we don't spend enough time on the evils of slavery, or of the genocide of the native groups, or on mistakes) seem to ignore that first, many students are simply too young to understand complex motivations for war (can you explain the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation to an eight-year old?) and that second, instilling some pride in one's country's accomplishments may not be a wholly bad thing, at least while very young. Criticism may be done more vigorously if one believes there is something worthwhile at the heart of the mess to criticize.
A friend of mine in Belgium learned, as part of his schooling, about two teensy battles Belgium fought before they were Belgium, because they were battles in which Belgium pwned some French ass. They're rather insignificant worldwide, but important to Belgian identity. This oddly hasn't prevented him from criticizing the later Belgian colonial programs.
That's only half the question. We not only must decide which events are important, but what meaning to ascribe to those events.
For example, most people probably agree that we should all know about the war in Viet-Nam. However, do we teach that:
A. False and misleading reports from a biased press can cause political leaders to undermine military efforts, causing the noble sacrifice of tens of thousands of soldiers in the struggle to spead freedom to be shamefully wasted; or
B. Mao was wrong when he said that political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and that you can't win the hearts and minds of a people when you're napalming women, children, houses and villages.
It goes back to the question of deciding the content of Belgian identity.
Personally, I regret not being well taught about the Peloponnesian war, an understanding of which is crucial for appreciating much recent science fiction.
Gelernter's discussion of Devil's Island and the Dreyfus Affair is ambiguous. Maybe the grad students knew about Dreyfus but didn't know he was sent to Devil's Island. I sure as hell didn't.
To start algebra in grade five? Because seriously, that's what any further calculus would require.
At my high school, year-two calculus was made available shortly after I graduated (for the top track); when I was in high school, I exhausted the curriculum with calc I. My sisters did with calc II. Beyond that, even some of the science majors in college don't need calc III; forget calc III and teach logic and writing.
To Michael Schneider's claim that it's all political, I can only respond that I wish it were so easy. Politics -- in the usual partisan sense of tax rates, welfare policy, the war in Iraq and abortion -- really don't suffice to explain the debates about education that we see.
To take one hackneyed divide: there are those (like Fontana, woo hoo!) who are part of the Great Books underground. There are others who find the great books idea crazy. Here's the thing. Contrary to vulgar opinion, the Great Books underground counts among its members people of almost every political affiliation. And their support of Great Books programs usually owes little to that affiliation. Certainyl were my goal to turn a group of sixteen year olds into a squadron of ideological mini-mes, the Great Books are practically the last instrument I would deploy in the effort.
But if instead Michael S means that one's views on education will inevitably derive from a conception of "the good life for man," and that people who disagree on this will disagree about education, then yes, 100%. That's why debates about education policy are always so interesting.
Slolerner: my (I hope not mean-spirited) suggestion was merely that comparing the the case of Dreyfus and his France to the the case of (say) Jose Padilla, and today's America was not a particularly illuminating analogy.
Cala: the ideal history curriculum, that's a topic for outside a comment box, I fear! Maybe we can save it for the next meet up ("OggedCon 2006").
My 6 year-old nephew is doing more advanced math than I was doing in grade 5. Public schools, both. His mother is almost worried about how advanced the curriculum is--but they've keeping up.
was merely that comparing the the case of Dreyfus and his France to the the case of (say) Jose Padilla, and today's America was not a particularly illuminating analogy.
Except that, from my perspective, you're in the tank for Bush on civil rights violations, baa. After all, at least Drefus got a trial about which people could take sides. There's that nasty politics again, determinant factor in deciding which analogies are tendentious (and why) and which are not.
Saying that X is a poor analogy for Y does not imply that is X is better or worse than Y. That's really all I meant by it SCMTim -- that the cases aren't really terribly alike. As you note, one enormous difference between the Padilla case and the Dreyfus case is that in the later, formal due process was more in evidence. Unless the only link drawing the analogies together is INJUSTICE!!!, which would serve to confirm my suspicion that this is an example of politics providing an analogy where one would not draw one.
But of course I am in the tank for W, so isn't that just what I would say?
In contrast to my high school's poor record on history, the math was pretty good. It was quite common for people to take the AP Calc BC - I don't think there even were AB classes since it was assumed that if you took AP you'd do the BC sequence - and 5-10 people did calculus junior year (or earlier), after which they took math classes at the local university.
Like Cala, I took two years of calc in high school (junior year AB, senior year BC). This was a large urban high school with a poor reputation, but I'm proud of having gone there and proud of the education I got.
On a more relevant note, baa is absolutely right that the Great Books Underground crosses all political lines. My sister goes to St. John's, as did both of our parents, and when she mentions that there is a large conservative Christian population among the student body they are amazed. I would submit, however, that the different people supporting programs like this do so for very different reasons.
Unless the only link drawing the analogies together is INJUSTICE!!!
Except that, as I understand it, the claim for the importance of the Dreyfus Affair is, in part, that it motivated Herzl's Zionism ("Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society"). Or, more formally, Herzl decided that "brother can't get a break."
OK, a bit of a stretch, I admit. But I remind you of the words of the Ur-Text:
Now, what in the heaven does a jury know about hell
If I took it, but but they just look at me
Like, hey I'm on a mission
I'm talkin' 'bout conditions
Ain't right sittin' like dynamite
Gonna blow you up and it just might
Blow up the bench and
Judge, the courtroom plus I gotta mention
This court is dismissed when I grab the mike
Yo flave...what is this?
The underlying question is always the same - can I trust the government to be fair to me and mine.
But of course I am in the tank for W, so isn't that just what I would say?
I hope you know that I have never thought that you have said anything in bad faith. I worry that, as our lonely Republican, you feel jumped occassionally. In recompense, I hope you're able to trade Pierce, who is a cancer. And the inventor of AIDS.
To Michael Schneider's claim that it's all political, I can only respond that I wish it were so easy. Politics -- in the usual partisan sense of tax rates, welfare policy, the war in Iraq and abortion -- really don't suffice to explain the debates about education that we see.
Politics in its broadest sense: "Who whom", would go a long way towards explaining the debate. Not only concerning what is taught in history classes, but concerning the deployment of resources in education.
Public school, b-wo? The track at my school for bright kids starts with algebra in seventh grade, geometry in eighth, algebra II in ninth, trig/precalc in tenth, with two years of calculus following it. (There was another year of something or other when I was there, or I didn't start algebra till 8th grade, or something).
I suppose some of those years could be collapsed into each other, but I'd hate to lose basic geometry (mostly because that's all I remember). And I don't know if elementary schoolers are solid enough in basic arithmetic to move onto the more theoretical stuff.
Summer school is cheating if we're talking curricula.
One of the problems with trying to cram everything into high school is that much further along in math, you're going to need someone with a master's degree in mathematics to teach advanced calculus properly; and at the moment, people with master's degrees in mathematics have far more lucrative options than teaching high school. (My calculus class was taught badly, and it seems to have been better than many; I can't imagine my calc teacher attempting calc III.)
I'm bitter about the math situation. I tapped out my HS' math classes in grade 11, and there was no "local university" option. In middle school it was great, because they would just send me over to the high school (it was a K-12 campus) for math and French courses. When I was in college, I had high school students in some quite advanced classes (one was the son of one of my professors and had done a ton of summer work), and I was jealous of the bastards. They were better than nearly all the college students in there, too, or at least 75% of them.
And yeah, I think they should start teaching algebra in grade 5. I spent a whole summer working on a textbook based on that very proposition. There's a program that is very determined to teach algebra to younger and younger students, and it has done so with quite a bit of success (and these aren't all mathematically advanced students, either).
AP tests: very, very silly if they are supposed to judge competence in the subject, rather than ability relative to the larger population. When I was graduating from eb's high school, I didn't want to take the AP Physics test because it was an extremely stressful week in my family life; I was sure I would bomb and it would be wasted effort. Besides, even if I had an okay grasp on mechanics, I was pretty sure I didn't have electromagnetism clear--why fake it? My teacher urged me to take everything, so I did. When I took my tests, I was worried about my score on the Calc BC, since I hadn't had time to answer the last question, though I was sure I had done everything else right, and I thought Physics would be a disaster, since I had failed to answer a single question on the long answer correctly. A few months later, I found out I got 5s on everything. I apparently managed to bullshit a science test: even though I couldn't answer any questions, I pretty much knew which formulas applied to which, so I applied them and did some math until I had an unmanageable snarl and then I moved onto the next one. Apparently partial-credit+curve=5 on the AP test. Maybe I was better at physics than the rest of the test-taking population, but the notion that I would have been competent to skip out of mechanics and e&m in college is absurd.
You were probably compared to me, who took the wrong AP Physics test without any AP training, who left 3/4ths of the test blank because I had never studied any E&M... and pulled a 2. I think you'd have to try to get a 1.
On the upside I left the exam two hours early and went for ice cream.
my (I hope not mean-spirited) suggestion was merely that comparing the the case of Dreyfus and his France to the the case of (say) Jose Padilla, and today's America was not a particularly illuminating analogy.
It's not a question of analogies. Arguments over the aptness of historical analogies too often bogs down in the, "but there's no sand in Vietnam!" problem.
It's a question of, as you correctly say, what the point is of learning history, or a given piece of history, at all. There are, apparently, two main answers being floated here, but I think they're really the same answer.
Answer (a) is that E. D. Hirschy kind of idea that Educated Persons should come up to scratch at Trivial Pursuit.
Answer (b), which I would give, is that there is some present-day application to learning history; that this application when not purely practical (e.g. military history) is essentially ethical.
Gelernter seems to rest his argument on answer (a), and so, it seems to me, do you, by using the adjective "tendentious". But why is it good to know about the Dreyfus affair, absent present application? I can think of no answer that does not imply some selection principle -- why the Dreyfus Affair, and not, let's say, the idiom of caricature peculiar to the era of Louis Napoleon? because the Dreyfus Affair had consequences i, ii, and iii -- and of course, once you develop an argument about consequences, you are stuck developing an argument about present-day application.
I agree that the Dreyfus Affair is worth an educated person's time (though not perhaps much of it) because it suggests
(1) the degree to which a civilized society committed to a theory of rights and liberties is nevertheless vulnerable, owing to a stew of motives incorporating ethnic prejudice, bureaucratic face-saving, and fear, to fits that can cause it to violate its core commitments to rights and liberties;
(2) the only honor in such an enterprise accrues to those who stick up for those core commitments in the face of prevailing opinion and official policy; that honor accrues in proportion to the effort expended on sticking up for those commitments and the consequences of those efforts.
This is a long-winded way of unpacking my comment in 53. I daresay that nearly everyone on learning of the Dreyfus Affair wants to believe one would have been a Dreyfusard, and to a considerable extent that is the point of knowing about the Dreyfus Affair. I don't think Gelernter meets that test by any stretch. Nor in fact do many of us, but Gelernter was the one who brought it up.
My thanks for putting up with me. Sorry for being a bit slow, and needing not only sleep but time to think.
Fortunately, while I was attempting thought, Slolrnr nailed it: "But why is it good to know about the Dreyfus affair, absent present application?" In the terms I'm more accustomed to, ‘why learn history unless it has meaning and import?'
Slolrnr posits an answer in terms of ethics, and gives a nice explication, but I think that answer is too narrow (and I'm not at all sure I buy his implied assumption that ethics is not purely practical). It doesn't account for Cala's example of the battles of the Belgians, for example.
I'd answer in cultural terms: that it's good to know about the Dreyfus affair because it helps build the shared understanding of meaning and reality that's necessary for civilization (the shared, agreed system that allows groups to live in something like peace and order).
Others might frame an answer in terms of identity: it's good to know because we're the sort of people who know about the Dreyfus affair - that's who we are. Just as, for example, Belgians are the sort of people who can successfully resist the bullying of their larger neighbor.
These are not disjunct answers, but different aspects (avatars?) of the same answer, which Slolrnr might put in terms of "present-day application. "
I call this application politics, which I'm using in the sense of ‘however it is we decide how we can all live together'. I think this differs from what baa is calling ‘the good life for man.' (A quick google led me to believe that's a reference to Aristotle and Plato)/
There is a saying about how getting the right answer depends on asking the right question, and I think it applies here. Consider these questions:
A. What do I need to know to live the good life for man?
B. What do you need to know to live the good life for man?
C. What does everyone need to know if we're going to preserve civilization?
Those questions elicit very different answers. I might think that I need to know Hebrew, or which direction faces Mecca, without thinking that you or anyone else need know these things. Personally, I don't think my ignorance of calculus has impaired either my own life or civilization, although some here seem to think it important. In the public debate I think it's important to distinguish when we're talking about the individual (what I think Baa was calling ‘the good life for man') and the group question.
Once we focus on question C - what does everyone need to know - it looks to me like the same class or type of question which Baa identifies as archetypically political. We decide what gets taught in school the same way we decide tax rates, welfare policy, the war in Iraq, abortions, etc.
Look at the question "should Intelligent Design be taught in Biology class in the public schools of Dover PA?" That question went to voters as part of a school board election, then the school board deliberated and voted, and then it ended up in federal court. On the practical level, that's exactly how the abortion question is handled.
Looking at the question more broadly, one could frame the ID debate as a question of identity (are we the sort of Nation that privileges Darwin?), or as an cultural question (what is the meaning of evolution?) or as an ethical question.
I hope those aren't tendentious examples. I must admit that I have the forgetting problem which Cala identified; things that don't strike me as meaningful or important get forgotten. So I like examples that have current import, which are (of course) the questions now being hotly contested.
Sorry about the length. I didn't have the time or the smarts to make it shorter.
1> Gelernter's column was evidently created by shooting some eightballs and then dictating into a tape recorder for 20 minutes. Babble-liscious is the appropriate word for that piece of junk.
2> I started to write something here about what Gelernter was failing to say, or attempting but failing to say but forget it. The stuff about Dreyfus is a throwaway line designed to reconfirm his reader's prejudices without examining them or proving them, and likewise, the column is bullshit end to end.
3> So, fuck him.
I took AP Euro, and it was adequate, I guess. I read the textbook, then spent the rest of the time reading other stuff in class. Boring!
History is usually poorly taught and goes mostly unlearned as far as I can tell, and that goes way way back. But the situation is not discernably worse than it ever was. Given the Weekly Standard's version of WWII, that crowd clearly has no fucking idea what the hell they're on about, so I don't really see where they get off. Perhaps if DG was babling about how ignorant he was of WWII he'd be on to something. So:
slolernr: It's a question of, as you correctly say, what the point is of learning history, or a given piece of history, at all. There are, apparently, two main answers being floated here, but I think they're really the same answer. Answer (a) is that E. D. Hirschy kind of idea that Educated Persons should come up to scratch at Trivial Pursuit.
Which is really a waste of time except in the sense of a minimal shared culture; that is mostly achieved in elementary school.
Answer (b), which I would give, is that there is some present-day application to learning history; that this application when not purely practical (e.g. military history) is essentially ethical.
I don't know what you mean here by ethical.
I would say that the only raw data available about the practice of government, social order and so on are contained in history and anthropology. It isn't very good data, but it is data. Without a skeletal form of 'history', any given person will be unable to absorb any kind of new data that becomes available, whatever the data (social, political, economic, etc.). That is a practical purpose, but I don't see how you can make conclusions about ethics without dealing with practicalities.
What skeletal form of history should be taught is contentious, and rightly so. But without the context of what skeletal form of history you're trying to teach, the data point about Dreyfus is just silly. The Dreyfus affair may be important to the history of Zionism, but on the context of WWI, Edirne and the Balkans (and pan-Slavism and Hungarian history, etc.) are far more important to answering the question of why a whole shitload of guys got waxed on the Western Front.
Sorry sloelrnr and MHS, this comment is probably on a perpendicular vector to what you're talking about.
ash
['I wish to throw coffee mugs at that guy's head.']
Not too orthogonal, Ash, for I think I understand what you said.
What I learned from both Anthropology and philosophy of science is that there ain't no such thing as really raw data: that any observational data is meaningful only in terms of the theory behind the observation. This is akin to your statement about the necessity for something on which to hang new information.
For example, descriptions of Crow kinhip systems assume the existence of kinship, customarily defined in terms of blood and marriage. For cultures that don't construct kinship this way (e.g. Yap), you can't meaningfully describe kinship.
It's like looking at cloud chamber pictures of atomic collisions - the understanding presupposes a theory which gives meaning to the idea of an electron volt.
So any skeletal form of history is going to reflect assumptions of what has meaning.
And, of course, I'd suggest that examining 'minimally shared culture' is not a waste of time. Millions of people have ended up quite dead because of disagreements about what constitutes 'minimally shared culture'. My limited experience of mediation suggests that if one can bring two parties to recognize the minimum shared understandings, you're most of the way to a settlement.
Looking at the question more broadly, one could frame the ID debate as a question of identity (are we the sort of Nation that privileges Darwin?)
I know this tangential, but this set me off for a moment. Mr. Schneider, can you clarify this point for me? My concern is the way you phrased this point (the ID debate being about "privileging Darwin," rather than, say, the insistence that science classes being about, I dunno, science). I just want to be sure I understand your thinking.
"My concern is the way you phrased this point (the ID debate being about "privileging Darwin," rather than, say, the insistence that science classes being about, I dunno, science). I just want to be sure I understand your thinking."
Good question, Mr. or Ms. Chopper. Let me take a very short trip down memory lane. We started with the question "what should students know about history?", which became ‘what should be taught about history?", which turned into "what is education all about, anyway?".
I tried to answer that question in terms of culture: that education is about constructing a shared system of meanings which allows people to live together in something like peace and order. I called this construction process politics. I asserted that culture (meaning) is always changing, and that it changes through a process of contest: that meanings change as people disagree about those meanings.
I asserted that these contests could be fought in different terms such as culture, identity, or ethics, all of which are different ways of looking at the same thing. I then offered the example of Intelligent Design, to try and stay on something like the original question about teaching history. I tried to frame the ID question in terms of identity, and culture, and should have framed it as an ethical question. I'm not saying the debate *is* about privileging Darwin, but that it could be contested in those terms.
The problem with casting it as ‘whether science classes should be about science' is that it begs the question. It assumes that there should be science classes, and that science should be defined in its own terms. In other words, you are assuming that science has a special place and should be taught: that science (Darwin) is privileged.
That may strike you as so obvious to be indisputable, but tens of millions of our fellow citizens apparently disagree. You may think they're idiots. That's okay, they might think you're a secular materialist.
Once we get to the point where one group is saying "idiot" and the other is saying "secular materialist", we're no longer having a discussion. There's no way to reach a modus vivendi. There's no resolution except saying the majority wins (and we may become a theocracy) or having someone blow a whistle and say "round over, everyone back to separate countries".
I think this is what Ogged was talking about when he said that discussions of academic issues "implicitly privilege some departments or areas over others" to which I suggested "of course they do, culture change is all about arguing over what is privileged." One way out of the pointless circularity and name calling is to make explicit the question of privilege.
Sometimes it's a way out of circularity, this explicating of privilege, and sometimes it's just more bullshit.
But come on. Teaching evolution's not like teaching both sides of a history debate, or trying to provide a spin on information. Not even in the same ballpark. This would be rather like insisting that we teach Holocaust denial as fact in the classrooms because there's a small noisy contingent that thinks it didn't happen.
Now, there is a place for the debate on whether religion can be taught in schools. (Losing that debate caused this pretend ID thing.) There's a place for the debate on whether we should teach science in schools. Or history. Or English.
But that's separate from the questions of what counts as subject matter in each of these disciplines. And even if it weren't, there's far better standards to decide that being noisy, well-funded, and wrapping oneself in a culture war; say, the standards of practicing scientists. (Whatever we teach our students, we want it to be factually true, right?)
The Darwinism debate just isn't in the same category as choosing whether to concentrate on the Dreyfuss Affair; more parallel would be to demand parity for the rogue historian who believes that anti-Semitism doesn't exist.
Let's restrict the word 'privilege' to contexts in which it can have meaning; if it means any time we make a decision about anything we're commiting the sin of privileging, it's a rather useless word.
('You're privileging math that adds up properly!')
tens of millions of our fellow citizens apparently disagree. You may think they're idiots.
Tens of millions of our fellow citizens think that professional wrestling is a sport, that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, that the planet is a mere six thousand years old, that bacon isn't delicious, and all sorts of equally ludicrous propositions. The fact that 2 out of 3 idiots agree doesn't make them non-idiotic.
And describing me as a secular materialist is spot-on correct. So I'll cop to that and continue to label ID agitators as idiots. It only seems fair.
There's no resolution except saying the majority wins (and we may become a theocracy) or having someone blow a whistle and say "round over, everyone back to separate countries".
I do seem to have stepped in it that time. Perhaps I should learn not to say anything I wouldn't want to step in. But I do thank everyone for indulging me in this discussion.
I'm going to put Matt Weiner's point about the existence of god to one side. That's a leap of faith too far, a tangent leading where far too many have gone before.
Apostropher writes "Tens of millions of our fellow citizens think that . . . all sorts of equally ludicrous propositions. The fact that 2 out of 3 idiots agree doesn't make them non-idiotic."
Where's your intellectual curiosity, man? (I mean the last word in a totally non gender specific way). Aren't you interested in epistemology? Isn't it at least a bit intriguing how and why people can form and hold such beliefs? Once you throw them all together into one big bag labeled "idiots" you've foreclosed any possibility of understanding.
If curiosity doesn't move you, let's try an instrumental approach: civilization depends on lots of people working (more or less) together. Division of labor in society, and all that. Those idiots are among the people who produce your food, and supply you with electricity, and produce computers, and elect your lawmakers, and without whom your life would tend more towards the nasty, brutish, poor, solitary, and short. Wouldn't it be better to recognize and reinforce the commonalities, to shore up whatever feeble threads are still holding our civilization together, rather than indulging in name calling? Can we even have a political system when name calling has totally supplanted discourse?
[parenthetical aside: do to poor impulse control, I'm going to indulge in yet another tendentious analogy: seeking to understand IDers is as stupid as trying to understand the root causes and motivations of terrorism. Okay, you may resume your regularly scheduled view of reality]
Cala writes "Whatever we teach our students, we want it to be factually true, right?"
Wrong. Certainly not when it comes to science, and I'd extend the principle across the board. Science doesn't deal with what's true.
Science deals with ‘what's the most useful theory we've thought up, which hasn't been too severely falsified in this circumstance?' Science can never prove a theory, it can only falsify. When an experiment produces results that match the predictions of a hypothesis, that doesn't prove the theory: you can never tell whether the theory is correct, of whether the theory is total nonsense that just happens (in this case, or these cases) to accidentally produce a correct prediction.
Facts don't have eternal independent existence in some aether: facts depend on context, on theory, on shared systems of meaning.
Try a simple question: how far is it from Washington DC to San Francisco?
In a simple world, where facts are facts, and there is only one truth, there'd be a simple answer: it is X miles. But that's only true in a geographic sense. One might also say, equally factually, equally truthfully: politically and culturally they are in different universes, and you can't measure the distance.
Cala mentions the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Being a fool, I'm going to pick up that gauntlet.
The cheap answer is: I say Shoah, you say Holocaust, and someone around here probably says po-tah-to. In other words, a lot of things happened between say 1923 and 1945, and which ones you count as important depend on what meaning you choose to ascribe.
What's the truth? Try these alternatives:
A. it was a democratic form of government, under a duly elected leader, going horribly and tragically wrong;
B. it was the deliberate, governmentally sanctioned doing to death of identifiable minorities, including homosexuals, Rom, and many many people from other disfavored groups.
Does anti-semitism exist? Yes and no. Yes, a lot of people affirm, and act upon, certain beliefs about Jews. No, it's just a particular variety of xenophobia, not a viable category unto itself (in the same way that while arachnophobia is different from triskedecaphobia, in understanding phobia you can treat the two classes as one).
Cala concludes "Let's restrict the word 'privilege' to contexts in which it can have meaning; if it means any time we make a decision about anything we're committing the sin of privileging, it's a rather useless word. "
I conclude the opposite. It's a very useful and honest word. It proudly proclaims "this we value." It allows us to say, for example, "By Dewey, this is the University of Chicago. While bacon is good, we're not going to start an animal husbandry department, because we privilege the work of Milton Friedman and Richard Posner over that of swineherds." And, of course, it invites the response "swineherds have done more to improve civilization than Friedman and Posner put together" and at least we're now talking explicitly about value and good in terms which allow the possibility of a peaceful resolution.
1) Deciding not to call names (or donate money to a corrupt political system, or making and maintaining nuclear weapons) only works if disarmanent is mutual
2) My quick take on your argument is that I hear you saying "in order to create a better shared culture, we all need to study each other and the roots of our feelings, maaan. When we all come together and really grok each other, we're all going to be able to decide what we as a collective think is the right thing to do. I'd suggest that given point 1 above, this is purely a way to sit around with your thumb up your ass waiting for the (stupid, superstitious, exploited) wolf in the room to settle down with you and just y'know, hang.
2) I don't think that's a fair reaction. My take on the argument is that it's a valid point to raise, but one that is fairly easily answered. If the question is "Why do we privilege science (evolution) over non-science (ID)?" there's a good answer. It's not that evolution is true and ID isn't -- while that's certainly the way I'd bet, a glowing white guy with a beard could appear tomorrow, create a unicorn and a griffin in the middle of Times Square, and flip off the biology faculty of every major university on the planet saying "So much for your evolution, smart guys!" The answer is that science (loosely, knowledge acquired or confirmed using the scientific method) is useful (and intellectually satisfying) in a manner that ID isn't, and that pretending that they are the same thing (by teaching ID in science class) makes it more difficult to teach and use science.
If you (hypothetical ID proponent) want to ask "Why must I value science over faith?" the answer is that you don't have to. But I, backed by the voting majority of the US and the Constitution, do value the unimpeded teaching of science over your ability to express your faith by interfering with science teaching, and will do what I politically can to stop you.
I've got plenty. I do not, however, suffer fools gladly. Everybody has a right to be an idiot, and I don't begrudge them the right. I still feel no hesitation to point out when somebody is abusing that right.
Sure, but it goes beyond ID. I was reacting more to this:
Wouldn't it be better to recognize and reinforce the commonalities, to shore up whatever feeble threads are still holding our civilization together, rather than indulging in name calling? Can we even have a political system when name calling has totally supplanted discourse?
And the following paragraphs as an extension. I'm all for reasoned discourse (and sorry, Michael Schneider, if my last was overly cranky), but it frankly seems to me that while reenforcing the commonalities is well and good (I sing the National Anthem at every game I go to), spending our time doing that rather than working to dissuade, formulate new arguments, constantly working to push back against the tide of ignorance and superstition and the manipulations of the very wealthy in our society, is bringing a back massager to a gun fight.
Eh, I agree with you more than I disagree with you, but I'm guessing that Schneider agrees with both of us to pretty much the same extent. There's a subtle but real difference between saying "I value science, and while I have nothing against your faith, I strongly object to your interference in my science class -- if science isn't your thing, stick your fingers in your ears," and "What kind of moron believes that crap?" While I think a lot of people are going to perceive the first as just as hostile as the second, there's still a tactical value to staying on the high ground. (Potential for rolling rocks downhill, mostly.)
I don't know, it seems awfully convenient for the Porter people to be able to blame Plum for that line. Not that he wasn't an idiot for making those broadcasts, but still.
You're the top, you discourage trollers, You're the top, but not Gayatollahs, You're the subject matter of Tia's blogger slash! You're Wolfson's grammar, You're profgrrl's camera, You're DE's lash.
Sorry if I was a bit nasty. But basically, my problem with calling it all privilege is that to me there seems to be a difference between the questions: "Here is the state of the discipline (science, history, philosophy); what within the state of the discipline should we teach? What is important?" and "This isn't part of the discipline, but I'm going to pretend it is." (We don't have perfect criteria for what counts as a discipline, but it's not as hopeless as saying 'it's all shared meanings' would suggest.)
I think the former questions constitute questions of privilege, and I think that it's meaningful to say that, "Here are some data that is part of the study of world history. We can't fit them all in; which should we prioritize or discard? What is value? What is important?" is a legitimate question of privilege. How do we teach economic theory? Do we teach laissez-faire economics as a good, or as a problem? What about Marx?
But I don't think I'm worried about the same set of problems if I'm trying to explain why, once we've decided that it's good to teach our kids some science, we shouldn't have to teach things that aren't regarded as science. It's an interesting problem, but it's not the same problem, and requires a different set of tools.
If I lump them all under the term 'privilege', then I'm probably going to bring the wrong tools to the job when it's time to decide what to include in the curriculum, proudly or otherwise. ('Hey, teaching kids about ID is just like the decision to teach them about Marx.')
Boy howdy, I take a bit of a nap and suddenly Cole Porter is breaking out all over. Perhaps there is something to the notion of entropy, after all. I still haven't figured out the Chopper/LB exchange, but I'll get back to that.
Cala, please tell me if I understand you correctly (and I count on you to set me straight, as nastily as may tickle your fancy, if I don't).
In my constuction we start with the undifferentiated chaos of all possible knowledge, and we draw a circle. We say "inside this circle is all the knowledge which meets the test ‘is this something all reasonably educated people should know?'" I think this was Gelernter's question, where we began this journey.
Then we draw a line across the area of all things educated people should know, saying "on one side is all knowledge we call Science, and on the other is all other knowledge." Then we divvy up the Science part and say, for example, "in this area is geology, here's chemistry, here's physics, here's creative accounting - hey! You! Creative accounting, get over there to the other side of that line next to ID, you're not part of science".
You, (correct me if I'm wrong) are saying that these are wholly different questions.
To me they look the same, questions of where we draw a line. I'd answer them both in the same way, looking at things like (a) does everything on the same side of the line share characteristics? (b) does the stuff on the same side of the line make something like a coherent whole? (c) is putting the line here useful, does it enable us to understand the world better, or to make better medicines or avoid having to watch reality TV shows? Okay, maybe those aren't precisely the best set of questions for drawing the lines, but I hope they ar illustrative.
I'm using the term privilege to refer to the drawing of the lines. That we privilege something when we say "you're inside the line". e.g.. ‘traditional notions of history privilege dead white males, because their actions are inside the line demarkating history while the lives of everyone else are deemed unimportant and not-history.'
You're right; they are both questions of where we draw lines. But they're different lines. Why do I think this?
Let's call the first set of lines ('what counts as science') category lines. Let's call the second set of lines ('what parts of science do we value') value lines.
It is possible for people to agree on the category lines, and even the contents of the categories. Let's grant for fun, that an American researcher and a Belgian researcher both agree to the major facts about the Battle of the Golden Spurs . They believe they both count as history, they believe that researchers have fairly accurate accounts of the events, etc. Or maybe they don't, but they think they need to do more research. But whatever, our postulated historians are in total agreement that the subject is history.
Can they still disagree whether this battle should be included in a fifth-grade curriculum? Suppose the American researcher believes that it would be a waste of time for the average American student when there's that Dreyfuss affair to learn about. Does that mean he believes its not history? No, just that it's not important. It's a value judgment.
They're just two separate questions; one can assent to one and deny the other. Sometimes the boundary lines on 'what counts as science' are fuzzy, but just because the lines on what to value are fuzzy, too, doesn't make them the same line.
I would agree with Cala's 141, particularly with the idea that the drawing of lines determining 'what sort of thing is this?' precedes the drawing of lines determining 'should educated people know this?'
142: Yeah -- it's pretty much important only because it established Dutch as the major language in Flanders, and for identity-forming purposes for Dutch Belgium.
Yeah, Flemish. (There is still a geographical divide between French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgium, but most kids these days learn both languages.)
Thank you for trying to explain that, Cala, but I must confess I'm still befuddled. I'm not being deliberately obtuse, I'm just truly naturally and inherently dense.
I think you are making this distinction:
A. Things reasonable people can disagree about; value judgments. e.g. should this particular event be included in a fifth grade curriculum.
B. Things reasonable people can't disagree about; category questions. e.g. is this particular battle part of history.
That's where we part company. I think the category questions are value judgments, too. To steal a line from LB (above) "The answer is that science (loosely, knowledge acquired or confirmed using the scientific method) is useful ... ." We define a category (science, history, whatever) and draw a line around it because we think it's useful (or good, or whatever).
You may be thinking ‘of course it's good, science has given us antibiotics and iPods and colonoscopies and so much corn we can feed it to cows and eat steak'.
That's true. If we don't define and bound science the way we do, we don't get those things. But that just changes the question from ‘what value do we choose to give to this definition of science?' to ‘what value to we choose to give to iPods and steak?'
Maybe my concept of what's reasonable is unreasonable. Maybe those who value theological certainty above steaks and antibiotics are simply idiots. But I find it useful to draw a line (create a category) that includes both those questions and treats them as instances of the same class.
I think you choose to live in a universe that contains Truth. I don't. You privilege facts, and I view facts as contingent and transitory. Interestingly, fundamentalist Christian Truth beats scientific truth on most tests: it is certain, immutable, comprehensive, and comprehensible. But since I don't value Truth, that disturbs me not one whit.
I think this is what LB was getting at when he pointed out "If the question is "Why do we privilege science (evolution) over non-science (ID)?" there's a good answer. It's not that evolution is true and ID isn't -- while that's certainly the way I'd bet, a glowing white guy with a beard could appear tomorrow, create a unicorn and a griffin in the middle of Times Square, and flip off the biology faculty of every major university on the planet saying "So much for your evolution, smart guys!"." Personally, I'm hoping not for the guy with the beard, but for the woman with the large but miraculously perky ... uh, never mind.
I'm not saying that you think like a fundie, or that you are one, or anything like that. Nor do I intend any disapprobation. I'm perfectly comfortable with a letting people live in whatever universe they choose - up to a point.
The point I stop accepting is where civilization collapses because we don't have enough shared reality to sustain cooperation. Deciding what we require in the shared reality, determining the necessary commonalities, is politics.
And, of course, there's still the very real probability that I've totally misunderstood what you're saying.
"Do you really think we're at this point, though? And if not, why does any of this matter?" (I gotta learn how to do that italic thing)
It's important because when LB says "But I, backed by the voting majority of the US and the Constitution, do value the unimpeded teaching of science over your ability to express your faith by interfering with science teaching, and will do what I politically can to stop you" he's leaving things unsaid.
It's important to remember that the US Consitution and electoral majorities are subject to change without notice, and that doing things politically presupposes a conception of what's political and an idea of how to act effectively. I also agree with LB that saying my (scientific) truth is stronger than your (religious) truth" is an ineffective argument. I think that there's a real possibility that we'll soon see a change in the meaning of the words "congress shall make no laws ... respecting an establishment of religion ... ." If that happens, Im likely to be looking for another country, not merely another reality. That's the background, in my opinion, of the discussion about Gelernter with which we started.
We're got a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country, and the assertion 'those effete educated types don't actually know anything about real history, so we should ignore them' is one of the traditional forms of argument.
ooopsie, I seemed to have strayed from a dispassionate intellectual inquiry into my own political beliefs. Sorry.
A. Things reasonable people can disagree about; value judgments. e.g. should this particular event be included in a fifth grade curriculum.
B. Things reasonable people can't disagree about; category questions. e.g. is this particular battle part of history.
I started responding to this by saying that drawing a distinction between value judgments and category judgments isn't the same as saying that reasonable people can disagree about the first but not the second, but come to think of it, I suppose I agree with you about that. I would be more guarded about it -- obviously reasonable people can disagree about marginal cases in category judgments, and obviously there can be rival systems of classification, but roughly, within the system of classification customarily used in American academics, there is an objectively right answer to the question "Is ID science?" ('No', for those following along at home.)
But saying there's an objectively right answer to that question doesn't require me to make the grandiose claim that I have access to Truth, and those who disagree with me don't. All it means is that I say I know the rules of a socially constructed game we've been playing for the last three centuries or so called Science, that I want to keep playing that game for all sorts of reasons like painless dentistry and refrigeration, and that ID isn't a coherent part of that game.
Now, by saying ID isn't part of the game of Science, I'm not saying that ID is categorically valueless, or that there aren't other games it could be part of: someone who values ID for it's own sake can still study it, just not in a science class.
I lost you at the end -- I can't see how the position Cala is taking (and I agree with) leads in any way to a loss of what can be agreed upon as consensus reality. (And absolutely no offense -- I'm only mentioning this because someone else will if I don't -- but my pseudonym is LB because my real name is Liz.)
I'd like to add that how well Joe D. did with this off the top of his head is an indication of something I've always believed: "You're the Top" is not that clever a song. Cole Porter wrote some clever lyrics, but not there. It's pretty easy to get random rhymes out of the entire universe of pop culture; it was a cute idea, but the execution is not particularly inspired. It's certainly no "She sits at the Ritz with her splits of mums/And starts to pine for a stein with her Village chums/But with a Schlitz in her mitts down at Fitzroy's Bar/She thinks of the Ritz--oh/It's so/Schizo."
The problem with this (which I believe to be true) is that it's vulnerable to the attack that you don't know it beyond all doubt. My hypo in 103, where some Creator appears and creates a griffin on the Evening News, is possible, and an ID proponent can therefore still say 'Maybe evolution is true, maybe ID is true -- let's teach both.' A stronger argument for differentiating between ID and evolution is that the reasons for thinking evolution are true are science reasons, and the reasons for thinking ID is true are not.
I've read it. I didn't mean to suggest that Joe D. wasn't very good with funny lyrics, just that the fact that he could come up with something basically as good (and in some ways better, since now JD did some directed parody of the original, like the "pack of Mormons") without great apparent effort demonstrates that Cole Porter, at least in that instance, is no JD.
My thanks to SB, and my apologies to LB. My problems with gender confusion are my own, no disrespect intended. Really, some of my best friends have gender.
When I accused Cala of believing in Truth I may indeed have leapt to the wrong conclusion. My apologies, and I'll retract it.
I think we have allowed into our shared reality the belief that there are "rules of a socially constructed game we've been playing for the last three centuries or so called Science, that I want to keep playing that game for all sorts of reasons like painless dentistry and refrigeration, and that ID isn't a coherent part of that game."
We're agreeing (I think) that we're defining the boundaries of science, drawing a line between science and non-science, where we think it needs to be to give us more things like painless dentistry (!?) and refrigeration. We think that's where the line needs to be because its having been drawn there allowed the development of those wonderful things we value.
I'm saying that we define the boundaries of education, we say that science should be part of the public school curriculum, for much the same reason: because we want to maintain a supply of people who know those rules and can play that game, because we want truly painless dentistry and maybe even a cure for colon cancer.
I think that's where you and Cala part company from me, and I must confess I still don't understand your position. I just don't see the distinction.
( I can't see how the position Cala is taking (and I agree with) leads in any way to a loss of what can be agreed upon as consensus reality.
Maybe I'm again leaping too far, but this is my theory:
The rules of this constructed game called society are subject to change. They are disputed, argued about, rephrased, reinterpreted, old rules disappear and new rules are invented. In other words, their meaning is contested.
The meaning and boundaries of science have changed. Before Karl Popper the notion of the impossibility of proof and the importance of falsification wasn't part of the rules (and, for some, there's still some confusion). Whether Natural History or other descriptive fields were properly included as sciences has changed. Eugenics was, in some senses, once a part of science. If I knew more history of science I could probably keep listing examples.
I expect the meaning and boundaries of science to continue to change. Right now there is a contest over the scienceness (can I say that?) of economics. Evolutionary psychologists are trying to create a new area of science, and there's not yet a consensus. There are other areas being contested, I'm sure. Again, the examples are legion (if not battalion).
The contest over evolution did not begin with the publication of Origin of Species and it won't end with the Dover decision. That the ramparts have held so far does not mean that they will always hold; past performance does not guarantee future returns. Your children's milage will vary. There could come a time when science isn't privileged on its own terms, when evolution and creationism are taught equally in public schools.
I'm afraid that if the lines of that contest are drawn in the wrong place, science will lose. I think that if the contest is about objectively right answers, or truth, or facts, science will lose (for the reason you gave so clearly in #158).
I think the most persuasive position, the position that allows us to keep science on its own terms yet allows the Creationists to claim victory and retire from the field, is to say "we're not claiming truth, or facts, or anything like that. Sure, scientific facts change, science comes up with things that turn out to patently false sometimes, but if we want more things like antibiotics and refrigeration we should keep science in the curriculum and allow scientists to define the boundaries of science and let science teachers decide which aspects of science are appropriate for which grades."
My original complaint was the use of the word 'privilege' to range over any demarcation lines at all, when I think it's better restricted to normative judgments. Reason being it's not necessarily the case at all that deciding what to include in science counts as a judgment of value.
A. Things reasonable people can disagree about; value judgments. e.g. should this particular event be included in a fifth grade curriculum.
B. Things reasonable people can't disagree about; category questions. e.g. is this particular battle part of history.
Nope, nope, nope. See, if I had wanted category B to be about value judgments ('reasonable people'), I wouldn't have spent all that time explaining how it wasn't a value judgment.
But now I'm a believer that science believes in absolute Truth , akin to a fundamentalist and apparently I'm writing so obtusely when I say that 'two historians could disagree on whether an event occurred' I mean to say that 'no two reasonable historians could disagree' and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot.
I'm beginning to think you're reading someone else's words and attributing them to me. I'll have to go kick my doppelganger.
Okay. So let me try this again.
What counts as 'science' is largely independent of what counts as 'something I value.'
Wait. No.
Let's make it even simpler. Suppose I have a bunch of blocks in front of me. Some of my blocks are round and some are square. I decide to divide them up into piles based on the following characteristics: having corners and ability to roll.
Now, it may be the case that when I separate all the square blocks from the round blocks, I'm doing so in part because I like the square blocks better. But clearly, the value judgment of 'Death to round blocks!' is not the same judgment I make when I say 'Let's put the blocks with corners in the left-hand pile.'
And I think we're in a similar position with science. We have a bunch of criteria which we think applies to science; maybe this includes falsifiability, or the standards of the scientific academic, or repeatability. We look at astrology. Does it meet these criteria? No? Okay, not a science. ID? No? Not a science either.
Does that mean I think that astrology and ID are a waste of time? Not necessarily. I don't think philosophy's a science, either.
The judgment that astrology and ID are a waste of time is conceptually separate from the decision that they're not part of science. The first judgment is a value judgment ('it won't get me what I want.') and the second is a category judgment ('it isn't like the other things in this group.')
Do the two types of judgments get conflated? Of course they do; if one believes that only science is a good thing, then defining something as science works also to approve it as a good thing.
Note, I haven't said a damned thing about absolute Truth. One doesn't have to believe that science is about absolute truth in order to think that astrology isn't science.
Now, back to the original point: 'privilege', as we were using it, was a value judgment. What is good to teach? You were suggesting that 'privilege' should range over decisions of what counted as different disciplines, if I read you correctly. Any decision at all is privileging one world view over the other.
And that's what I took issue with. Now we're conflating two sense of 'privilege' under one, and that's where people get all upset because they think that by saying 'ID isn't science' I mean 'ID is a bad way to look at the world.'
I can love astrology more than anyone has ever loved astrology, but that's not going to turn it into a science.
Well, I'm still interested, although about as confused as you are. I'm agreeing with everything you've said - with Schneider, I'm agreeing up to a point, then losing track of his arguments, and ending up with something that I don't quite get but think I disagree with.
Having retired from the field, I'll pop back in only to mention that Cala has really captured my thinking on the matter, and done so in a much more politic manner than I.
If I'm understanding him correctly, I think what he's saying is that when we say things like 'That isn't science' we're necessarily making a value judgment ('That shouldn't be taught'), and that in doing so, we're alienating IDers, or more generally, those who disagree with us. To ameliorate this alienation, he proposes, we should embrace this value judgment and say, 'Hey, IDer, we're not claiming absolute truth, just that because we value doing science in this way, and it gets us good results like vaccines.'
I disagree not because I believe that science is going after absolute Truth, but because the question 'what counts as science' doesn't include a value judgment. (Discovering the formula for nerve gas unquestionably counts as science, but I don't think that when I point out that chemistry is a science, I'm valuing the uses of nerve gas.)
Moreover, I disagree that framing it all as 'just a matter of our shared values' is going to get us anywhere with the IDer. If it's just a matter of liking my values more than I like yours, then this is the sort of thing that should be decided by vote. Do we all like astrology? Yea? Now it's a science. We all believe ID is right and holy? Yea? Okay, now it's a science, too.
This is where I'm losing Schneider -- I don't quite see what he's proposing that's likely, as a mater of tactics, to ameliorate any such alienation. I'm all for the idea that finding common ground if at all possible is a good idea; I just don't see how he gets there.
I do have a slight point of disagreement with you, I think. You're absolutely right that saying 'X is science, Y is not science' isn't a value judgment, it's a definitional matter. (That doesn't mean there aren't honestly contested calls, but neither evolution or ID is one -- evolution is clearly in, ID just as clearly out.) There is a value judgment, though, in saying that maintaining the classification system that includes science as a category is a good thing to do. While calling astrology a 'science' would be either a simple factual error or a redefinition of 'science', rather than a value judgment that astrology is a good thing, it would be possible to say that: "In our modern age, 'science' is no longer a useful concept. We've got all the technology we need, and we can maintain it by rote. Let's stop talking about science and divide knowledge into 'Intellectually Stimulating': astrology, astronomy, literature, pure mathematics, philosophy, physics, and theology; and 'Vocational Training': medicine, law, computer science, HVAC, and psychology." That would be a value judgment (in my opinion, an insane one) that might leave evolution and ID in the same box -- it just wouldn't be a box labeled 'science' or one that served the purposes science does.
I agree with you that there's probably a value judgment in saying 'Categorizing things by similarity is something we should do' and there's probably reasons that we like to include criteria such as 'repeatability' as part of science that are in some sense value judgments: it is good to have confirmable experiments.
Maybe this is Schneider's point; if it's a value judgment to say that repeatability should be counted as one of the goals of science, and then we use repeatability to discern what is science and what isn't, then I am cheating when I say that making categorical distinctions doesn't involve value judgments.
But is that the same sort of value judgment as saying ID is bad? I don't think so, if only saying "We value doing science in this way" isn't the same as saying "We value only things that are done in this way." or even "Everything done in this way has value." I think the scientific method is a good thing to teach, even though some of the kids learning it may use it to craft horrible torture techniques lab-tested, method-approved.
Maybe we can call it a meta-value judgment versus a value judgment. It still doesn't seem to me that 'what counts as science' is on the same level as 'is this a worthwhile endeavor'.
But is that the same sort of value judgment as saying ID is bad?
I think the difference between the two value judgments is simply that placing a high value on the maintenance of our current definition of science is going to be much more broadly popular than simply placing a higher value on evolution than ID. If the question is presented to people as "Should evolution alone be taught, or should ID be taught as well?" lots of people will think it's no big deal, and say 'Sure, go ahead'.
If you shift ground onto the definition of science, and make the argument: "Because of the practice of science over the last couple of centuries, we have this lovely comfortable society to live in, and all sorts of wonderful knowledge about the universe. 'Science' has a clear (clear enough) set of rules that exclude ID. If you want to teach ID in science classes, there are only two possibilities: (a) you're just a liar. You know people value science, and you want this non-science thing of yours to be treated as such because of the cachet calling something 'science' lends it, or (b) you want to change the definition of 'science' in a fundamental way, and abandon the practices that brought us all this great info about Bose-Einstein condensates and the Cambrian explosion, and incidentally public health and babies that reliably live past their fifth birthdays."
Someone could, presented with that argument, make the decision that they value obedience to the perceived will of God that ID be taught as science more than they value the continued existence of science. I would think they were a fruitloop for having such a preference, but I don't think that it's a fundamentally different kind of value decision than the decision that evolution and ID, considered in isolation, either are or aren't both the sorts of things that should be taught in schools.
The reason I'm being stubborn on this is that one of the typical ID arguments against teaching evolution goes something like this:
"Evolution is just a way of explaining how the world got here. So is ID. The only reason you don't accept ID as a possibility is because you're an atheist who hates Christians! We should teach both because they're both the same, it just depends on whether you value materialism or godly values."
Now, if all I can say is, yeah, it's just that I value evolution more because it gets me some good things, I'm really in a very weak position here. I have to hope the other person agrees with me that there are good things to be gotten.
But that's not the reason we're teaching evolution or saying ID isn't a science; we're teaching evolution and the scientific method and such because that's what scientists are doing. Now maybe the scientists are doing it because they believe it leads to good things; that's plausible, but given the amount of good science that has lead to horrible results, I suspect that 'we are doing it because we value it' isn't really the right way to frame it. It may be more that "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up."
The reason I'm being stubborn on this is that one of the typical ID arguments against teaching evolution goes something like this:
"Evolution is just a way of explaining how the world got here. So is ID. The only reason you don't accept ID as a possibility is because you're an atheist who hates Christians! We should teach both because they're both the same, it just depends on whether you value materialism or godly values."
Now, if all I can say is, yeah, it's just that I value evolution more because it gets me some good things, I'm really in a very weak position here. I have to hope the other person agrees with me that there are good things to be gotten.
But that's not the reason we're teaching evolution or saying ID isn't a science; we're teaching evolution and the scientific method and such because that's what scientists are doing. Now maybe the scientists are doing it because they believe it leads to good things; that's plausible, but given the amount of good science that has lead to horrible results, I suspect that 'we are doing it because we value it' isn't really the right way to frame it. It may be more that "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up."
The reason I'm being stubborn on this is that one of the typical ID arguments against teaching evolution goes something like this:
"Evolution is just a way of explaining how the world got here. So is ID. The only reason you don't accept ID as a possibility is because you're an atheist who hates Christians! We should teach both because they're both the same, it just depends on whether you value materialism or godly values."
Now, if all I can say is, yeah, it's just that I value evolution more because it gets me some good things, I'm really in a very weak position here. I have to hope the other person agrees with me that there are good things to be gotten.
But that's not the reason we're teaching evolution or saying ID isn't a science; we're teaching evolution and the scientific method and such because that's what scientists are doing. Now maybe the scientists are doing it because they believe it leads to good things; that's plausible, but given the amount of good science that has lead to horrible results, I suspect that 'we are doing it because we value it' isn't really the right way to frame it. It may be more that "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up."
At this point I'm really just dodging work, but don't you have to complete this argument: "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up," with "and we want more science because we value it"? Without that final step, (or, actually, I suppose, even with it) you remain open to the attack that "You may want more science, but I don't. I want more obedience to the will of God. So abandon your puny scientific project and teach ID instead."
Thank you for sticking with it. I appreciate your help in clarifying my confusion.
Suppose I have a bunch of blocks in front of me. Some of my blocks are round and some are square. I decide to divide them up into piles based on the following characteristics: having corners and ability to roll.
Wonderful example. I'm going to steal that example.
You have chosen a sorting characteristic, drawn a line across the universe of blocks, based on shape. You could, instead, have chosen to sort them by color (black blocks from white), or material (wood blacks from metal blocks), or smoothness (rough blocks from smooth blocks), or ownership (my blocks from your blocks), or any of a myriad of other characteristics .
By choosing shape you are saying that shape is important, where color or material is not important. You are not saying "death to the round blocks!", but you are saying that material and color are meaningless to you in this sorting. I'd call that a value judgment, I think it's a normative judgment, and I've been calling it "privileging shape."
I'm saying that when you define a category you choose a defining characteristic, whether it's roundness for a pile of blocks, or falsifiability for science, or whatever characteristic we use when choosing which subjects should be taught. In each case we are necessarily simultaneously choosing to ignore a whole host of other characteristics, to ignore those other characteristics. We're giving meaning to some characteristics, and treating others as meaningless. To choose to give meaning and importance to some things, and ignore others, is what I've been calling ‘privileging' the important things.
Perhaps I was being careless in using the term ‘good'. I said that any choice of a defining characteristic, a privileging of an attribute, meant saying saying ‘this characteristic is good'. That does suggest that the absence of the character is bad. I should have said that it meant ‘this characteristic is a good way to sort'. I only meant that when we sorted the blocks, we were saying ‘shape is a good way to sort'.
That's where we went off into the question of what good about the choice of characteristics we choose to define science. That's where we were considering whether falsifiability and repeatability were good (useful) characteristics because that way of sorting led to refrigeration and polyester.
But I am maundering, as usual, and repeating things. My appreciation to Cala, for making the point so much more clearly than I managed: Maybe this is Schneider's point; if it's a value judgment to say that repeatability should be counted as one of the goals of science, and then we use repeatability to discern what is science and what isn't, then I am cheating when I say that making categorical distinctions doesn't involve value judgments. Yes, that's what I've been struggling, with such great difficulty, to say. Thank you.
And LB nailed it when she said Let's stop talking about science and divide knowledge into 'Intellectually Stimulating': astrology, . . . ; and 'Vocational Training': medicine, law, . . . ." That would be a value judgment (in my opinion, an insane one) . . . .
That was very nicely put, although I'm not sure about the ‘insane' part. There are law schools where you can take courses in criminal law which are wonderful intellectual endeavors, but won't tell you the first thing about how to prosecute or defend a criminal case. Other schools have courses which teach only the vocation aspect, and some schools offer separate courses, which might be title ‘Intellectual Criminal Law' and "Practical Criminal Law'. There are serious argument about which should be taught at which schools, arguments among tenured professors who (in most circumstances) pass in society as if they were sane.
People argue about the boundaries of the category ‘law'. Is mediation a part of law? If our defining characteristic is ‘a way to resolve disputes', it's in (and maybe law schools should have faculty members trained in counseling). If our boundary is at ‘a formal system of rules for imposing predictability on human behavior', it's out. (that's from Carl LLewelyn, if I recall). If we want to support civil society in Iraq by strengthening the legal system, do we send in lawyers or anthropologists or mediators?
I don't know if there's an intellectual aspect to HVAC, but if we allow history as an intellectual endeavor I'm sure someone's done a dissertation titled "The Role of Advances in Central Heating and Chimney Design in English Great Houses in the Political and Social Changes in England, 1700 - 1920" (I think that's from James Burke). Personally, I'm very interested in the relation between the rise of the watchmaking industry (and the development of its industrial practices and methods) and immigration and urbanization in Illinois, 1865 - 1930 or so. I don't know if that's history, cultural geography, architecture, or political science, but I don't think it's insane.
Someone could ... make the decision that they value obedience to the perceived will of God that ID be taught as science more than they value the continued existence of science. I would think they were a fruitloop for having such a preference, but I don't think that it's a fundamentally different kind of value decision ... .
I agree, and that's precisely the political problem: how to preserve the consent of the governed to the shared understand that this is taught and that isn't? How do we contest it? What are the terms of the contest? Where can we draw a line that enough people can live with?
I don't know if that's history, cultural geography, architecture, or political science, but I don't think it's insane.
My use of 'insane' was limited to the idea of abandoning science as a classification in favor of 'Intellectually Stimulating' and 'Vocational Education'. Obviously those are, in other contexts, useful classifications.
I don't know if that's history, cultural geography, architecture, or political science, but I don't think it's insane.
I don't follow you here. You're talking about the existence of marginal cases, where classification is difficult. Absolutely such cases do exist, but they don't have much to do with evolution and ID, which aren't marginal cases (if you think they are -- that there is room for honest disagreement about whether ID properly fits in the science classification, we should argue about that). What follows, in your view, from the existence of marginal cases?
I agree, and that's precisely the political problem: how to preserve the consent of the governed to the shared understand that this is taught and that isn't?
Well, I'm repeating myself here, sort of, but by explaining that science is definable, and ID isn't it. That someone who wants ID in a science classroom either doesn't understand what science is, is a liar, or wants to abandon science as a classification. And that abandoning science as a classification is a really bad idea, because then what do we do when all of our current antibiotics stop working, or the oil runs out?
You ask the sort of questions that make for interesting times. Would that I had a nice, clear, logical answer. I don't. I have some thoughts, and some opinions which, when the wind is west by northwest, seem to make some sense. T me.
I don't like being forced into the corner of saying of saying that we keep science against the day when all the antibiotics or oil runs out. There's something wrong with that answer. It makes sense, it's culturally meaningful, I can't find a better one, but it's somehow wrong. It's ugly. I don't want a world in which we must justify education, or knowledge, in instrumental terms.
And that answer fails to explain something: when I talk to people who are heavily invested in science, who care deeply and work hard on the questions at the cutting edge, or who love teaching and learning it, nobody ever says "I'm doing it to find a replacement for oil." They talk about how nifty keen it is, how there's some sort of beauty to a good theory, how there's some emotional resonance in devising an elegant experiment to test a hypothesis, how science is fun.
Those sound very much like what deeply religious people say, too, although they might use other words than fun and nifty keen. Personally, I do not see that aspect of religion, but I suspect that says more about me than about religion.
So I'm thinking, somewhere in some corner of what might charitably be called my mind, I wonder what happens if we abandon the dichotomous distinction between religion and science, as we abandoned the notion that matter and energy are wholly distinct? Is there's some other way to construct a grand unified reality in which we can keep the good (?!) aspects of both, and lose the conflict.
I don't find Gould's notion of the non-overlapping magisteria appealing, either. Again, it just seems ugly and clunky, as if it has tail fins that are far too big. It meets all the criteria I can identify, but that may only mean I'm failing to identify all the important criteria.
So I look at marginal cases, because often things become clearer and more revealing at the margins. Consider Duchamp's urinal, which challenged the central concept of art by taking a stand at a margin. Consider again relativity, which (in some sense) looked at what happens to the idea of mass and energy when you push speed to the marginal case (I know, I'm mangling this badly). Or look at anthropology, which found interesting ideas by asking what one observed by standing partly outside the margin of a culture.
Again, I don't have a good logical explanation of why I suspect that looking at the marginal cases might shed some light on the ID/Science debate, which is not a marginal case (I agree). But I have these weak analogies and a strong hunch that just maybe we'll be able to see something important - or, at least, something interesting, nifty keen, and fun.
That's the best case I can make for why the marginal cases do have something to do with evolution and ID. Weak, I know. I'm very likely to be wrong. But trying ideas because they might be interesting is, well, fun for me.
The idea that science is useful, the disjunct magisteria idea, is (I think) a manifestation of the values of pluralism and individual freedom and tolerance, and they founder against the adamant belief that my religion is better than your science, I don't care about antibiotics, and I must not suffer the sinner to live amongst us (you made this very point). The science side is also weakened by the naive, pseudoscientific notions that only science has a grasp on objective reality, that science is a path to truth, and that science is value neutral.
I love geology. I have 20 acres in the mountains near here. I can stand there, on gneiss that's several hundred years million old, look across to a higher outcrop of basalt that's nearly that old, the other direction towards the big volcano that's ten to fifty million year's old, down towards the basalt at the edge of my property that's probably less than a hundred thousand years old, knowing that over the hill behind me is basalt from about the time the pyramids were built, while over there is limestone from when this rock I'm standing on was eight thousand feet lower. (yes, it's a geologically marginal area, and perhaps a bad idea to make a long term investment in land that's very likely to see another volcano nearby within the next twenty thousand years).
I don't love geology because the knowledge does me much practical good. I love it because it somehow makes the world more fun, more interesting, let's me see things I wouldn't otherwise see. I love it the way I love Duchamp's urinal. Geology will help me if I want to try putting in a well, just the way seeing a urinal before me leads sometimes to an immediate increase in my personal comfort, but there's something else there, too.
Maybe we should say we teach science for the same reason we teach art, because it's beautiful. Maybe we refuse to admit ID to science because the combination is ugly, the way bad copies of the Venus de Milo are ugly. But in a time when our US Attorney General felt the need to improve some classical sculptures by putting a curtain over their exposed bosoms, I just don't know.
I'm sorry I'm not clearer and better focused. Maybe in my next life I'll understand this better. I fear I've gone all grokish and embarrassed myself again. Well, sometimes humiliation is the first step in learning.
Today most incoming college students don't seem to know any history at all.
One of my pet peeves is the assumption that students knew more history in the past. It may be true for some decades - possibly the 50s and 60s, though I haven't seen any stats on that - but it's not an assumption that should go unquestioned. I don't know if anyone here clicked through on the link I posted in the comments to Yglesias' post, but the New York Times in 1943 ran an expose on the shocking lack of history knowledge among college freshmen.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:53 AM
My department tends to count a course on anyone dead as fulfilling the history requirement, as long as the focus is more or less on explaining, rather than responding to, the person's ideas.
I am guilty on Gelernter's charge, but there's only so much room in this brain; I don't think it's a failure of the educational system or evidence of bias, exactly, because there's quite a lot I don't know that is from all over the ideological divide.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:58 AM
It may be problematic to the extent, however, that whatever history I've had always seemed to stop ('because we're running out of time') around 1860 and pick up again around WWI.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:00 PM
I agree with Gelerntner on this point, but the Unabomber probably also agrees, so I am not forced to choose between them.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:01 PM
A course at my dept on a very recently deceased philosopher (a relation of someone who appears on Zorn's The Big Gundown) was counted towards the history requirement. Everyone I talked to seemed to find this shocking, but it must have had some support.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:02 PM
We don't even have a philosophy requirement.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:06 PM
I mean, gaps in knowledge are problematic, but I'd personally be more worried about all the journalists who manage to get their degrees without learning to write or recognize logical fallacies.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:10 PM
I dunno, I might prefer it if journalists didn't learn to write logical fallacies.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:10 PM
learning to write or [to] recognize logical fallacies.
Parallelism!
"To avoide the tediouse repetition of these woordes: is equalle to: I will settle as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or gemowe lines of one lengthe: ======, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle."
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:12 PM
It's good to know that, even as the calendar changes, some things remain eternal. WMYBSALB, Wolfson?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:15 PM
Yeah, yeah. Fuck you, too.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:24 PM
"…the way in which discussions of academic issues (diversity and pedagogy in particular come to mind, as well as the 'haven of leftists!' complaint) often implicitly privilege some departments or areas over others, which leads to a view that manages to make sense of only a narrow slice of the university."
The disingenuous synechdote, unfortunately a common ruse.
Posted by JDC | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 12:45 PM
In the 1950s, incoming college freshman had already gained what we would now consider a doctoral-level knowledge of a wide variety of fields. Most had some acquaintance with at least six foreign languages and a passable facility with calculus-based physics and set theory. The high achievers had memorized all of Homer, in the original Greek. Sporting events were also characterized by much better sportsmanship and self-discipline.
Then they desegregated schools and everything went to hell.
(I sometimes think that all the critics of contemporary education are on the verge of saying that last sentence, but they realize they can't.)
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:12 PM
Well look, David Gelertner may not be the ideal spokesman for liberal learning, nor the examples he adduces the most compelling evidence of its decline, but is it not depressing if graduate students in linguistics, philosophy, or literature are basically ignoramouses about Western culture broadly? One needn't know who Robspierre is to do great work in neural networks, or whatever. Yet such a person is nonetheless plainly an ignoramus.
What is bad about being an ignoramus? Do we really need to have this conversation?
[likewise on history textbooks. Is it not possible that Gelertner is right about their abominable quality and bias? Having just spent 10 minutes failing try to find the standard US history textbook for Southern CT, I can't comment on Gelertner's precise claim. Friends who work in the text book industry, however, confirm the general picture of intellectual decline. Isn't that bad?]
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:14 PM
I'm not as concerned with the question "Do you know what the Dreyfuss Affair is?" as I am with the question "Do you have the skills to find out and place it in some kind of meaningful context?"
Posted by JDC | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:24 PM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:33 PM
the addition of "graduate students" added nothing beyond "people who have been to college."
I don't think that's true if you read "graduate student" as a way of saying "college graduate who we can reasonably expect is more interested than average in scholarly pursuits." That is, being a graduate student is probably a pretty good indicator that one requires less arm-twisting to learn stuff.
That said, the Gelernter article is pure silliness.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:39 PM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:46 PM
I'll agree with baa for once, or halfway anyway. I'm frequently appalled by the ignorance of historical context displayed by well-educated professionals, including academics.
The mention of Dreyfus was unfortunate, since this isn't a question of specific details, but of the presence of any historical context at all.
It's so bad that a book trying to bring a historical awareness back into philosophy ("How History Made the Mind" -- my review comes up in Google) displays a rather haphazard knowledge of some of the historical periods most critical to its argument.
People often wonder out loud about at the motivation for my frequent rants about analytic philosophy. It comes from analytic philosophy's apparent conviction that all questions discussed philosophically before about 1950 have either been solved by analytic philosophy, or are being worked on by analytic philosophy, or have been assigned to a science such as linguistics or brain science, or else have been shown to be meaningless and not worth bothering with. That's a large, arrogant claim, and I think that it's not true, and that it's a very damaging error.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:48 PM
I won't defend today's history textbooks - my high school aimed the history books at B students (at least this is what one of the teachers told me outright when I complained) - but I guess I'll link to excerpts of the 1943 Times study again (scroll past the Hanson quote). I hesitated to do so because I feel like I'm becoming an internet crank about this (see also). I agree that ignorance is a problem, but it's been quite a persistent one, and since it's been a problem in the past it doesn't seem very helpful to say, "Things were better in the past, let's recover that."
Also, Gelernter actually frames it this way
There's a "many" to "most" problem here. Today it's still true that many students take AP History, but most incoming freshmen don't know history all that well. I suspect most high school students don't take AP at all. So do most AP students know history worse than previous AP students? Could be true, but I'd like to see the data. Do people who would have taken AP not take it now? Could be true, but it seems more likely that college-bound students today would try to take as much AP as they can.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:51 PM
One needn't know who Robspierre is to do great work in neural networks, or whatever. Yet such a person is nonetheless plainly an ignoramus.
You are a strange, strange man, baa. May your year be good, and the Celtics awful.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 2:58 PM
Yeah, I took gradaute students to mean "people who went to college, weren't retarded, and were fairly bookish." (and while these two groups are non-identical, I would argue that the first is, by and large, a subset of the second)
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:03 PM
At least half of your New Year's wish is already granted, SCMT -- this Celtics team is just appalling. And Paul Peirce is shooting fricking 49% percent from the floor! The man is a goddamn hero.
And on your link, I claim complete intellectual consistency.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:15 PM
No, baa, I think you're cheating. G is making a point about educational systems, not about the general degeneracy of the contemporary mind. If so, the problem has to be curricular, not personal, hence "fairly bookish"-- if it suggests outside reading-- is a fudge.
I don't mean to be cranky about this; I hope you know it's all said with a wink. Appearances of crankiness come from my negative attitude toward the idea that smart people who like general learning should go to grad school-- if there's overlap, that's suggestive of a problem. (Go to grad school because you love neural networks more than anything, not because knowing a little about a lot is your goal, etc. etc.)
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:18 PM
Also, baa, to stay on your good side I note that as far as curricular matters go, I'm part of the Great Books Reactionary Underground here. No chance of making headway, but by god we'll go down swinging.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:22 PM
In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen documented that high school history textbooks provide what he describes on his website as "an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation." (http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/ ) Great book. The problem with history textbooks isn't their "left-wing bias," as Gelernter claims, but (inter alia) that they present everything the United States has ever done as wonderful. Reading high school history textbooks, one is not told, for example, that we were at war with the "Indians" continuously for 200 years (nor of our abysmal, genocidal treatment of them), or that within a few decades after the Civil War, blacks were treated about as horribly in the South as they were under slavery (yes, they were treated pretty badly in the North, too). These textbooks also have little if any discussion of American imperialism, our sponsorship of right-wing dictators, or any other reason that people in other countries might have for not liking us.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:26 PM
the Great Books Reactionary Underground
Yeah, like no one saw that coming. Also, Paul Pierce created the AIDS virus.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:26 PM
Now I'm not sure what it is we disagree about, Fontana. I certainly agree that not every bookish smart guy should go to graudate school. Hell, I tried to get Wolfson to take a job at the Carlyle group.
The pro-Gelertner claim that seem to me defensible is that the average US (non-science) grad student possesses broader general education than the average US college student. If that's because the US college population contiains a bottom quarter who can't be expected to read or retain anything, that's as may be. Basic point: if grad students at University X are ignorant, it's a fair assumption that the undergrads at university X are yet more ignorant.
Does comity reign once more?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:35 PM
Paul Peirce is Jewish?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:37 PM
A couple of further points:
1) There is quite a lot of world history that I was taught in high school that I, as a soon-to-be ex-graduate student (pessimistically), simply no longer remember. I happen to remember that we never covered anything about Europe in the 1890s, but I doubt that my rather good grasp of European and American history has remained since my last formal history course. It would be wrong to conclude from that, however, that my high school (decent public) didn't adequately teach history, any more than my inability to remember all of second-level calculus means that my math education was inadequate.
I took AP Euro and American and placed out of both in college; if anything, that's hurt my knowledge of history since my last history class was completed when I was sixteen.
I'm rusty. (And I'm also a lot dumber than I was when I was sixteen.) But that's not the fault of the schooling system, unless the proverbial schooling system back in the day had a method for perfect memory retention that we've lost.
2) Gelernter's claim that missing knowledge about the beginnings of the Zionist movement, in graduate students, amounts to leftist bias is just absurd.
There was a question on the AP Exam of the plight of European Jews in the late 1800s; I remember it because my memory likes to fuck with me, and because I compared Catherine the Great and Stalin instead. It's true my high school didn't teach it, because we ran out of time while preparing for the AP Euro exam, but look, it was on the test. This was in 1996.
Now maybe the non-leftists control the exam board but the leftists chose the curriculum that's based on the exam.... but the reasonable explanation is a lot simpler. We always, in every history course I took, ran out of time by the end of the school year, at which point it was a choice, in European history, to cover the 1850s-1890s, or to skip that and move on to WWI and II.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:37 PM
I'm part of the Great Books Reactionary Underground
You should teach at St. John's, Labs. You'd fit in well.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:38 PM
As an also soon-to-be ex-graduate student, but one who would specialize in late 19th century American and (sort of) European history, your stories are breaking my heart.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:44 PM
32 to 30 and 3.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:45 PM
Oh, I agree it's problematic, eb. But it just ain't because the liberal academy hates... erm, Jews? Or whatever it is?
(Have to check my liberal academy membership card.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:50 PM
baa, your claim in 28, that graduate students generally possess greater broad knowledge (related: should they?) just seems false. People who end up pursuing graduate school tend to be the sort captivated by one specific field, often to the exclusion of all else.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:53 PM
I think that we should declare Cala to be a statistical outlier.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 3:57 PM
No, no, I think you're right, cala, I think only one of my high school history courses - on China and Japan - covered the whole assigned period. The rest were, well I don't remember what the rest were. I think 20th century US history might have consisted of PBS documentaries and some lectures, and my first semester freshman history course was in a room full of stoves and ovens, taught by someone who had taught cooking and home ec for 25 years but, because she had a history BA and the school was understaffed that semester, she was assigned to teach history for the first time that year. So all the nonpolitical/nonpoliticized constraints were there.
I'm just sad that the late 19th century gets skipped over; this happens in "US from the Civil War to the present" courses too, when the teacher decides to speed into the 20th century. I don't remember any late 19th century history from high school.
(How the hell did I end up a history major?)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:00 PM
Oddly, that happened in my high school too; in the U.S. history classes, we study the Civil War in great detail (all forgotten, too), study the Reconstruction, and at about 1880, we skip ahead until we get interesting and start to pwn t3h w0rld.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:03 PM
My grad school experience seems to back up 35 and 24. Maybe I'm an outlier too, but I've heard quite a lot grad students make statements of the type "I'm so not interested in X" even where X was an acknowledged important subject. People at the dreary place I worked before grad school seemed to have a wider variety of interests, and a number were considering, but ambivalent about, going to graduate school.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:15 PM
I'd like to second Frederick's recommendation of Lies My Teacher Told Me. Great book.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:17 PM
Maybe am I a statistically outlier, but I learned about our mistreatment of the Indians from somewhere, and I didn't have a course in college on history..... so where did it come from? (We didn't tackle it in elementary school, but who studies genocide when they're seven, anyway? If there is a time to be upbeat about being American, it's when you're little.)
And my high school history book had a chapter called "The American Empire." It was generally upbeat about it, but it did describe the expansion to California and the Pacific Northwest while mentioning a lot of the problems that it caused.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:25 PM
Just to be clear, Cala, you can be right that grad students are more likely to be specialists than generalists, and it can nonetheless be true that grad students are on average, more likely to possess broad education than undergraduates.
Consider the simplified equation
I = S + D Where:
I = # of students without broad liberal education
S = those who have passionate, but narrow, intellectual interests
D = those who have no intellectual interests
My claim would be that even if the S% among grad students is greater than the S% among undergrads, the D% among undergrads is much higher than among grad students.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:28 PM
I see what you're saying, sort of. All else being equal, graduate students will have had a broader education than undergrads, so they're the best measure of the 'best' our system can put out. Fair enough.
I think this claim is wrong for the factors I mentioned; I was a great generalist through high school, and later I specialized, and the lack of knowledge is due to attrition over time rather than lack of exposure to historical knowledge.
In short, I don't think that equation helps because S and I interfere with each other; I'd be a better generalist if my brain power weren't finite and being sucked up by a graduate program (that is probably going to kick me out.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:42 PM
Let B = those with intellectual interests broad enough to include knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair
It would be interesting to know if the B% would be higher among grads or undergrads. For all S where S does not include interest in a topic for which knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair is important, I suspect that S and D are similarly unlikely to know what it was.
I have probably mangled the language of logic and math in this comment.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:43 PM
Perhaps another formula might help clarify things. Consider the following equation:
DA=R+T+C
R is Richard Dreyfuss
T is the tree he hit with his car
C is the cocaine he was taking
DA, the Dreyfuss Affair, results from the combination of these three factors one night in 1982
Posted by JDC | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:47 PM
Well that attempt at clarification obviously failed. My bad. It's not so much that the grad students are the best we breed, as far as general education goes, but rather that they are less likely than undergrads to be totally out lunch, with respect to intellectual endeavor. And I think that difference is large enough to swamp any factors (like an emphasis on specialization) that tend to disfavor the level of general knowledge among graduate students.
To put it even more simply, the "D" in the equation above stood for drunk...
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:53 PM
Teehee. Okay. See what you're saying; flat-out disagree, based purely on my own experience, but I may be an Emersonian outlier..
Now, what do people do for jobs when they leave with master's degrees? (Not a good time for french fry jokes.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 4:56 PM
Management consulting can be a nice option if you a) don't quite know what you want to do, and b) have the flexibility/desire to travel and work long hours. It's a good overall business education, and it serves as bogus credential for what you want to do next. Getting in the door is the trouble. What was your MA in?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 5:00 PM
M.A.'s philosophy; undergrad had a minor in computery business stuff (don't remember any of that either but I can still pretend). Do have a year of work experience in consulting.
Arg. I hate school and work. Someone make me a millionaire. Then I'll have time to read about the Dreyfuss Affair.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 5:15 PM
You're so in! Go consult, and read about Dreyfuss on the 6am flight to Cincinnatti.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 5:17 PM
Do I have to go to Cinci? It's practically Kentucky.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 5:23 PM
I'm skipping a lot of posts here, but I don't quite understand why ignorance=leftist bias. There is a great deal that I would bet Gelertner doesn't know about, say, labor history, and I would be willing to bet that the student who never heard of Dreyfuss has also never heard of the Triangle fire. My high school history textbooks told me nothing about mass deportation of Japanese Americans during World War 2, and that was back before they were supposed to have deteriorated so badly.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 6:35 PM
Which is worse:
(a) not knowing about the Dreyfus affair;
(b) knowing about the Dreyfus affair, but not objecting to arbitrary and unlawful imprisonment in your own country?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 6:37 PM
And here I thought the value of a historical education was that one avoided tendentious analogies!
Seriously though, mcmc raises an important point. There are (at least) three kinds of historicla ignorance at issue here. Ignorance that arises from simple negligence (poor pedagogy, laziness, whatever), ignorance that arises from political bias, and ignorance that arises from different (non-political) conceptions of the practice of historical education. I suspect #1 is the main source, and is (at least immediately) uncontroversial.
The later two are more interesting (at least to me), and they often interact. For Gelertner, I suspect, some aspect of the correct approach to history at the highschool level is bound up in teaching things like the Dreyfus affair: major political events in Western great powers. There are a couple of choices here -- the idea of a common intellectual culture, the idea of the centrality of the West and of Europe, a focus on 'big events' -- that are both intellectual and political judgments. These are hard decisions to escape -- even if one assumes scrupulously unbiased treatment and thinks only in terms of level of attention. Which should get more pages, the Missouri Compromise or the Seneca Falls convention? Or neither of these in favor of an account of everyday life as a poor farmer in 1830s Connecticut?
It's hard to answer that question without some idea of what one is trying to accomplish with the high school study of history. Is one trying to inform citizens, instruct humanists, or make a particular point?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 8:05 PM
Forgive me for stepping in where sensible people would fear to tread, but as a visitor from a parallel universe of discourse this all seems a bit angels & pin head.
What we're trying to do is create a shared system of symbols and meanings, a culture; a shared reality; create enough areas of agreement about what was/is/can be that we can sustain a civilization.
Such efforts are *always* contested. Whether it's a contest over the meaning of sex, or the place of religion in politics, or whether rock&roll inevitably causes moral decay, meaning is contested. That obviously includes contesting the meaning, the importance, the substance of history.
So statements such as "different (non-political) conceptions of the practice of historical education" look like gibberish to me, because there ain't no such thing as a non-political conception of history. History, or what we decide should be the substance of history, reflects a judgement over what has meaning and import, and that's always a political question. Any question of what is admitted to our shared reality is a political question, a question of how to sustain civilization.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 8:28 PM
reflects a judgement over what has meaning and import, and that's always a political question
If you want the word "political" I'll give it to you, but I'd like to keep some sort of a distinction between my deliberations about value and my subscription to the People's Daily Worker.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 8:53 PM
Let B = those with intellectual interests broad enough to include knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair
I have knowledge of the Dreyfus Affair, but it's not because of the breadth of my intellectual interests. I can't even remember how I learned about it. Probably from my parents.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 8:55 PM
Oops. Sometimes I omit the conclusion.
*Of course* these discussions "implicitly privilege some departments or areas over others". That's inherent in the contest. We're fighting over what should be privileged, what's important, what has meaning and what doesn't. Over what it means to be civilized.
Jefferson believed one couldn't be civilized without an understanding of the architecture of Palladio. Now I'd bet that name doesn't appear in most syllabi. Seventy five years ago one couldn't get out of most high schools without being at least exposed to, if not actually profficient at, wood and metal working. Now I'm sure there are graduate students who couldn't tell a lathe from a milling machine, nor have a clue how to operate either. Forty years ago the idea that high school students should have an opportunity for direct experience with computers was unusual. Nursing started as an avocation, became a trade, and then turned itself into a profession (as did law and medicine). All that happenned because of discussions implicitly privileging some areas over others.
*Of course* this "leads to a view that manages to make sense of only a narrow slice of the university." That's the nature of univerwsties, and cultures. They usuall don't make sense as a whole, because as any moment your seeing something that's in the middle of a transition, with holdovers like a body's appendix, and battles half-fought with both (or all) sides still on the field. Culture, being actively contested, is never a sensible integrated whole.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 8:59 PM
How can you distinguish "between my deliberations about value and my subscription to the People's Daily Worker?"
Don't you subscribe to the Daily Worker as a result of a deliberation about value? Don't actions reflect (or embody) values? I'd say that the subscription was at least as good evidence of your deliberations about values as whatever you might say about those deliberations.
Sorry, I not only think slow, I'm not good at multitasking.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 9:04 PM
I'd suggest that if you know about the Dreyfus Affair it does reflect the breadth of your interests.
If I may toss in an usupported assertion: people are much more likely to remember things that interest them, things that are important to them. Whether the interest (or importance) was intellectual, as opposed, for example, to remembering the Dreyfus Affair because you heard it from someone in whom you had a strong sexual interest, I couldn't say. I'm not at all sure I know the distinction between an intellectual interest and other kinds of interests.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 9:14 PM
And here I thought the value of a historical education was that one avoided tendentious analogies!
No, I'm pretty sure that history is philosophy teaching by examples. You can call that tendentious if you like, but you'll have to pick a fight with Thucydides, not me.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 9:24 PM
I'm with Cala about the forgetting factor. This may not be supportable, but I don't think the problem is that the "system" doesn't teach broad materials, but the it doesn't do so in a memorable way. I took an advanced European History course in high school that lasted two years and culminated in a 6-hour examination on which I did probably better than most other test I've taken. I don't feel like I'm some kind of connoisseur of European history, now, though I do have minimum knowledge of the Dreyfus affair.
The other things is you're not really forced to learn much in college, at a lot of schools. I took one history course (which I don't remember much of except for Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, for some reason, even though I loved the class and the prof), and tested out of the other one. So if I hadn't taken that class in high school (which was not required), I would have had no opportunity to know anything about what when on in Europe, ever. So.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 9:25 PM
I learned my European History in high school the pre-WWII German way from a pre-WWII German: lecture and rote memorization. We covered l'Affaire Dreyfuss, bien sur! And, since I remember it pretty damned well all these years later, I've tended to give credit to Herr. C for his teaching.
However. I went to my high school reunion last week and reminisced with some other students about Herr C. They remembered virtually nothing from the class--not even his startling (yearly, penitential) admission about his short time in the Hitler Youth. I remember what I remember from his class because I continued to read history.
For the "O Tempora; O Mores!" crowd: Herr C. also prepped me for the European History AP. I wanted to take it, although a specific class for the test hadn't been given at my HS for about ten years. Herr C. shook his head at my progress: "It is a very difficult test," he warned me. "I do not think you are ready." He was a little horrified, I think, when I got a five. Declining standards? Maybe.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 9:29 PM
You've nailed the structure of the problem, baa (while Gerlernter knits baskets out of copies of the Dreyfus court records), but you leave us without a concrete opinion. What should we cover?
Many proposals (usually ones upset that we don't spend enough time on the evils of slavery, or of the genocide of the native groups, or on mistakes) seem to ignore that first, many students are simply too young to understand complex motivations for war (can you explain the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation to an eight-year old?) and that second, instilling some pride in one's country's accomplishments may not be a wholly bad thing, at least while very young. Criticism may be done more vigorously if one believes there is something worthwhile at the heart of the mess to criticize.
A friend of mine in Belgium learned, as part of his schooling, about two teensy battles Belgium fought before they were Belgium, because they were battles in which Belgium pwned some French ass. They're rather insignificant worldwide, but important to Belgian identity. This oddly hasn't prevented him from criticizing the later Belgian colonial programs.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 9:37 PM
What should we cover?
That's only half the question. We not only must decide which events are important, but what meaning to ascribe to those events.
For example, most people probably agree that we should all know about the war in Viet-Nam. However, do we teach that:
A. False and misleading reports from a biased press can cause political leaders to undermine military efforts, causing the noble sacrifice of tens of thousands of soldiers in the struggle to spead freedom to be shamefully wasted; or
B. Mao was wrong when he said that political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and that you can't win the hearts and minds of a people when you're napalming women, children, houses and villages.
It goes back to the question of deciding the content of Belgian identity.
Personally, I regret not being well taught about the Peloponnesian war, an understanding of which is crucial for appreciating much recent science fiction.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 10:07 PM
Personally, I regret not being well taught about the Peloponnesian war
About which I remember pretty much only this exchange.
Herr C.: The Athenian Senate voted to declare war because they wanted booty...
Student A: I'm sorry, Herr C., but why did the Senate declare war?
Herr C.: Because they wanted booty!
Student B: Herr C., I didn't catch that. What did the Senate want?
Herr C.: Booty! Booty! Don't you know anything? Booty!
Imagine it with a thick German accent. Priceless.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 10:21 PM
I think that Unfogged has to many outliers by far. The whole site has to be renormed, and I'm the man to do it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 10:32 PM
Well you go, girl.
*snap, snap, snap*
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 10:43 PM
I re-note my own booty moment.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 10:48 PM
Gelernter's discussion of Devil's Island and the Dreyfus Affair is ambiguous. Maybe the grad students knew about Dreyfus but didn't know he was sent to Devil's Island. I sure as hell didn't.
Here is another stupid paragraph from Gelernter:
College--preparatory math had been making steady progress. Before World War II, most incoming college freshmen weren't prepared for calculus. By the 1960s, good colleges had cut out teaching any math course below calculus. In the late '60s, math--teaching moved a step higher: High schools started teaching calculus, and smart college freshmen routinely enrolled in second--year calculus courses. Since then, progress has stopped. Today most public high schools offer essentially the same math sequences they did a generation ago.
Oh no, students take more math in high school than they did 50 years ago but the same amount they did 25 years ago.
There are only 4 years in high school. What does Gelernter want?
Posted by Joe o | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:10 PM
To start algebra in grade five? Because seriously, that's what any further calculus would require.
At my high school, year-two calculus was made available shortly after I graduated (for the top track); when I was in high school, I exhausted the curriculum with calc I. My sisters did with calc II. Beyond that, even some of the science majors in college don't need calc III; forget calc III and teach logic and writing.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:16 PM
(oh, and when my dad attended the same high school, it only covered through pre-calculus)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:18 PM
To Michael Schneider's claim that it's all political, I can only respond that I wish it were so easy. Politics -- in the usual partisan sense of tax rates, welfare policy, the war in Iraq and abortion -- really don't suffice to explain the debates about education that we see.
To take one hackneyed divide: there are those (like Fontana, woo hoo!) who are part of the Great Books underground. There are others who find the great books idea crazy. Here's the thing. Contrary to vulgar opinion, the Great Books underground counts among its members people of almost every political affiliation. And their support of Great Books programs usually owes little to that affiliation. Certainyl were my goal to turn a group of sixteen year olds into a squadron of ideological mini-mes, the Great Books are practically the last instrument I would deploy in the effort.
But if instead Michael S means that one's views on education will inevitably derive from a conception of "the good life for man," and that people who disagree on this will disagree about education, then yes, 100%. That's why debates about education policy are always so interesting.
Slolerner: my (I hope not mean-spirited) suggestion was merely that comparing the the case of Dreyfus and his France to the the case of (say) Jose Padilla, and today's America was not a particularly illuminating analogy.
Cala: the ideal history curriculum, that's a topic for outside a comment box, I fear! Maybe we can save it for the next meet up ("OggedCon 2006").
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:40 PM
My 6 year-old nephew is doing more advanced math than I was doing in grade 5. Public schools, both. His mother is almost worried about how advanced the curriculum is--but they've keeping up.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:43 PM
was merely that comparing the the case of Dreyfus and his France to the the case of (say) Jose Padilla, and today's America was not a particularly illuminating analogy.
Except that, from my perspective, you're in the tank for Bush on civil rights violations, baa. After all, at least Drefus got a trial about which people could take sides. There's that nasty politics again, determinant factor in deciding which analogies are tendentious (and why) and which are not.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 1-06 11:54 PM
Saying that X is a poor analogy for Y does not imply that is X is better or worse than Y. That's really all I meant by it SCMTim -- that the cases aren't really terribly alike. As you note, one enormous difference between the Padilla case and the Dreyfus case is that in the later, formal due process was more in evidence. Unless the only link drawing the analogies together is INJUSTICE!!!, which would serve to confirm my suspicion that this is an example of politics providing an analogy where one would not draw one.
But of course I am in the tank for W, so isn't that just what I would say?
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:02 AM
In contrast to my high school's poor record on history, the math was pretty good. It was quite common for people to take the AP Calc BC - I don't think there even were AB classes since it was assumed that if you took AP you'd do the BC sequence - and 5-10 people did calculus junior year (or earlier), after which they took math classes at the local university.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:06 AM
Like Cala, I took two years of calc in high school (junior year AB, senior year BC). This was a large urban high school with a poor reputation, but I'm proud of having gone there and proud of the education I got.
On a more relevant note, baa is absolutely right that the Great Books Underground crosses all political lines. My sister goes to St. John's, as did both of our parents, and when she mentions that there is a large conservative Christian population among the student body they are amazed. I would submit, however, that the different people supporting programs like this do so for very different reasons.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:30 AM
Unless the only link drawing the analogies together is INJUSTICE!!!
Except that, as I understand it, the claim for the importance of the Dreyfus Affair is, in part, that it motivated Herzl's Zionism ("Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society"). Or, more formally, Herzl decided that "brother can't get a break."
OK, a bit of a stretch, I admit. But I remind you of the words of the Ur-Text:
Now, what in the heaven does a jury know about hell
If I took it, but but they just look at me
Like, hey I'm on a mission
I'm talkin' 'bout conditions
Ain't right sittin' like dynamite
Gonna blow you up and it just might
Blow up the bench and
Judge, the courtroom plus I gotta mention
This court is dismissed when I grab the mike
Yo flave...what is this?
The underlying question is always the same - can I trust the government to be fair to me and mine.
But of course I am in the tank for W, so isn't that just what I would say?
I hope you know that I have never thought that you have said anything in bad faith. I worry that, as our lonely Republican, you feel jumped occassionally. In recompense, I hope you're able to trade Pierce, who is a cancer. And the inventor of AIDS.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 12:39 AM
To start algebra in grade five? Because seriously, that's what any further calculus would require.
I took AP calc as a sophomore, and some further calculus over the summer and at UCI.
I remember none of it!
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 9:19 AM
None of the further material, that is.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 9:20 AM
The two other younger people in that calculus class (Joey Yu, sophomore; David Chen, freshman) were much better at math than I.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 9:21 AM
To Michael Schneider's claim that it's all political, I can only respond that I wish it were so easy. Politics -- in the usual partisan sense of tax rates, welfare policy, the war in Iraq and abortion -- really don't suffice to explain the debates about education that we see.
Politics in its broadest sense: "Who whom", would go a long way towards explaining the debate. Not only concerning what is taught in history classes, but concerning the deployment of resources in education.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 9:39 AM
Public school, b-wo? The track at my school for bright kids starts with algebra in seventh grade, geometry in eighth, algebra II in ninth, trig/precalc in tenth, with two years of calculus following it. (There was another year of something or other when I was there, or I didn't start algebra till 8th grade, or something).
I suppose some of those years could be collapsed into each other, but I'd hate to lose basic geometry (mostly because that's all I remember). And I don't know if elementary schoolers are solid enough in basic arithmetic to move onto the more theoretical stuff.
Summer school is cheating if we're talking curricula.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 9:48 AM
Yeah, public school. I'm not sure how it happened, except that in 8th grade I was going to the HS for math.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 9:56 AM
That's nifty.
One of the problems with trying to cram everything into high school is that much further along in math, you're going to need someone with a master's degree in mathematics to teach advanced calculus properly; and at the moment, people with master's degrees in mathematics have far more lucrative options than teaching high school. (My calculus class was taught badly, and it seems to have been better than many; I can't imagine my calc teacher attempting calc III.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:06 AM
I'm bitter about the math situation. I tapped out my HS' math classes in grade 11, and there was no "local university" option. In middle school it was great, because they would just send me over to the high school (it was a K-12 campus) for math and French courses. When I was in college, I had high school students in some quite advanced classes (one was the son of one of my professors and had done a ton of summer work), and I was jealous of the bastards. They were better than nearly all the college students in there, too, or at least 75% of them.
And yeah, I think they should start teaching algebra in grade 5. I spent a whole summer working on a textbook based on that very proposition. There's a program that is very determined to teach algebra to younger and younger students, and it has done so with quite a bit of success (and these aren't all mathematically advanced students, either).
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:08 AM
AP tests: very, very silly if they are supposed to judge competence in the subject, rather than ability relative to the larger population. When I was graduating from eb's high school, I didn't want to take the AP Physics test because it was an extremely stressful week in my family life; I was sure I would bomb and it would be wasted effort. Besides, even if I had an okay grasp on mechanics, I was pretty sure I didn't have electromagnetism clear--why fake it? My teacher urged me to take everything, so I did. When I took my tests, I was worried about my score on the Calc BC, since I hadn't had time to answer the last question, though I was sure I had done everything else right, and I thought Physics would be a disaster, since I had failed to answer a single question on the long answer correctly. A few months later, I found out I got 5s on everything. I apparently managed to bullshit a science test: even though I couldn't answer any questions, I pretty much knew which formulas applied to which, so I applied them and did some math until I had an unmanageable snarl and then I moved onto the next one. Apparently partial-credit+curve=5 on the AP test. Maybe I was better at physics than the rest of the test-taking population, but the notion that I would have been competent to skip out of mechanics and e&m in college is absurd.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:10 AM
You were probably compared to me, who took the wrong AP Physics test without any AP training, who left 3/4ths of the test blank because I had never studied any E&M... and pulled a 2. I think you'd have to try to get a 1.
On the upside I left the exam two hours early and went for ice cream.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:14 AM
scmTim: no worries, I was just twitting you back.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 10:50 AM
baa wrote:
my (I hope not mean-spirited) suggestion was merely that comparing the the case of Dreyfus and his France to the the case of (say) Jose Padilla, and today's America was not a particularly illuminating analogy.
It's not a question of analogies. Arguments over the aptness of historical analogies too often bogs down in the, "but there's no sand in Vietnam!" problem.
It's a question of, as you correctly say, what the point is of learning history, or a given piece of history, at all. There are, apparently, two main answers being floated here, but I think they're really the same answer.
Answer (a) is that E. D. Hirschy kind of idea that Educated Persons should come up to scratch at Trivial Pursuit.
Answer (b), which I would give, is that there is some present-day application to learning history; that this application when not purely practical (e.g. military history) is essentially ethical.
Gelernter seems to rest his argument on answer (a), and so, it seems to me, do you, by using the adjective "tendentious". But why is it good to know about the Dreyfus affair, absent present application? I can think of no answer that does not imply some selection principle -- why the Dreyfus Affair, and not, let's say, the idiom of caricature peculiar to the era of Louis Napoleon? because the Dreyfus Affair had consequences i, ii, and iii -- and of course, once you develop an argument about consequences, you are stuck developing an argument about present-day application.
I agree that the Dreyfus Affair is worth an educated person's time (though not perhaps much of it) because it suggests
(1) the degree to which a civilized society committed to a theory of rights and liberties is nevertheless vulnerable, owing to a stew of motives incorporating ethnic prejudice, bureaucratic face-saving, and fear, to fits that can cause it to violate its core commitments to rights and liberties;
(2) the only honor in such an enterprise accrues to those who stick up for those core commitments in the face of prevailing opinion and official policy; that honor accrues in proportion to the effort expended on sticking up for those commitments and the consequences of those efforts.
This is a long-winded way of unpacking my comment in 53. I daresay that nearly everyone on learning of the Dreyfus Affair wants to believe one would have been a Dreyfusard, and to a considerable extent that is the point of knowing about the Dreyfus Affair. I don't think Gelernter meets that test by any stretch. Nor in fact do many of us, but Gelernter was the one who brought it up.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 11:00 AM
My thanks for putting up with me. Sorry for being a bit slow, and needing not only sleep but time to think.
Fortunately, while I was attempting thought, Slolrnr nailed it: "But why is it good to know about the Dreyfus affair, absent present application?" In the terms I'm more accustomed to, ‘why learn history unless it has meaning and import?'
Slolrnr posits an answer in terms of ethics, and gives a nice explication, but I think that answer is too narrow (and I'm not at all sure I buy his implied assumption that ethics is not purely practical). It doesn't account for Cala's example of the battles of the Belgians, for example.
I'd answer in cultural terms: that it's good to know about the Dreyfus affair because it helps build the shared understanding of meaning and reality that's necessary for civilization (the shared, agreed system that allows groups to live in something like peace and order).
Others might frame an answer in terms of identity: it's good to know because we're the sort of people who know about the Dreyfus affair - that's who we are. Just as, for example, Belgians are the sort of people who can successfully resist the bullying of their larger neighbor.
These are not disjunct answers, but different aspects (avatars?) of the same answer, which Slolrnr might put in terms of "present-day application. "
I call this application politics, which I'm using in the sense of ‘however it is we decide how we can all live together'. I think this differs from what baa is calling ‘the good life for man.' (A quick google led me to believe that's a reference to Aristotle and Plato)/
There is a saying about how getting the right answer depends on asking the right question, and I think it applies here. Consider these questions:
A. What do I need to know to live the good life for man?
B. What do you need to know to live the good life for man?
C. What does everyone need to know if we're going to preserve civilization?
Those questions elicit very different answers. I might think that I need to know Hebrew, or which direction faces Mecca, without thinking that you or anyone else need know these things. Personally, I don't think my ignorance of calculus has impaired either my own life or civilization, although some here seem to think it important. In the public debate I think it's important to distinguish when we're talking about the individual (what I think Baa was calling ‘the good life for man') and the group question.
Once we focus on question C - what does everyone need to know - it looks to me like the same class or type of question which Baa identifies as archetypically political. We decide what gets taught in school the same way we decide tax rates, welfare policy, the war in Iraq, abortions, etc.
Look at the question "should Intelligent Design be taught in Biology class in the public schools of Dover PA?" That question went to voters as part of a school board election, then the school board deliberated and voted, and then it ended up in federal court. On the practical level, that's exactly how the abortion question is handled.
Looking at the question more broadly, one could frame the ID debate as a question of identity (are we the sort of Nation that privileges Darwin?), or as an cultural question (what is the meaning of evolution?) or as an ethical question.
I hope those aren't tendentious examples. I must admit that I have the forgetting problem which Cala identified; things that don't strike me as meaningful or important get forgotten. So I like examples that have current import, which are (of course) the questions now being hotly contested.
Sorry about the length. I didn't have the time or the smarts to make it shorter.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 2:06 PM
1> Gelernter's column was evidently created by shooting some eightballs and then dictating into a tape recorder for 20 minutes. Babble-liscious is the appropriate word for that piece of junk.
2> I started to write something here about what Gelernter was failing to say, or attempting but failing to say but forget it. The stuff about Dreyfus is a throwaway line designed to reconfirm his reader's prejudices without examining them or proving them, and likewise, the column is bullshit end to end.
3> So, fuck him.
I took AP Euro, and it was adequate, I guess. I read the textbook, then spent the rest of the time reading other stuff in class. Boring!
History is usually poorly taught and goes mostly unlearned as far as I can tell, and that goes way way back. But the situation is not discernably worse than it ever was. Given the Weekly Standard's version of WWII, that crowd clearly has no fucking idea what the hell they're on about, so I don't really see where they get off. Perhaps if DG was babling about how ignorant he was of WWII he'd be on to something. So:
slolernr: It's a question of, as you correctly say, what the point is of learning history, or a given piece of history, at all. There are, apparently, two main answers being floated here, but I think they're really the same answer. Answer (a) is that E. D. Hirschy kind of idea that Educated Persons should come up to scratch at Trivial Pursuit.
Which is really a waste of time except in the sense of a minimal shared culture; that is mostly achieved in elementary school.
Answer (b), which I would give, is that there is some present-day application to learning history; that this application when not purely practical (e.g. military history) is essentially ethical.
I don't know what you mean here by ethical.
I would say that the only raw data available about the practice of government, social order and so on are contained in history and anthropology. It isn't very good data, but it is data. Without a skeletal form of 'history', any given person will be unable to absorb any kind of new data that becomes available, whatever the data (social, political, economic, etc.). That is a practical purpose, but I don't see how you can make conclusions about ethics without dealing with practicalities.
What skeletal form of history should be taught is contentious, and rightly so. But without the context of what skeletal form of history you're trying to teach, the data point about Dreyfus is just silly. The Dreyfus affair may be important to the history of Zionism, but on the context of WWI, Edirne and the Balkans (and pan-Slavism and Hungarian history, etc.) are far more important to answering the question of why a whole shitload of guys got waxed on the Western Front.
Sorry sloelrnr and MHS, this comment is probably on a perpendicular vector to what you're talking about.
ash
['I wish to throw coffee mugs at that guy's head.']
Posted by ash | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 4:15 PM
Not too orthogonal, Ash, for I think I understand what you said.
What I learned from both Anthropology and philosophy of science is that there ain't no such thing as really raw data: that any observational data is meaningful only in terms of the theory behind the observation. This is akin to your statement about the necessity for something on which to hang new information.
For example, descriptions of Crow kinhip systems assume the existence of kinship, customarily defined in terms of blood and marriage. For cultures that don't construct kinship this way (e.g. Yap), you can't meaningfully describe kinship.
It's like looking at cloud chamber pictures of atomic collisions - the understanding presupposes a theory which gives meaning to the idea of an electron volt.
So any skeletal form of history is going to reflect assumptions of what has meaning.
And, of course, I'd suggest that examining 'minimally shared culture' is not a waste of time. Millions of people have ended up quite dead because of disagreements about what constitutes 'minimally shared culture'. My limited experience of mediation suggests that if one can bring two parties to recognize the minimum shared understandings, you're most of the way to a settlement.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 2-06 4:54 PM
Looking at the question more broadly, one could frame the ID debate as a question of identity (are we the sort of Nation that privileges Darwin?)
I know this tangential, but this set me off for a moment. Mr. Schneider, can you clarify this point for me? My concern is the way you phrased this point (the ID debate being about "privileging Darwin," rather than, say, the insistence that science classes being about, I dunno, science). I just want to be sure I understand your thinking.
Thanks.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 9:55 AM
"My concern is the way you phrased this point (the ID debate being about "privileging Darwin," rather than, say, the insistence that science classes being about, I dunno, science). I just want to be sure I understand your thinking."
Good question, Mr. or Ms. Chopper. Let me take a very short trip down memory lane. We started with the question "what should students know about history?", which became ‘what should be taught about history?", which turned into "what is education all about, anyway?".
I tried to answer that question in terms of culture: that education is about constructing a shared system of meanings which allows people to live together in something like peace and order. I called this construction process politics. I asserted that culture (meaning) is always changing, and that it changes through a process of contest: that meanings change as people disagree about those meanings.
I asserted that these contests could be fought in different terms such as culture, identity, or ethics, all of which are different ways of looking at the same thing. I then offered the example of Intelligent Design, to try and stay on something like the original question about teaching history. I tried to frame the ID question in terms of identity, and culture, and should have framed it as an ethical question. I'm not saying the debate *is* about privileging Darwin, but that it could be contested in those terms.
The problem with casting it as ‘whether science classes should be about science' is that it begs the question. It assumes that there should be science classes, and that science should be defined in its own terms. In other words, you are assuming that science has a special place and should be taught: that science (Darwin) is privileged.
That may strike you as so obvious to be indisputable, but tens of millions of our fellow citizens apparently disagree. You may think they're idiots. That's okay, they might think you're a secular materialist.
Once we get to the point where one group is saying "idiot" and the other is saying "secular materialist", we're no longer having a discussion. There's no way to reach a modus vivendi. There's no resolution except saying the majority wins (and we may become a theocracy) or having someone blow a whistle and say "round over, everyone back to separate countries".
I think this is what Ogged was talking about when he said that discussions of academic issues "implicitly privilege some departments or areas over others" to which I suggested "of course they do, culture change is all about arguing over what is privileged." One way out of the pointless circularity and name calling is to make explicit the question of privilege.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 5:30 PM
Sometimes it's a way out of circularity, this explicating of privilege, and sometimes it's just more bullshit.
But come on. Teaching evolution's not like teaching both sides of a history debate, or trying to provide a spin on information. Not even in the same ballpark. This would be rather like insisting that we teach Holocaust denial as fact in the classrooms because there's a small noisy contingent that thinks it didn't happen.
Now, there is a place for the debate on whether religion can be taught in schools. (Losing that debate caused this pretend ID thing.) There's a place for the debate on whether we should teach science in schools. Or history. Or English.
But that's separate from the questions of what counts as subject matter in each of these disciplines. And even if it weren't, there's far better standards to decide that being noisy, well-funded, and wrapping oneself in a culture war; say, the standards of practicing scientists. (Whatever we teach our students, we want it to be factually true, right?)
The Darwinism debate just isn't in the same category as choosing whether to concentrate on the Dreyfuss Affair; more parallel would be to demand parity for the rogue historian who believes that anti-Semitism doesn't exist.
Let's restrict the word 'privilege' to contexts in which it can have meaning; if it means any time we make a decision about anything we're commiting the sin of privileging, it's a rather useless word.
('You're privileging math that adds up properly!')
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 5:46 PM
tens of millions of our fellow citizens apparently disagree. You may think they're idiots.
Tens of millions of our fellow citizens think that professional wrestling is a sport, that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis, that the planet is a mere six thousand years old, that bacon isn't delicious, and all sorts of equally ludicrous propositions. The fact that 2 out of 3 idiots agree doesn't make them non-idiotic.
And describing me as a secular materialist is spot-on correct. So I'll cop to that and continue to label ID agitators as idiots. It only seems fair.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 5:52 PM
Secular materialism be damned. It's pretty clear that God exists, and is a dick.
I mean, what can you say when he smites a guy at the moment when that guy decides to do something non-evil for once?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 7:09 PM
There's no resolution except saying the majority wins (and we may become a theocracy) or having someone blow a whistle and say "round over, everyone back to separate countries".
Buy this in toto. Hope we go another way.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01- 4-06 7:11 PM
I do seem to have stepped in it that time. Perhaps I should learn not to say anything I wouldn't want to step in. But I do thank everyone for indulging me in this discussion.
I'm going to put Matt Weiner's point about the existence of god to one side. That's a leap of faith too far, a tangent leading where far too many have gone before.
Apostropher writes "Tens of millions of our fellow citizens think that . . . all sorts of equally ludicrous propositions. The fact that 2 out of 3 idiots agree doesn't make them non-idiotic."
Where's your intellectual curiosity, man? (I mean the last word in a totally non gender specific way). Aren't you interested in epistemology? Isn't it at least a bit intriguing how and why people can form and hold such beliefs? Once you throw them all together into one big bag labeled "idiots" you've foreclosed any possibility of understanding.
If curiosity doesn't move you, let's try an instrumental approach: civilization depends on lots of people working (more or less) together. Division of labor in society, and all that. Those idiots are among the people who produce your food, and supply you with electricity, and produce computers, and elect your lawmakers, and without whom your life would tend more towards the nasty, brutish, poor, solitary, and short. Wouldn't it be better to recognize and reinforce the commonalities, to shore up whatever feeble threads are still holding our civilization together, rather than indulging in name calling? Can we even have a political system when name calling has totally supplanted discourse?
[parenthetical aside: do to poor impulse control, I'm going to indulge in yet another tendentious analogy: seeking to understand IDers is as stupid as trying to understand the root causes and motivations of terrorism. Okay, you may resume your regularly scheduled view of reality]
Cala writes "Whatever we teach our students, we want it to be factually true, right?"
Wrong. Certainly not when it comes to science, and I'd extend the principle across the board. Science doesn't deal with what's true.
Science deals with ‘what's the most useful theory we've thought up, which hasn't been too severely falsified in this circumstance?' Science can never prove a theory, it can only falsify. When an experiment produces results that match the predictions of a hypothesis, that doesn't prove the theory: you can never tell whether the theory is correct, of whether the theory is total nonsense that just happens (in this case, or these cases) to accidentally produce a correct prediction.
Facts don't have eternal independent existence in some aether: facts depend on context, on theory, on shared systems of meaning.
Try a simple question: how far is it from Washington DC to San Francisco?
In a simple world, where facts are facts, and there is only one truth, there'd be a simple answer: it is X miles. But that's only true in a geographic sense. One might also say, equally factually, equally truthfully: politically and culturally they are in different universes, and you can't measure the distance.
Cala mentions the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Being a fool, I'm going to pick up that gauntlet.
The cheap answer is: I say Shoah, you say Holocaust, and someone around here probably says po-tah-to. In other words, a lot of things happened between say 1923 and 1945, and which ones you count as important depend on what meaning you choose to ascribe.
What's the truth? Try these alternatives:
A. it was a democratic form of government, under a duly elected leader, going horribly and tragically wrong;
B. it was the deliberate, governmentally sanctioned doing to death of identifiable minorities, including homosexuals, Rom, and many many people from other disfavored groups.
Does anti-semitism exist? Yes and no. Yes, a lot of people affirm, and act upon, certain beliefs about Jews. No, it's just a particular variety of xenophobia, not a viable category unto itself (in the same way that while arachnophobia is different from triskedecaphobia, in understanding phobia you can treat the two classes as one).
Cala concludes "Let's restrict the word 'privilege' to contexts in which it can have meaning; if it means any time we make a decision about anything we're committing the sin of privileging, it's a rather useless word. "
I conclude the opposite. It's a very useful and honest word. It proudly proclaims "this we value." It allows us to say, for example, "By Dewey, this is the University of Chicago. While bacon is good, we're not going to start an animal husbandry department, because we privilege the work of Milton Friedman and Richard Posner over that of swineherds." And, of course, it invites the response "swineherds have done more to improve civilization than Friedman and Posner put together" and at least we're now talking explicitly about value and good in terms which allow the possibility of a peaceful resolution.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 12:21 AM
A few points:
1) Deciding not to call names (or donate money to a corrupt political system, or making and maintaining nuclear weapons) only works if disarmanent is mutual
2) My quick take on your argument is that I hear you saying "in order to create a better shared culture, we all need to study each other and the roots of our feelings, maaan. When we all come together and really grok each other, we're all going to be able to decide what we as a collective think is the right thing to do. I'd suggest that given point 1 above, this is purely a way to sit around with your thumb up your ass waiting for the (stupid, superstitious, exploited) wolf in the room to settle down with you and just y'know, hang.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 10:41 AM
2) I don't think that's a fair reaction. My take on the argument is that it's a valid point to raise, but one that is fairly easily answered. If the question is "Why do we privilege science (evolution) over non-science (ID)?" there's a good answer. It's not that evolution is true and ID isn't -- while that's certainly the way I'd bet, a glowing white guy with a beard could appear tomorrow, create a unicorn and a griffin in the middle of Times Square, and flip off the biology faculty of every major university on the planet saying "So much for your evolution, smart guys!" The answer is that science (loosely, knowledge acquired or confirmed using the scientific method) is useful (and intellectually satisfying) in a manner that ID isn't, and that pretending that they are the same thing (by teaching ID in science class) makes it more difficult to teach and use science.
If you (hypothetical ID proponent) want to ask "Why must I value science over faith?" the answer is that you don't have to. But I, backed by the voting majority of the US and the Constitution, do value the unimpeded teaching of science over your ability to express your faith by interfering with science teaching, and will do what I politically can to stop you.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:12 AM
Where's your intellectual curiosity, man?
I've got plenty. I do not, however, suffer fools gladly. Everybody has a right to be an idiot, and I don't begrudge them the right. I still feel no hesitation to point out when somebody is abusing that right.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:23 AM
Sure, but it goes beyond ID. I was reacting more to this:
Wouldn't it be better to recognize and reinforce the commonalities, to shore up whatever feeble threads are still holding our civilization together, rather than indulging in name calling? Can we even have a political system when name calling has totally supplanted discourse?
And the following paragraphs as an extension. I'm all for reasoned discourse (and sorry, Michael Schneider, if my last was overly cranky), but it frankly seems to me that while reenforcing the commonalities is well and good (I sing the National Anthem at every game I go to), spending our time doing that rather than working to dissuade, formulate new arguments, constantly working to push back against the tide of ignorance and superstition and the manipulations of the very wealthy in our society, is bringing a back massager to a gun fight.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:30 AM
105 to 103, obviously.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:37 AM
Eh, I agree with you more than I disagree with you, but I'm guessing that Schneider agrees with both of us to pretty much the same extent. There's a subtle but real difference between saying "I value science, and while I have nothing against your faith, I strongly object to your interference in my science class -- if science isn't your thing, stick your fingers in your ears," and "What kind of moron believes that crap?" While I think a lot of people are going to perceive the first as just as hostile as the second, there's still a tactical value to staying on the high ground. (Potential for rolling rocks downhill, mostly.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:45 AM
Science can never prove a theory, it can only falsify.
Exactly. I used to respect Cala, but now that she's laid bare her ignorance of the scientific project, no longer.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:48 AM
I say Shoah, you say Holocaust, and someone around here probably says po-tah-to.
It's me. I pronounce Holocaust "po-tah-to". I also replace Cole Porter's original lyrics with "You're the top, you're Adolph Hitler".
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 12:00 PM
I ♥ Joe Drymala.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 12:03 PM
Joe Drymala is P.G. Wodehouse, give or take an Axis power.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 12:11 PM
Ha! That's awesome, Weiner.
SB, I used to respect you, but now that you've laid bare your...
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:16 PM
Your ass remains a gold mine.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:22 PM
I'll bet I'd heard that Wodehouse thing somewhere before, though, and unwittingly plagarized it, given how much I traffic in Teh Musical Theater Ghey.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:27 PM
What a great comment thread that was.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:28 PM
I don't know, it seems awfully convenient for the Porter people to be able to blame Plum for that line. Not that he wasn't an idiot for making those broadcasts, but still.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:32 PM
Unfogged mutual backscratch exquisite corpse "You're the Top" remix!
You're the top, you're philosopho-Cala
You're the top, you're Joe Drymala
I'm going outside, take it from here.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:34 PM
You're the top, you're Almeida's blender,
You're the top, you know Standpipe's gender
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:38 PM
You're the top, you're ogged's hot ex,
You're the top, you think about teh sex
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:43 PM
You're a kooky kink from an Apo link with farms;
You're Ogged's weird cleanness,
You're FL's penis,
You're Smasher's arms
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:49 PM
You're the top! You're a Wolfson nitpick.
You're the top! You eschew the lipstick.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:52 PM
Ooo. Very nice, particularly the first line. Three more couplets, please -- I'm one rhyme away from an end-of-stanza bit.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 1:53 PM
I'm Tom Hilde perplexed, a mustached text or Chop',
But ATM, I'm the bottom, you're the top!
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:01 PM
You're the top, you discourage trollers,
You're the top, but not Gayatollahs,
You're the subject matter of Tia's blogger slash!
You're Wolfson's grammar,
You're profgrrl's camera,
You're DE's lash.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:05 PM
Drymala wins.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:06 PM
Sorry if I was a bit nasty. But basically, my problem with calling it all privilege is that to me there seems to be a difference between the questions: "Here is the state of the discipline (science, history, philosophy); what within the state of the discipline should we teach? What is important?" and "This isn't part of the discipline, but I'm going to pretend it is." (We don't have perfect criteria for what counts as a discipline, but it's not as hopeless as saying 'it's all shared meanings' would suggest.)
I think the former questions constitute questions of privilege, and I think that it's meaningful to say that, "Here are some data that is part of the study of world history. We can't fit them all in; which should we prioritize or discard? What is value? What is important?" is a legitimate question of privilege. How do we teach economic theory? Do we teach laissez-faire economics as a good, or as a problem? What about Marx?
But I don't think I'm worried about the same set of problems if I'm trying to explain why, once we've decided that it's good to teach our kids some science, we shouldn't have to teach things that aren't regarded as science. It's an interesting problem, but it's not the same problem, and requires a different set of tools.
If I lump them all under the term 'privilege', then I'm probably going to bring the wrong tools to the job when it's time to decide what to include in the curriculum, proudly or otherwise. ('Hey, teaching kids about ID is just like the decision to teach them about Marx.')
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:09 PM
These are awesome couplets, but I forget the tune/meter.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:13 PM
Here, Cala.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:14 PM
Actually, that likely won't help, since it's not an audiofile. Nevermind.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:15 PM
I just started to type "It goes like this," planning to hum a few bars, but that probably wouldn't work too well for you.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:15 PM
I've heard it, but it's been a while, and it gets mixed up with "I get a kick out of you' and 'Anything goes' in my head.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:20 PM
You're a mac, you're a Tripp performance,
You're the Jack in a pack of Mormons
I'm a Lane review, I'm Ogged's dim view of pop,
But if Jude Law's cock's the bottom, you're the top!
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:27 PM
(Ok, so performance/Mormons is forced. And so is cleanness/penis.)
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:30 PM
Please. When the competition includes grammar/camera and trollers/Gayatollahs, beating yourself up over flawed rhymes is simply ostentatious.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:32 PM
Yeah, what Cala said.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:37 PM
You're the top! You're farberesque!
You're a lawyer! You're LizardBreath!
This Weiner-mobile's rolling, oh when will it stop?
But if Ogged is the bottom, Unf's the top!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:38 PM
I liked camera/grammar. It's reminiscent of Morressey's spanner/piano.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:38 PM
In 126, that is.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 2:38 PM
Boy howdy, I take a bit of a nap and suddenly Cole Porter is breaking out all over. Perhaps there is something to the notion of entropy, after all. I still haven't figured out the Chopper/LB exchange, but I'll get back to that.
Cala, please tell me if I understand you correctly (and I count on you to set me straight, as nastily as may tickle your fancy, if I don't).
In my constuction we start with the undifferentiated chaos of all possible knowledge, and we draw a circle. We say "inside this circle is all the knowledge which meets the test ‘is this something all reasonably educated people should know?'" I think this was Gelernter's question, where we began this journey.
Then we draw a line across the area of all things educated people should know, saying "on one side is all knowledge we call Science, and on the other is all other knowledge." Then we divvy up the Science part and say, for example, "in this area is geology, here's chemistry, here's physics, here's creative accounting - hey! You! Creative accounting, get over there to the other side of that line next to ID, you're not part of science".
You, (correct me if I'm wrong) are saying that these are wholly different questions.
To me they look the same, questions of where we draw a line. I'd answer them both in the same way, looking at things like (a) does everything on the same side of the line share characteristics? (b) does the stuff on the same side of the line make something like a coherent whole? (c) is putting the line here useful, does it enable us to understand the world better, or to make better medicines or avoid having to watch reality TV shows? Okay, maybe those aren't precisely the best set of questions for drawing the lines, but I hope they ar illustrative.
I'm using the term privilege to refer to the drawing of the lines. That we privilege something when we say "you're inside the line". e.g.. ‘traditional notions of history privilege dead white males, because their actions are inside the line demarkating history while the lives of everyone else are deemed unimportant and not-history.'
Why do you see them as wholly different?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 3:24 PM
I liked camera/grammar. It's reminiscent of Morressey's spanner/piano.
That was supposed to be a rhyme?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 3:42 PM
You're right; they are both questions of where we draw lines. But they're different lines. Why do I think this?
Let's call the first set of lines ('what counts as science') category lines. Let's call the second set of lines ('what parts of science do we value') value lines.
It is possible for people to agree on the category lines, and even the contents of the categories. Let's grant for fun, that an American researcher and a Belgian researcher both agree to the major facts about the Battle of the Golden Spurs . They believe they both count as history, they believe that researchers have fairly accurate accounts of the events, etc. Or maybe they don't, but they think they need to do more research. But whatever, our postulated historians are in total agreement that the subject is history.
Can they still disagree whether this battle should be included in a fifth-grade curriculum? Suppose the American researcher believes that it would be a waste of time for the average American student when there's that Dreyfuss affair to learn about. Does that mean he believes its not history? No, just that it's not important. It's a value judgment.
They're just two separate questions; one can assent to one and deny the other. Sometimes the boundary lines on 'what counts as science' are fuzzy, but just because the lines on what to value are fuzzy, too, doesn't make them the same line.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 3:52 PM
I note from Cala's link, with amusement, that the French reclaimed their golden spurs in a smashing victory two years later.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 4:52 PM
I would agree with Cala's 141, particularly with the idea that the drawing of lines determining 'what sort of thing is this?' precedes the drawing of lines determining 'should educated people know this?'
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 4:57 PM
142: Yeah -- it's pretty much important only because it established Dutch as the major language in Flanders, and for identity-forming purposes for Dutch Belgium.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 5:02 PM
Flemish?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 5:06 PM
Yeah, Flemish. (There is still a geographical divide between French-speaking and Dutch-speaking Belgium, but most kids these days learn both languages.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 5:11 PM
Thank you for trying to explain that, Cala, but I must confess I'm still befuddled. I'm not being deliberately obtuse, I'm just truly naturally and inherently dense.
I think you are making this distinction:
A. Things reasonable people can disagree about; value judgments. e.g. should this particular event be included in a fifth grade curriculum.
B. Things reasonable people can't disagree about; category questions. e.g. is this particular battle part of history.
That's where we part company. I think the category questions are value judgments, too. To steal a line from LB (above) "The answer is that science (loosely, knowledge acquired or confirmed using the scientific method) is useful ... ." We define a category (science, history, whatever) and draw a line around it because we think it's useful (or good, or whatever).
You may be thinking ‘of course it's good, science has given us antibiotics and iPods and colonoscopies and so much corn we can feed it to cows and eat steak'.
That's true. If we don't define and bound science the way we do, we don't get those things. But that just changes the question from ‘what value do we choose to give to this definition of science?' to ‘what value to we choose to give to iPods and steak?'
Maybe my concept of what's reasonable is unreasonable. Maybe those who value theological certainty above steaks and antibiotics are simply idiots. But I find it useful to draw a line (create a category) that includes both those questions and treats them as instances of the same class.
I think you choose to live in a universe that contains Truth. I don't. You privilege facts, and I view facts as contingent and transitory. Interestingly, fundamentalist Christian Truth beats scientific truth on most tests: it is certain, immutable, comprehensive, and comprehensible. But since I don't value Truth, that disturbs me not one whit.
I think this is what LB was getting at when he pointed out "If the question is "Why do we privilege science (evolution) over non-science (ID)?" there's a good answer. It's not that evolution is true and ID isn't -- while that's certainly the way I'd bet, a glowing white guy with a beard could appear tomorrow, create a unicorn and a griffin in the middle of Times Square, and flip off the biology faculty of every major university on the planet saying "So much for your evolution, smart guys!"." Personally, I'm hoping not for the guy with the beard, but for the woman with the large but miraculously perky ... uh, never mind.
I'm not saying that you think like a fundie, or that you are one, or anything like that. Nor do I intend any disapprobation. I'm perfectly comfortable with a letting people live in whatever universe they choose - up to a point.
The point I stop accepting is where civilization collapses because we don't have enough shared reality to sustain cooperation. Deciding what we require in the shared reality, determining the necessary commonalities, is politics.
And, of course, there's still the very real probability that I've totally misunderstood what you're saying.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:04 PM
The point I stop accepting is where civilization collapses because we don't have enough shared reality to sustain cooperation.
Do you really think we're at this point, though? And if not, why does any of this matter?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:10 PM
"Do you really think we're at this point, though? And if not, why does any of this matter?" (I gotta learn how to do that italic thing)
It's important because when LB says "But I, backed by the voting majority of the US and the Constitution, do value the unimpeded teaching of science over your ability to express your faith by interfering with science teaching, and will do what I politically can to stop you" he's leaving things unsaid.
It's important to remember that the US Consitution and electoral majorities are subject to change without notice, and that doing things politically presupposes a conception of what's political and an idea of how to act effectively. I also agree with LB that saying my (scientific) truth is stronger than your (religious) truth" is an ineffective argument. I think that there's a real possibility that we'll soon see a change in the meaning of the words "congress shall make no laws ... respecting an establishment of religion ... ." If that happens, Im likely to be looking for another country, not merely another reality. That's the background, in my opinion, of the discussion about Gelernter with which we started.
We're got a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country, and the assertion 'those effete educated types don't actually know anything about real history, so we should ignore them' is one of the traditional forms of argument.
ooopsie, I seemed to have strayed from a dispassionate intellectual inquiry into my own political beliefs. Sorry.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:31 PM
I gotta learn how to do that italic thing
Put your text between <i> and </i>.
when LB says … he
She.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:45 PM
You're the top,
you're Ogged's beloved phone,
You're the top,
you're Farber's lovers' moans . . . .
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:45 PM
A. Things reasonable people can disagree about; value judgments. e.g. should this particular event be included in a fifth grade curriculum.
B. Things reasonable people can't disagree about; category questions. e.g. is this particular battle part of history.
I started responding to this by saying that drawing a distinction between value judgments and category judgments isn't the same as saying that reasonable people can disagree about the first but not the second, but come to think of it, I suppose I agree with you about that. I would be more guarded about it -- obviously reasonable people can disagree about marginal cases in category judgments, and obviously there can be rival systems of classification, but roughly, within the system of classification customarily used in American academics, there is an objectively right answer to the question "Is ID science?" ('No', for those following along at home.)
But saying there's an objectively right answer to that question doesn't require me to make the grandiose claim that I have access to Truth, and those who disagree with me don't. All it means is that I say I know the rules of a socially constructed game we've been playing for the last three centuries or so called Science, that I want to keep playing that game for all sorts of reasons like painless dentistry and refrigeration, and that ID isn't a coherent part of that game.
Now, by saying ID isn't part of the game of Science, I'm not saying that ID is categorically valueless, or that there aren't other games it could be part of: someone who values ID for it's own sake can still study it, just not in a science class.
I lost you at the end -- I can't see how the position Cala is taking (and I agree with) leads in any way to a loss of what can be agreed upon as consensus reality. (And absolutely no offense -- I'm only mentioning this because someone else will if I don't -- but my pseudonym is LB because my real name is Liz.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:45 PM
And SB beat me to it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 6:46 PM
You're the top, you're a Mineshaft mounter
You're the top, you're Ogged's TiVo counter
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:08 PM
I'd like to add that how well Joe D. did with this off the top of his head is an indication of something I've always believed: "You're the Top" is not that clever a song. Cole Porter wrote some clever lyrics, but not there. It's pretty easy to get random rhymes out of the entire universe of pop culture; it was a cute idea, but the execution is not particularly inspired. It's certainly no "She sits at the Ritz with her splits of mums/And starts to pine for a stein with her Village chums/But with a Schlitz in her mitts down at Fitzroy's Bar/She thinks of the Ritz--oh/It's so/Schizo."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:16 PM
> "Whatever we teach our students, we want it to be factually true, right?"
>Wrong. Certainly not when it comes to science, and I'd extend the principle across the board. Science doesn't deal with what's true.
I think this is a mistake. Evolution is factually true. I only want to hear counter-arguments from those who believe it to be false.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:23 PM
Tia, have you read this? "You're the Top" may not be clever, but Joe's facility with the lyrics doesn't prove your case.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:24 PM
Evolution is factually true.
The problem with this (which I believe to be true) is that it's vulnerable to the attack that you don't know it beyond all doubt. My hypo in 103, where some Creator appears and creates a griffin on the Evening News, is possible, and an ID proponent can therefore still say 'Maybe evolution is true, maybe ID is true -- let's teach both.' A stronger argument for differentiating between ID and evolution is that the reasons for thinking evolution are true are science reasons, and the reasons for thinking ID is true are not.
(And Drymala is an awfully sharp parodist.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:36 PM
(I should also say that I am dreadfully embarassed to be talking about truth and knowledge in front of all these philosophers.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:39 PM
I've read it. I didn't mean to suggest that Joe D. wasn't very good with funny lyrics, just that the fact that he could come up with something basically as good (and in some ways better, since now JD did some directed parody of the original, like the "pack of Mormons") without great apparent effort demonstrates that Cole Porter, at least in that instance, is no JD.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:48 PM
Cole Porter thought of the framework, though. Did Drymala ever do that? Even the musical he wrote when he was already five was indebted to Sondheim.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:51 PM
Ah, I see.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 7:51 PM
Joe's "Rice, Rice Baby" is brilliant.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:03 PM
2 facts about Joe Drymala:
Joe Drymala is so talented he thought of the framework for today's satire decades before he was born.
Joe Drymala is so modest he allowed Cole Porter to take the credit for that framework.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:08 PM
When Joe Drymala writes "pancreas" and "congressional," they rhyme.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:11 PM
Joe Drymala once sent me a videotape of him making love to my wife. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:21 PM
In that video, every time Ben Wolfson's mom (for it was his mom), attempted to convey her ecstasy in words, Joe Drymala would rhyme her utterance.
"Fuck me again, you rhyming stallion," was answered with, "I think I'd better call in a battalion."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:29 PM
I dream of a
Tia-Joe D cutting contest.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:37 PM
"I think I'd better call in a battalion."
Wouldn't he liken himself to a battalion, rather than admit he's not up to the task?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:39 PM
168 wasn't actually meant to be free verse. Punting on the philosophical issues...
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 8:51 PM
Joe Drymala is banned.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 10:04 PM
That was the least funny thing I could have said, I think.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 10:07 PM
It would have been funny with an exclamation point.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 10:14 PM
It would have been funny with an exclamation point.
Yeah, Joe. You suck at this.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:13 PM
I gotta learn how to do that italic thing
Put your text between and .
when LB says … he
She.
My thanks to SB, and my apologies to LB. My problems with gender confusion are my own, no disrespect intended. Really, some of my best friends have gender.
When I accused Cala of believing in Truth I may indeed have leapt to the wrong conclusion. My apologies, and I'll retract it.
I think we have allowed into our shared reality the belief that there are "rules of a socially constructed game we've been playing for the last three centuries or so called Science, that I want to keep playing that game for all sorts of reasons like painless dentistry and refrigeration, and that ID isn't a coherent part of that game."
We're agreeing (I think) that we're defining the boundaries of science, drawing a line between science and non-science, where we think it needs to be to give us more things like painless dentistry (!?) and refrigeration. We think that's where the line needs to be because its having been drawn there allowed the development of those wonderful things we value.
I'm saying that we define the boundaries of education, we say that science should be part of the public school curriculum, for much the same reason: because we want to maintain a supply of people who know those rules and can play that game, because we want truly painless dentistry and maybe even a cure for colon cancer.
I think that's where you and Cala part company from me, and I must confess I still don't understand your position. I just don't see the distinction.
( I can't see how the position Cala is taking (and I agree with) leads in any way to a loss of what can be agreed upon as consensus reality.
Maybe I'm again leaping too far, but this is my theory:
The rules of this constructed game called society are subject to change. They are disputed, argued about, rephrased, reinterpreted, old rules disappear and new rules are invented. In other words, their meaning is contested.
The meaning and boundaries of science have changed. Before Karl Popper the notion of the impossibility of proof and the importance of falsification wasn't part of the rules (and, for some, there's still some confusion). Whether Natural History or other descriptive fields were properly included as sciences has changed. Eugenics was, in some senses, once a part of science. If I knew more history of science I could probably keep listing examples.
I expect the meaning and boundaries of science to continue to change. Right now there is a contest over the scienceness (can I say that?) of economics. Evolutionary psychologists are trying to create a new area of science, and there's not yet a consensus. There are other areas being contested, I'm sure. Again, the examples are legion (if not battalion).
The contest over evolution did not begin with the publication of Origin of Species and it won't end with the Dover decision. That the ramparts have held so far does not mean that they will always hold; past performance does not guarantee future returns. Your children's milage will vary. There could come a time when science isn't privileged on its own terms, when evolution and creationism are taught equally in public schools.
I'm afraid that if the lines of that contest are drawn in the wrong place, science will lose. I think that if the contest is about objectively right answers, or truth, or facts, science will lose (for the reason you gave so clearly in #158).
I think the most persuasive position, the position that allows us to keep science on its own terms yet allows the Creationists to claim victory and retire from the field, is to say "we're not claiming truth, or facts, or anything like that. Sure, scientific facts change, science comes up with things that turn out to patently false sometimes, but if we want more things like antibiotics and refrigeration we should keep science in the curriculum and allow scientists to define the boundaries of science and let science teachers decide which aspects of science are appropriate for which grades."
I hope that was a useful response.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 5-06 11:49 PM
169: I decided to go with making fun of your mom's sexual appetites than glorifying Joe.
And really, I have no illusions that I could win a cutting contest with Joe.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 7:57 AM
It depends what we're cutting.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 7:59 AM
If you refer to cheese, Joe, my oggs rival the unrealized ones of Chuck Norris. So yeah, never mind, don't be steppin'.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 8:03 AM
I should probably let this die.
My original complaint was the use of the word 'privilege' to range over any demarcation lines at all, when I think it's better restricted to normative judgments. Reason being it's not necessarily the case at all that deciding what to include in science counts as a judgment of value.
A. Things reasonable people can disagree about; value judgments. e.g. should this particular event be included in a fifth grade curriculum.
B. Things reasonable people can't disagree about; category questions. e.g. is this particular battle part of history.
Nope, nope, nope. See, if I had wanted category B to be about value judgments ('reasonable people'), I wouldn't have spent all that time explaining how it wasn't a value judgment.
But now I'm a believer that science believes in absolute Truth , akin to a fundamentalist and apparently I'm writing so obtusely when I say that 'two historians could disagree on whether an event occurred' I mean to say that 'no two reasonable historians could disagree' and anyone who thought otherwise was an idiot.
I'm beginning to think you're reading someone else's words and attributing them to me. I'll have to go kick my doppelganger.
Okay. So let me try this again.
What counts as 'science' is largely independent of what counts as 'something I value.'
Wait. No.
Let's make it even simpler. Suppose I have a bunch of blocks in front of me. Some of my blocks are round and some are square. I decide to divide them up into piles based on the following characteristics: having corners and ability to roll.
Now, it may be the case that when I separate all the square blocks from the round blocks, I'm doing so in part because I like the square blocks better. But clearly, the value judgment of 'Death to round blocks!' is not the same judgment I make when I say 'Let's put the blocks with corners in the left-hand pile.'
And I think we're in a similar position with science. We have a bunch of criteria which we think applies to science; maybe this includes falsifiability, or the standards of the scientific academic, or repeatability. We look at astrology. Does it meet these criteria? No? Okay, not a science. ID? No? Not a science either.
Does that mean I think that astrology and ID are a waste of time? Not necessarily. I don't think philosophy's a science, either.
The judgment that astrology and ID are a waste of time is conceptually separate from the decision that they're not part of science. The first judgment is a value judgment ('it won't get me what I want.') and the second is a category judgment ('it isn't like the other things in this group.')
Do the two types of judgments get conflated? Of course they do; if one believes that only science is a good thing, then defining something as science works also to approve it as a good thing.
Note, I haven't said a damned thing about absolute Truth. One doesn't have to believe that science is about absolute truth in order to think that astrology isn't science.
Now, back to the original point: 'privilege', as we were using it, was a value judgment. What is good to teach? You were suggesting that 'privilege' should range over decisions of what counted as different disciplines, if I read you correctly. Any decision at all is privileging one world view over the other.
And that's what I took issue with. Now we're conflating two sense of 'privilege' under one, and that's where people get all upset because they think that by saying 'ID isn't science' I mean 'ID is a bad way to look at the world.'
I can love astrology more than anyone has ever loved astrology, but that's not going to turn it into a science.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 8:11 AM
Well, I'm still interested, although about as confused as you are. I'm agreeing with everything you've said - with Schneider, I'm agreeing up to a point, then losing track of his arguments, and ending up with something that I don't quite get but think I disagree with.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 8:19 AM
Having retired from the field, I'll pop back in only to mention that Cala has really captured my thinking on the matter, and done so in a much more politic manner than I.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 8:38 AM
If I'm understanding him correctly, I think what he's saying is that when we say things like 'That isn't science' we're necessarily making a value judgment ('That shouldn't be taught'), and that in doing so, we're alienating IDers, or more generally, those who disagree with us. To ameliorate this alienation, he proposes, we should embrace this value judgment and say, 'Hey, IDer, we're not claiming absolute truth, just that because we value doing science in this way, and it gets us good results like vaccines.'
I disagree not because I believe that science is going after absolute Truth, but because the question 'what counts as science' doesn't include a value judgment. (Discovering the formula for nerve gas unquestionably counts as science, but I don't think that when I point out that chemistry is a science, I'm valuing the uses of nerve gas.)
Moreover, I disagree that framing it all as 'just a matter of our shared values' is going to get us anywhere with the IDer. If it's just a matter of liking my values more than I like yours, then this is the sort of thing that should be decided by vote. Do we all like astrology? Yea? Now it's a science. We all believe ID is right and holy? Yea? Okay, now it's a science, too.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 8:40 AM
To ameliorate this alienation, he proposes,
This is where I'm losing Schneider -- I don't quite see what he's proposing that's likely, as a mater of tactics, to ameliorate any such alienation. I'm all for the idea that finding common ground if at all possible is a good idea; I just don't see how he gets there.
I do have a slight point of disagreement with you, I think. You're absolutely right that saying 'X is science, Y is not science' isn't a value judgment, it's a definitional matter. (That doesn't mean there aren't honestly contested calls, but neither evolution or ID is one -- evolution is clearly in, ID just as clearly out.) There is a value judgment, though, in saying that maintaining the classification system that includes science as a category is a good thing to do. While calling astrology a 'science' would be either a simple factual error or a redefinition of 'science', rather than a value judgment that astrology is a good thing, it would be possible to say that: "In our modern age, 'science' is no longer a useful concept. We've got all the technology we need, and we can maintain it by rote. Let's stop talking about science and divide knowledge into 'Intellectually Stimulating': astrology, astronomy, literature, pure mathematics, philosophy, physics, and theology; and 'Vocational Training': medicine, law, computer science, HVAC, and psychology." That would be a value judgment (in my opinion, an insane one) that might leave evolution and ID in the same box -- it just wouldn't be a box labeled 'science' or one that served the purposes science does.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 8:58 AM
I agree with you that there's probably a value judgment in saying 'Categorizing things by similarity is something we should do' and there's probably reasons that we like to include criteria such as 'repeatability' as part of science that are in some sense value judgments: it is good to have confirmable experiments.
Maybe this is Schneider's point; if it's a value judgment to say that repeatability should be counted as one of the goals of science, and then we use repeatability to discern what is science and what isn't, then I am cheating when I say that making categorical distinctions doesn't involve value judgments.
But is that the same sort of value judgment as saying ID is bad? I don't think so, if only saying "We value doing science in this way" isn't the same as saying "We value only things that are done in this way." or even "Everything done in this way has value." I think the scientific method is a good thing to teach, even though some of the kids learning it may use it to craft horrible torture techniques lab-tested, method-approved.
Maybe we can call it a meta-value judgment versus a value judgment. It still doesn't seem to me that 'what counts as science' is on the same level as 'is this a worthwhile endeavor'.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 9:17 AM
But is that the same sort of value judgment as saying ID is bad?
I think the difference between the two value judgments is simply that placing a high value on the maintenance of our current definition of science is going to be much more broadly popular than simply placing a higher value on evolution than ID. If the question is presented to people as "Should evolution alone be taught, or should ID be taught as well?" lots of people will think it's no big deal, and say 'Sure, go ahead'.
If you shift ground onto the definition of science, and make the argument: "Because of the practice of science over the last couple of centuries, we have this lovely comfortable society to live in, and all sorts of wonderful knowledge about the universe. 'Science' has a clear (clear enough) set of rules that exclude ID. If you want to teach ID in science classes, there are only two possibilities: (a) you're just a liar. You know people value science, and you want this non-science thing of yours to be treated as such because of the cachet calling something 'science' lends it, or (b) you want to change the definition of 'science' in a fundamental way, and abandon the practices that brought us all this great info about Bose-Einstein condensates and the Cambrian explosion, and incidentally public health and babies that reliably live past their fifth birthdays."
Someone could, presented with that argument, make the decision that they value obedience to the perceived will of God that ID be taught as science more than they value the continued existence of science. I would think they were a fruitloop for having such a preference, but I don't think that it's a fundamentally different kind of value decision than the decision that evolution and ID, considered in isolation, either are or aren't both the sorts of things that should be taught in schools.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 9:38 AM
The reason I'm being stubborn on this is that one of the typical ID arguments against teaching evolution goes something like this:
"Evolution is just a way of explaining how the world got here. So is ID. The only reason you don't accept ID as a possibility is because you're an atheist who hates Christians! We should teach both because they're both the same, it just depends on whether you value materialism or godly values."
Now, if all I can say is, yeah, it's just that I value evolution more because it gets me some good things, I'm really in a very weak position here. I have to hope the other person agrees with me that there are good things to be gotten.
But that's not the reason we're teaching evolution or saying ID isn't a science; we're teaching evolution and the scientific method and such because that's what scientists are doing. Now maybe the scientists are doing it because they believe it leads to good things; that's plausible, but given the amount of good science that has lead to horrible results, I suspect that 'we are doing it because we value it' isn't really the right way to frame it. It may be more that "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up."
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 10:02 AM
The reason I'm being stubborn on this is that one of the typical ID arguments against teaching evolution goes something like this:
"Evolution is just a way of explaining how the world got here. So is ID. The only reason you don't accept ID as a possibility is because you're an atheist who hates Christians! We should teach both because they're both the same, it just depends on whether you value materialism or godly values."
Now, if all I can say is, yeah, it's just that I value evolution more because it gets me some good things, I'm really in a very weak position here. I have to hope the other person agrees with me that there are good things to be gotten.
But that's not the reason we're teaching evolution or saying ID isn't a science; we're teaching evolution and the scientific method and such because that's what scientists are doing. Now maybe the scientists are doing it because they believe it leads to good things; that's plausible, but given the amount of good science that has lead to horrible results, I suspect that 'we are doing it because we value it' isn't really the right way to frame it. It may be more that "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up."
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 10:04 AM
The reason I'm being stubborn on this is that one of the typical ID arguments against teaching evolution goes something like this:
"Evolution is just a way of explaining how the world got here. So is ID. The only reason you don't accept ID as a possibility is because you're an atheist who hates Christians! We should teach both because they're both the same, it just depends on whether you value materialism or godly values."
Now, if all I can say is, yeah, it's just that I value evolution more because it gets me some good things, I'm really in a very weak position here. I have to hope the other person agrees with me that there are good things to be gotten.
But that's not the reason we're teaching evolution or saying ID isn't a science; we're teaching evolution and the scientific method and such because that's what scientists are doing. Now maybe the scientists are doing it because they believe it leads to good things; that's plausible, but given the amount of good science that has lead to horrible results, I suspect that 'we are doing it because we value it' isn't really the right way to frame it. It may be more that "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up."
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 10:06 AM
arg, sorry.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 10:07 AM
At this point I'm really just dodging work, but don't you have to complete this argument: "we do the scientific method because it's the only reliable way to get more science short of waiting for geniuses like Newton to pop up," with "and we want more science because we value it"? Without that final step, (or, actually, I suppose, even with it) you remain open to the attack that "You may want more science, but I don't. I want more obedience to the will of God. So abandon your puny scientific project and teach ID instead."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 10:12 AM
I should probably let this die.
Thank you for sticking with it. I appreciate your help in clarifying my confusion.
Suppose I have a bunch of blocks in front of me. Some of my blocks are round and some are square. I decide to divide them up into piles based on the following characteristics: having corners and ability to roll.
Wonderful example. I'm going to steal that example.
You have chosen a sorting characteristic, drawn a line across the universe of blocks, based on shape. You could, instead, have chosen to sort them by color (black blocks from white), or material (wood blacks from metal blocks), or smoothness (rough blocks from smooth blocks), or ownership (my blocks from your blocks), or any of a myriad of other characteristics .
By choosing shape you are saying that shape is important, where color or material is not important. You are not saying "death to the round blocks!", but you are saying that material and color are meaningless to you in this sorting. I'd call that a value judgment, I think it's a normative judgment, and I've been calling it "privileging shape."
I'm saying that when you define a category you choose a defining characteristic, whether it's roundness for a pile of blocks, or falsifiability for science, or whatever characteristic we use when choosing which subjects should be taught. In each case we are necessarily simultaneously choosing to ignore a whole host of other characteristics, to ignore those other characteristics. We're giving meaning to some characteristics, and treating others as meaningless. To choose to give meaning and importance to some things, and ignore others, is what I've been calling ‘privileging' the important things.
Perhaps I was being careless in using the term ‘good'. I said that any choice of a defining characteristic, a privileging of an attribute, meant saying saying ‘this characteristic is good'. That does suggest that the absence of the character is bad. I should have said that it meant ‘this characteristic is a good way to sort'. I only meant that when we sorted the blocks, we were saying ‘shape is a good way to sort'.
That's where we went off into the question of what good about the choice of characteristics we choose to define science. That's where we were considering whether falsifiability and repeatability were good (useful) characteristics because that way of sorting led to refrigeration and polyester.
But I am maundering, as usual, and repeating things. My appreciation to Cala, for making the point so much more clearly than I managed: Maybe this is Schneider's point; if it's a value judgment to say that repeatability should be counted as one of the goals of science, and then we use repeatability to discern what is science and what isn't, then I am cheating when I say that making categorical distinctions doesn't involve value judgments. Yes, that's what I've been struggling, with such great difficulty, to say. Thank you.
And LB nailed it when she said Let's stop talking about science and divide knowledge into 'Intellectually Stimulating': astrology, . . . ; and 'Vocational Training': medicine, law, . . . ." That would be a value judgment (in my opinion, an insane one) . . . .
That was very nicely put, although I'm not sure about the ‘insane' part. There are law schools where you can take courses in criminal law which are wonderful intellectual endeavors, but won't tell you the first thing about how to prosecute or defend a criminal case. Other schools have courses which teach only the vocation aspect, and some schools offer separate courses, which might be title ‘Intellectual Criminal Law' and "Practical Criminal Law'. There are serious argument about which should be taught at which schools, arguments among tenured professors who (in most circumstances) pass in society as if they were sane.
People argue about the boundaries of the category ‘law'. Is mediation a part of law? If our defining characteristic is ‘a way to resolve disputes', it's in (and maybe law schools should have faculty members trained in counseling). If our boundary is at ‘a formal system of rules for imposing predictability on human behavior', it's out. (that's from Carl LLewelyn, if I recall). If we want to support civil society in Iraq by strengthening the legal system, do we send in lawyers or anthropologists or mediators?
I don't know if there's an intellectual aspect to HVAC, but if we allow history as an intellectual endeavor I'm sure someone's done a dissertation titled "The Role of Advances in Central Heating and Chimney Design in English Great Houses in the Political and Social Changes in England, 1700 - 1920" (I think that's from James Burke). Personally, I'm very interested in the relation between the rise of the watchmaking industry (and the development of its industrial practices and methods) and immigration and urbanization in Illinois, 1865 - 1930 or so. I don't know if that's history, cultural geography, architecture, or political science, but I don't think it's insane.
Someone could ... make the decision that they value obedience to the perceived will of God that ID be taught as science more than they value the continued existence of science. I would think they were a fruitloop for having such a preference, but I don't think that it's a fundamentally different kind of value decision ... .
I agree, and that's precisely the political problem: how to preserve the consent of the governed to the shared understand that this is taught and that isn't? How do we contest it? What are the terms of the contest? Where can we draw a line that enough people can live with?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 3:39 PM
I don't know if that's history, cultural geography, architecture, or political science, but I don't think it's insane.
My use of 'insane' was limited to the idea of abandoning science as a classification in favor of 'Intellectually Stimulating' and 'Vocational Education'. Obviously those are, in other contexts, useful classifications.
I don't know if that's history, cultural geography, architecture, or political science, but I don't think it's insane.
I don't follow you here. You're talking about the existence of marginal cases, where classification is difficult. Absolutely such cases do exist, but they don't have much to do with evolution and ID, which aren't marginal cases (if you think they are -- that there is room for honest disagreement about whether ID properly fits in the science classification, we should argue about that). What follows, in your view, from the existence of marginal cases?
I agree, and that's precisely the political problem: how to preserve the consent of the governed to the shared understand that this is taught and that isn't?
Well, I'm repeating myself here, sort of, but by explaining that science is definable, and ID isn't it. That someone who wants ID in a science classroom either doesn't understand what science is, is a liar, or wants to abandon science as a classification. And that abandoning science as a classification is a really bad idea, because then what do we do when all of our current antibiotics stop working, or the oil runs out?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 4:16 PM
Hrm. Poorly edited, that. But I think it still makes some sense.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 4:26 PM
You ask the sort of questions that make for interesting times. Would that I had a nice, clear, logical answer. I don't. I have some thoughts, and some opinions which, when the wind is west by northwest, seem to make some sense. T me.
I don't like being forced into the corner of saying of saying that we keep science against the day when all the antibiotics or oil runs out. There's something wrong with that answer. It makes sense, it's culturally meaningful, I can't find a better one, but it's somehow wrong. It's ugly. I don't want a world in which we must justify education, or knowledge, in instrumental terms.
And that answer fails to explain something: when I talk to people who are heavily invested in science, who care deeply and work hard on the questions at the cutting edge, or who love teaching and learning it, nobody ever says "I'm doing it to find a replacement for oil." They talk about how nifty keen it is, how there's some sort of beauty to a good theory, how there's some emotional resonance in devising an elegant experiment to test a hypothesis, how science is fun.
Those sound very much like what deeply religious people say, too, although they might use other words than fun and nifty keen. Personally, I do not see that aspect of religion, but I suspect that says more about me than about religion.
So I'm thinking, somewhere in some corner of what might charitably be called my mind, I wonder what happens if we abandon the dichotomous distinction between religion and science, as we abandoned the notion that matter and energy are wholly distinct? Is there's some other way to construct a grand unified reality in which we can keep the good (?!) aspects of both, and lose the conflict.
I don't find Gould's notion of the non-overlapping magisteria appealing, either. Again, it just seems ugly and clunky, as if it has tail fins that are far too big. It meets all the criteria I can identify, but that may only mean I'm failing to identify all the important criteria.
So I look at marginal cases, because often things become clearer and more revealing at the margins. Consider Duchamp's urinal, which challenged the central concept of art by taking a stand at a margin. Consider again relativity, which (in some sense) looked at what happens to the idea of mass and energy when you push speed to the marginal case (I know, I'm mangling this badly). Or look at anthropology, which found interesting ideas by asking what one observed by standing partly outside the margin of a culture.
Again, I don't have a good logical explanation of why I suspect that looking at the marginal cases might shed some light on the ID/Science debate, which is not a marginal case (I agree). But I have these weak analogies and a strong hunch that just maybe we'll be able to see something important - or, at least, something interesting, nifty keen, and fun.
That's the best case I can make for why the marginal cases do have something to do with evolution and ID. Weak, I know. I'm very likely to be wrong. But trying ideas because they might be interesting is, well, fun for me.
The idea that science is useful, the disjunct magisteria idea, is (I think) a manifestation of the values of pluralism and individual freedom and tolerance, and they founder against the adamant belief that my religion is better than your science, I don't care about antibiotics, and I must not suffer the sinner to live amongst us (you made this very point). The science side is also weakened by the naive, pseudoscientific notions that only science has a grasp on objective reality, that science is a path to truth, and that science is value neutral.
I love geology. I have 20 acres in the mountains near here. I can stand there, on gneiss that's several hundred years million old, look across to a higher outcrop of basalt that's nearly that old, the other direction towards the big volcano that's ten to fifty million year's old, down towards the basalt at the edge of my property that's probably less than a hundred thousand years old, knowing that over the hill behind me is basalt from about the time the pyramids were built, while over there is limestone from when this rock I'm standing on was eight thousand feet lower. (yes, it's a geologically marginal area, and perhaps a bad idea to make a long term investment in land that's very likely to see another volcano nearby within the next twenty thousand years).
I don't love geology because the knowledge does me much practical good. I love it because it somehow makes the world more fun, more interesting, let's me see things I wouldn't otherwise see. I love it the way I love Duchamp's urinal. Geology will help me if I want to try putting in a well, just the way seeing a urinal before me leads sometimes to an immediate increase in my personal comfort, but there's something else there, too.
Maybe we should say we teach science for the same reason we teach art, because it's beautiful. Maybe we refuse to admit ID to science because the combination is ugly, the way bad copies of the Venus de Milo are ugly. But in a time when our US Attorney General felt the need to improve some classical sculptures by putting a curtain over their exposed bosoms, I just don't know.
I'm sorry I'm not clearer and better focused. Maybe in my next life I'll understand this better. I fear I've gone all grokish and embarrassed myself again. Well, sometimes humiliation is the first step in learning.
Posted by michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01- 6-06 11:25 PM