Do the flaws in education discredit the discpline being taught?

Well, one of the problems is that the story of "they thought the earth was flat" is flat out wrong and anybody who bothered to read any of the discourse concerning Columbus and his voyage would know that it is.Instead, the reason Columbus had so much trouble financing his voyage is because he claimed the earth was small whereas everybody else thought it was much larger. Columbus used a poor map with a crappy translation and came up with a size that did, indeed, have a journey westward across the Pacific being a shorter journey than one around Africa to the east. However, most everybody else had a more accurate size of the earth (even Eratosthenes' calculation was pretty close) and refused to listen since the journey westward would have been longer than the journey eastward (which it is, even if the Americas weren't in the way).I was taught this in public school about 25 years ago. The "thought the earth was flat" tale is on the same level as "Washington chopped down a cherry tree" apocrypha.So I would say that if you were, indeed, taught that Columbus' big idea was that the earth was round, then that does deal a blow to the validity of the educational system.Evolution, however, does not fall into this category. Or, more accurately, the problem is not that the concept of evolution is a fraud that is being taught in lieu of the "real thing" but rather that the simplified, reduced version of evolution that is taught isn't nearly as robust as the actual evolutionary theory that is out there.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Trae responds to me:

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Doesn’t this fall into the whole ”teaching to the test’ question? Seems to me there is far too much focus on teaching ”things’ over teaching ”tools’ knowledge and information.

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That would depend upon what you mean by "teaching to the test." If it means such as what happens in the Academic Decathlon where the Literature section is based upon a particular book, then that is a problem if all you are testing is whether or not they have read it by asking plot questions.You get farther if you then ask them to write about the various themes and such, but you can also run into the problem of knowing what those theme questions are going to be and spend your time telling the students what to write in their essays.Subjects like math and science have an easier time of avoiding "teaching to the test" in that those subjects are skills-based and the learning comes in figuring out how to combine them. Thus, the dreaded word problems where you have to learn how to figure out what the question is, where the needed information lies, and how to combine all the various formulae.When I was in fourth and fifth grades, however, we had "research" projects where we were taken to the class library and taught how to use it: How to read the card catalog, how to find items in the library, and then given a research assignment where we had to write on a subject that we researched in the library, including writing up the bibliography where we had to use at least three sources of which only one could be the encyclopedia. No plagiarism (which we were taught about, too). And this was done with a placement test to be taken in fifth grade so that you could be tracked through sixth and junior high for advanced placement or remedial work.Does nobody do that anymore?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

nwr responds to me:

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It is why teaching that the earth was flat would be using a great exaggeration.

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It's more than a "great exaggeration." It's a lie. There is no shred of truth in it. None of the people involved thought the earth was flat. To even bring up "they thought the earth was flat" is to lie to the students. There is a difference between teaching Newtonian physics which is wrong at every speed but still useful because at common speeds, the discrepancy between the linear and relativistic answers are so small as to be undetectable without highly specialized equipment and teaching things such as Columbus proved the earth was round that can't even be altered later on with deeper examination but need to be discarded as fraud.

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but then I was in Australia where American history received very little attention in high school.

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Hmmm...I was taught about the discovery and colonization of Australia in American schools. It was part of World History and a required course. I should think that the European conquest of the world including Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Australasia would be important since it did happen and had a huge effect upon global relationships.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

brennakimi writes:

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my brother had a middle school history book that said that martin luther king jr had been president.

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Evidence, please? This is sounding way too much like the various fundamentalist claims about what is being taught in schools (cf. Haeckel drawings). When you get around to investigating what is really there, you find it bears no resemblance to the original claim.Who was the publisher? What state was this in? When did it happen? We all love to hear about these groaners, but "my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate saw the X-ray" isn't good enough.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

brennakimi responds to me:

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i don't think it is any proof that we should not teach history in schools, i just thought i'd share cause it's so ridiculous.

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jesus.

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(*sigh*)The problem is bad enough without people making up stories out of whole cloth. Your claim is akin to "my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate saw the X-ray!" No evidence, no book, at a time when you were at best 10 years old and he was 12.Martin Luther King, Jr. was president? Please. I can't find a single example of that in my (albeit) quick search of errors in textbooks.Now, King was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Perhaps you are misremembering the information that was given?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Omnivorous responds to me:

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but this response to brennakimi seems manifestly unfair and unduly patronizing

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What's the cliche? "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." To claim that there is a textbook that indicated Martin Luther King, Jr. was President of the United States is an outrageous claim and thus, it requires an outrageous response.Besides, I was nice the first time. I asked politely for a source and got bupkus. No title was given and the next piece of information indicates that the claimaint was at a stage in life where memories are highly suspect with regard to accuracy (memory is notoriously unreliable and the memories of children even more so.)So, I tried to offer a way out: Martin Luther King, Jr. was president of at least one organization, and a fairly important one, at that. Perhaps this is just a misunderstanding on brennakimi's part.

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no demands for citation-level documentation have been made regarding your recollections of educational experiences--nor should they be.

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Incorrect, both factually and substantially. I have been called on my anecdotes (f'rinstance, people ask me where I got the E. coli/T4 phage experiment and I tell them that it is written up in my college Intro to Bio text: Life: The Science of Biology by Purves/Orians.) In my primer on thermodynamics, I point out that while all the text is original to me, the information is culled from three physics textbooks (two H&Rs and a SZ&Y).And too, they SHOULD call me on them if they seem beyond the pale. All claims carry burden of proof and that burden is always on the one making the claim. One should never, ever feel put out by being asked for source material. If you've got the goods, why hide them?

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I, too, can recall absurdities I was taught in elementary school

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I don't deny such. As I said, "The problem is bad enough without people making up stories out of whole cloth." And as I said in my original post, "We all love to hear about these groaners, but 'my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate saw the X-ray' isn't good enough."

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even though it was more than 40 years ago, and the practical impossibility of providing book, chapter, and verse is obvious.

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Why? I kept my books.

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Can we only contribute to discussion the personal experiences we can document to academic journal standards?

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If you expect to be believed when you say that you have evidence the moon is made of green cheese, then yes. To say, "I remember getting into a fight at school over having to say the Pledge of Allegiance," is one thing. That's a personal experience and it isn't that far-fetched of an idea.But to claim that a textbook indicated Martin Luther King, Jr. was president is so clearly beyond the pale that it screams out for sourcing. We already get this kind of crap with regard to creationists whining about how Haeckel's drawings of embryos which he altered in order to buttress his claim of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny are still being used (completely ignoring the context in which such drawings are offered as well as deriding the science of embryology and what it has to say about evolutionary development).We don't need people making shit up.

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We would have to strike much from the entire forum.

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And a lot of it should be. There's a problem with the "right to my opinion" attitude. It leads one to the conclusion that their right to have an opinion indicates that said opinion is worth something.

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Having served as a copyeditor, I can well imagine a weary corrector editing in the silly mistake brenna recalls.

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Indeed. I look at my own writing and I cringe at some of the mistakes I have made. I am notorious for dropping my nots. The phrase I want to be typing has the verb negated ("I do not like that"), but somehow the "not" makes good its escape by the time it's written down and sent ("I do like that.") I certainly understood what it was I was trying to say. Where the hell did that "not" go?I have no trouble believing that mistakes have been made, but that is one doozy of an error and it would be nice if there were some evidence of it other than someone's vague recollection from when they were no more than 10 about a book that wasn't even theirs and never read.Would you trust that as a reference?

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.