This is part of an essay in which Pinker responded as if President Bush had asked hiim
Pinker’s response treated education as a pressing scientific issue. He recommended that science be used to improve education.[ol][]Apply a scientific mindset to the educational process.[]The sciences of mind can provide a sounder conception of human nature, which ultimately underlies all educational policy.The… cure for [people being taken in by] fallacies is enhanced education in relatively new fields such as economics, biology, and probability and statistics.[/ol]Do you agree with Pinker?
Maybe I’m completely misinterpereting the OP, so I’ll apologize up front if I do so.
I would certainly agree that education is a very pressing issue for the nation and the world. Do I agree with the remedies?
In the science realm, perhaps. Unfortunately, much of the “liberal arts” education that we all know and love deals with literature, arts, and culture, things that can’t easially be quantified.
Truthfully, I have no idea what Pinker is trying to say here. I’ll just leave it alone.
I’d say that the cure for fallacies is enhanced education about those very same logical pitfalls, and education about how to spot them in ordinary life.
Interestingly enough, I find it odd that Mr Pinker is complaining about fads in one breath, and proceeds to endorse increaced education on economics and biology in another. Thought I cannot say about probability or statistics, as I have taken neither, I can say that the fields of economics and biology have been stricken with fads since their inception. Creationism vs Evolution, numerous theories about how dinosuars disappeared/changed into birds, and what-exactly-constitutes-life have plagued the biology community for ages, each of them “improving” on the previous dogma. Same goes for economics and the various schools of thought.
Maybe Pinker is advocating increaced education in all of these areas so that we can better determine the “truth.” Who knows?
I take it was Pinker that said: “The sciences of mind can provide a sounder conception of human nature.” This is a statement of belief, and I do not share Mr. Pinker’s religion.
Sdj:But what would Mr Pinker advocate cutting back?
He seems to be saying that we should replace some teaching of comparatively “outdated” subjects like trigonometry or “the classics”, whatever he means by that (I think of Latin and Greek as “the classics”, but the average schoolchild today doesn’t learn them) with more modern subjects like economics and statistics.
I agree with Soup that this is not necessarily a magic bullet for avoiding faddism. Nor will it necessarily help the “innumeracy, factual ignorance, and scientific illiteracy” that Pinker’s complaining about. Fighting ignorance, innumeracy, and illiteracy, IMHO, is less a matter of the names of the topics you’re teaching, and more a matter of whether you’re teaching whatever subject it is well. Students who have been poorly instructed in economics, neurobiology, and statistics will be just as ignorant, gullible and incompetent as those who were poorly instructed in French, classics, and trigonometry.
Like Soup-du-jour I’m not entirely sure what he’s proposing (possibly because I’m too lazy to read the entire article)
But it seems to me that what he is proposing is the application of the scientific method to education. Which, approving of the SM, I heartifully endorse - if that’s what he’s saying.