When educators try to inculcate children with the scientific method, the main legacy of traditional science, the outcome is often an educational train wreck. As Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization, puts it:
[T]he scientific method [is] an approach to learning that has been nearly deified in the centuries following the European Enlightenment. Children are introduced to the scientific method in middle school and informed that it is the only accurate process by which to gather knowledge and learn about the real world around us ... The scientific observer is never a participant in the reality he or she observes, but only a voyeur. As for the world he or she observes, it is a cold, uncaring place, devoid of awe, compassion or sense of purpose. Even life itself is made lifeless to better dissect its component parts. We are left with a purely material world, which is quantifiable but without quality ... The scientific method is at odds with virtually everything we know about our own nature and the nature of the world. It denies the relational aspect of reality, prohibits participation and makes no room for empathic imagination. Students in effect are asked to become aliens in the world.
In Rifkin's view, the way science is currently defined and taught is a profound violation of how today's youngsters -- and an increasing number of scientists -- see the world. Although he does not use these words, the way kids are taught science these days constitutes a form of child abuse. It involves the forced infliction of a false identity. There is an unfortunate precedent -- Native American children who were once forced into white-run schools and forbidden to speak their native tongue or wear native clothing. They were required to become something they were not. Many Native Americans who endured this experience were psychologically scarred. They recall their experiences as a nightmare and speak of them with deep bitterness. Similarly, many young people see themselves as foreigners in the world of science, strangers in a strange land. No wonder they do not fall in love with science and seek it as a career. The separateness, distance, and aloofness required to do science is a repudiation of the relational, embedded, networked way they view their place in the world. They simply are not psychologically geared the way their forebears were for the past 200 years, a fact which many science educators have a hard time accepting.
And not just science educators. All of us are locked into comfortable, personal learning styles that stand us in good stead over the years. We become biased: the learning style that works for me should work for you as well. I bumped into my own learning prejudice recently, while on tour for my book The Power of Premonitions. Following a talk at a bookstore, a woman and her teen-age daughter came forward. The mom said her daughter was fascinated by premonitions and wanted to ask me a question. I listened. She was obviously very intelligent and I was pleased to have touched a young mind. There was a long line of people behind the pair, so I answered her question briefly and concluded, "Thanks! Sorry we can't talk longer, but it's all in Part One of my book." At that point the teen gave me a look suggesting I was demented and said, "You mean like a book. Like you want me to read a book. Like a real book?" The disconnect was painful. For a moment I felt like an old fart about 1,000 years old.
The prevailing image of science as an individual, solitary endeavor is largely inaccurate. In today's world, research problems are tackled by teams of scientists working collaboratively. Scientific papers commonly have dozens of authors. Yet this collaborative image does not come through to teens contemplating science, particularly young women. "Girls steer away from careers in math, science and engineering because they view science as a solitary rather than a social occupation," according to Jacquelynne Eccles, a senior research professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and the University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Eccles and her colleagues found that young women were more likely than young men to place a high value on occupations that permitted flexibility and did not require them to be away from their family. The young women also valued working with people. In contrast, young men were more likely to value jobs that required them to supervise others. Eccles concluded, "We as a culture do a very bad job of telling our children what scientists do. Young people have an image of scientists as eccentric old men with wild hair, smoking cigars, deep in thought, alone. Basically, they think of Einstein. We need to change that image and give our children a much richer, nuanced view of who scientists are, what scientists do and how they work."
No wonder kids are confused about how science is done in real life. The science community seems to go out of its way to conceal the collaborative, cooperative, team approach. Nobel Prizes are given to individuals, not to teams. In medicine we emphasize individuals -- e.g., Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, not the research group that helped make it a reality. It's not that individual achievement in science is bad, but that it's an incomplete view that is increasingly off-putting to a generation of young people who are more sensitive than their predecessors to mutual, shared endeavors.
Additional stereotypes prevent girls from entering science, such as the widespread belief that females don't have the innate mental abilities that boys have, and therefore aren't able to compete successfully in the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). This is a hot-button issue because evidence suggests that if young women are told they can't hack it in science and math, the result can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The belief in the inferiority of women for STEM fields is widespread, even in academia. Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, ignited a firestorm in January 2005 when he suggested that "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly the variability of aptitude" reinforced by '"lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination" that account for the paucity of women at the highest levels in science and math. The respondents in the Bayer Facts of Science Education XIV survey, which polled 1,226 female and minority chemists and chemical engineers in 2010, gave the U. S. K-12 education system a "D" for the job it does to encourage minorities to study STEM subjects and a "D+" grade for encouraging girls.
Mae C. Jemison, a chemical engineer and the first African-American female astronaut, who works with Bayer's science literacy project, says, "My professors were not that excited to see me in their classes. When I would ask a question, they would just look at me like, 'Why are you asking that?' But when a white boy down the row would ask the same question, they'd say 'astute observation.'" Gender disparities are glaring at the upper academic levels of science and math. Commenting on a 2010 report on the underrepresentation of women in science and math by the American Association of University Women, Nancy Hopkins, an M. I. T. biology professor, said, "Harvard just tenured its first female [math professor], after 375 years."
Rabbi David Wolpe: Does Faith Matter?
Gareth Harris: Can You Speak Science? A Primer from a Priest
Scientific method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Steps of the Scientific Method
There was a post here informing others that Dr. Dossey wrote a book, The Power of Premonitions.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-of-Premonitions-ebook/dp/B0024NP54M/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&m=A3QI763M62X7GQ&s=digital-text&qid=1272696843&sr=8-2
I replied to that comment, thanking the commenter...whose name I unfortunately did not record... for that information as it is very relevant to Dr. Dossey's credibility on any critique of science.
I refreshed the page only to see both the comment to which I replied (a day or 2 old) and my reply of a few minutes ago are GONE.
What's with the censorship? No one said anything untrue.
I cannot offer any proof other than my word. I did not take a screen shot.
This anti-science censorship is not fitting of a liberal site.
oldworldgallery at hotmail
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-newton/in-defense-of-scientific-_b_552602.html#postComment
I can't believe the level of hatred for science these people AH employs have. Its truly disgusting. Completely anti-educational.
PZ Meyers weighs in.
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1885
Steve Novella
Where is our flippin' Science section?
(Thanks, AynSpandex for the info)
There is nothing abusive about teaching the scientific method. There is something abusive about teaching science as a faith system like any other, which we are free to disregard like a strange religion. The only one being hurt with that approach is the curiosity of a young mind.
Of course, if can potentially be misinterpreted if you start teaching kids that "not everything is knowable through science". But, again, these deeper philosophical questions can be taught if students are equipped with the necessary analytical/critical ability.
I think this is a very important point you make. Where scientific methodology and knowledge leaves off is not a free for all that requires science be stripped of its methods to better address the unscientific (for lack of a better word). It's not the end of critical thinking or knowledge. It doesn't require an invocation of idealism or religion. Philosophy has led the way, science follows. Art and the humanities provide us with different insights into the human condition and how we are in this world. None of it must necessarily recourse to irrationality or superstition or a renovation of science.
In Defense of Scientific Methodology
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-newton/in-defense-of-scientific-_b_552602.html?show_comment_id=45607857#comment_45607857
I am a scientist and taught science classes while in graduate school. I love my job and loved teaching, because I saw in my students their appreciation of the universe grow when they were able to describe its characteristics via equations and data collection.
I also find Mr. Dossey's assertions about girls and women studying science and math insulting and belittling, as I grew up in a very conservative state in a very conservative time period, and no teacher ever told me I should not, being female, pursue a career in science. No family members discouraged me, and my parents only buoyed my interest by buying me books on astronomy, zoology, and engineering. I never felt any peer pressure to shift to "feminine" disciplines, because everyone who knew me understood that a child should be free to make his or her own decisions about "what I want to be when I grow up."
And I'm sorry, Dr. Dossey, but your penultimate paragraph highlighting the stereotypes supposedly hindering girls' entering STEM subjects is *so* 1970s: "This is a hot-button issue because evidence suggests that if young women are told they can't hack it in science and math, the result can be a self-fulfilling prophesy." Pardon me, but isn't this true for any child? If I tell little Johnnie that he'll never be any good at tee-ball, so he just shouldn't try, doesn't that also have a chance of being a self-fullfilling prophesy?
.... oh wait, I forgot evolution is fiction, never mind......
Critically examining and understanding the world removes none of the beauty and awe. Quite the contrary. Only people ignorant of science would make such a claim.
Wow, I've totally lost respect for Mr. Rifkin, too.
This article reminds me of that.
BTW, HuffPo, where IS the SCIENCE section??????????
Smart manager! Somehow I don't think the anti-science people are sincere in wanting a better methodolgy for enhancing and acquiring knowledge and understanding of our world. They seem more interested in dragging science down to the level of belief, faith, and personal opinion. I'm not sure why this is, but it seems to be proliferating across the political spectrum, from fundamentalism to post-modern idealism. It's a worry given the magnitude of the problems facing humanity in this century. Maybe I just answered my own wondering...
"Of the reality or unreality of the mystic's world I know nothing. I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight. What I do wish to maintain -- and it is here that the scientific attitude becomes imperative -- is that insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth, in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means."
--Bertrand Russell
Understanding self and world requires a closer approach than mathematics and the predictive method, even a closer approach than thought. Maybe a Buddha could help here the most, but the mathematicians, scientists and philosophers have something to offer too. But let's not ask too much of the latter and do our own homework for ourselves in lieu of the former.
If anybody, a mystic or scientist or anyother wishes to tell or sell the answer to the "original why", one should guard their mind and their wallet.
But lesser 'whys' are approachable, if at least something other than a quantitative method is utilized along with the quantitative method. This other "method" can be simply being present, without abstract theories in the way,
Here is a good example of the blindness of quantitative analysis in disclosing the qualitative, which instead must be appreciated in a direct way, without recourse to mathematics and mechanistic framing/theories.
"Scientific research" has just figured out that Chimpanzees are very complex beings with rich relationships and inner lives.
"Scientists in Scotland filmed a group of chimps grooming and caressing an elderly female who died, and remaining subdued for several days afterwards. Other researchers saw females carrying around the bodies of their dead children. Both studies are reported in the journal Current Biology. The scientists say this suggests other species, particularly apes, are more like humans than *we* might think."
Who's "we" in the above statement? Certainly not the people who live with animals in natural settings and watch their complex interactions (in an "unscientific" way), who make friends of certain individual animals, and certainly not children who would not be presumptuous enough to make such a large distinction between self and other. The "we" refers to those blinded by an over reliance on the objective method which is good only for predicting what might happen next, but not why. The "we" refers to the "grown ups in the room", those hard-headed warriors for "reason".
Some might think that it took "science" to see chimpanzees as they are. Maybe to some extent, but equally the "scientific" approach kept us blind to what was always there to be seen in a directly without our theories in the way.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8645283.stm
That is what the world looks like when framed as mechanism. We desperately want "is" statements about the world, but by framing it as mechanism in order to predict events, we lose sight of something in the process. There is no room for qualitative statements in a quantitative method. This is not a problem of the quantitative method… its good for doing what it does do. There are relationships all around… between animals, between humans and animals, between living beings in the natural world. But if we frame these being as sacs of chemicals, where chemical reactions determine what they do, if we reduce sentience also to chemistry, then indeed its a picture of self and world that young persons unconditioned by the quantitative method find strange, distant and cold. And many adults too. Not long ago, there was no "scientific basis" for animals feeling pain, and having inner lives. But people with pets knew better than to defer to the scientific consensus about this. Now, it is the scientific consensus that is coming around to what sensitive, thoughtful people have always known. This is not to say that the scientific method is problematic. The problem is when people take the map for the territory, when they suppress their subjective knowing about the world in an unnecessary deference to objective, quantitative statements about self and world.