As somebody interested in pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, I often read of how the godless academy, in its acceptance of the liberal status quo, is complicit in suppressing the truth because it doesn’t “teach the controversy.” You hear this sort of claim a lot if you hang out with proponents of flat-earthism,* the moon-landing-hoax theory,* young earth creationism, geocentrism, intelligent design, 9/11 Truth, and anti-Stratfordianism for example.
I have to agree with the moonbats on this one; academia is complicit in suppressing the truth because it doesn’t “teach the controversy.” When there aren’t conspiracy theories involved, subjects can often be cut, dry, and only of interest to the experts. Ever notice how much more fascinating Shakespearian analysis becomes when suddenly the question is on the table that Bacon was the man? Or how structural engineering suddenly has interest for the layperson when discussing the idea that planes couldn’t have caused the World Trade Center collapse? Or how, when Intelligent Designers attempt to hijack evolution by saying it all couldn’t have happened via random chance, people become interested in the phenomenon of natural selection?
I think us non-conspiracy-theorists – call us “atheorists” – owe it to the public to make the subjects we learn about in school fascinating so that they won’t become apathetic and let nutters take over the dialogue. In my experience, people are often interested in academic topics when they’re not cut and dry but have the practical purpose of ensuring that popular “alternative theories” are appreciated in all their resplendent wrongness. Therefore, I think that we should teach academic subjects through the lens of how-all-that-“alternative theory”-stuff-you-hear-on-the-side-is-wrong.
You mean, teach a truth and then give examples of untruths and explain whay they’re BS? Seems a bit burdensome. My fear is that, since the BS is more fun, people will remember IT and forget the truth you initially tried to teach.
It would be better, I think, to nurture critical thinking skills and the humility to admit, "The science here is beyond my comprehension and it’s clear I don’t understand and so I amunqualified to opine.
Maybe medicine should be taught this way as well. Bring in the humors of the brain, blood letting and leaches. They could even run experiments on living volunteers to prove these old disproven theories as wrong, once again.
Discussing conspiracy/alternative/nonscientific theories provides a good opportunity to show how those critical thinking skills can be applied to cut through the bullshyte. It can help people to appreciate the difference between a theory and a hypothesis, and get them thinking about how to properly apply things like reason/logic/evidence/decision theory/probability.
The problem is what if some idiots start believing in the bullshit?
You know why all those creationists want their theories taught as an alternative in schools? Because they think they can get the kids to believe them if they are exposed to it early enough. I’d rather a subject be boring and accurate than fascinating and dangerously erroneous
Bingo. The classic “foot-in-the-door” method. Fuck that shit. I think it’s fairly obvious why the nutjobs are referred to as such. Why give them any more credence than what little they can generate on their own?
I agree with the OP. Like it or not, people fall for bullshit over and over. If we are to educate the populace, we need to teach why these things aren’t true. Propaganda requires anti-propaganda. If we don’t teach kids about, say, creationism, then we’re leaving them defenseless when they wander though the internets and come across creationist websites.
It’s not like it’s particularly easy to refute bullshit on your own. For example, I don’t know at what temperature steel melts, nor how hot jet fuel burns. So if a Truther tells me that the fuel isn’t hot enough, I might believe them. Even with a skeptical mind, I might hop over to wikipedia to look it up, and find- by gum- they’re right! So even then I might buy into it.
But since I’ve heard this garbage before- since I’ve been educated on it- it’s easy for me to retort “Steel doesn’t have to melt for a buildnig to fall down.” Bam. Ignorance avoided.
I don’t know why we’re not refuting CTs in public schools. When you’re sick, you go to a doctor. You don’t pretend that the sickness doesn’t exist just because you don’t want to dignify it with a response. I don’t know why that attitude prevails in our education system.
As a Shakespeare professor, I respectfully disagree. The reason why I don’t normally spend time in class on The Authorship Question is that a) there are many, many more interesting things to talk about in a Shakespeare class; and b) part of my job is demonstrating how professional literary critics think, and most of the time, that means focusing on the text (and to a lesser extent, the broader social and historical conditions under which the text was produced), rather than the author.
I’ll answer questions about authorship if students ask them, and I do give a brief opening-day lecture on Shakespeare’s life and what his contemporaries had to say about him, but most of the time I want their attention to be on the words they’re reading or hearing.
There is education and entertainment. I don’t see why education has to be made ‘entertaining’.
You know men pay more attention to half naked babes. Perhaps teachers should have to be really hot and wear bikinis to teach.
Maybe the evening news could be made more entertaining by having people get really mad and scream and cry, and tell half-truths and lies. Maybe that would make the news better.
Really I’d only go for this if it were a class specifically aimed at critical thinking. Like, call the class: “Bullshit” and introduce a number of the more widely accepted BS hypotheses and have the students write essays explaining why the hypothesis is BS.
Otherwise addressing this crap is a distraction from what we currently believe to be the truth. I see no reason, for instance, to dedicate any time to birthers/truthers/NAMBLA in a general education cirriculum. Such ideas are worthy only of ridicule, and the classroom is no place for that.
I’m all for teaching the controversy as part of critical thinking - which implies that the end of the section will show why the creationists, say, are flat out wrong. I suspect they won’t like that method. In high school chemistry we learned about phlogiston, but we did not get told that the hypothesis had to be respected and that there were good arguments on either side.
So, teach the controversy, if there is time, but don’t pretend both sides are equally respectable.
