In this episode, Scott, Melanie, and Michael provide and discuss evidence that science education is broken and in need of help, then discuss some ways to fix science education (and education in general).
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About Scott:
Scott K. Harris (https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-k-harris-b037966) has a Bachelor of Arts in History/Psychology from Texas State University and a Master’s in Education from Lamar University. He received the Mirabeau B. Lamar Award for Teaching Excellence, and was the first teacher in Texas to receive the Quality School Teacher Award.
In his 29th year of teaching, Harris has taught U.S. History, World History, Psychology, A.P. Psychology, A.P. Macroeconomics, Philosophy, and International Baccalaureate’s capstone course Theory of Knowledge. He also coached swimming and water polo for 17 years.
Harris has guest-lectured at Texas State in Philosophy, and at the University of Texas San Antonio’s graduate school in Education. For nearly two decades he was a member of the Mind Science Foundation and the National Association of Scholars.
Harris piloted curriculum for what is now John Stossel-in-the-Classroom, serves as a consultant to Free- to-Choose Media, and is an associate producer for Izzit.org, all of which produce videos advocating liberty and economic education.
Contact Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-k-harris-b037966
Contact Melanie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-katragadda-nctm-9b14522a
Contact Michael: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-gold-2883921/
Show notes and external links:
1. "Science students learned the facts of their specific field without understanding how science should work in order to draw true conclusions.’ —David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World:
2. “Few [scientists] are philosophers. Most are intellectual journeyman, exploring locally, hoping for a strike, living for the present." —E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
3. The quote mentioned GPA, not IQ: “The correlation between the test of broad, conceptual thinking and GPA was about zero.” — David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
4. Because of Arturo Casadevall's accomplishments, “his peers took it seriously when he arrived at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2015 as Chair of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, and warned that scientific research is in crisis. In a lecture to his new colleagues, Casadevall declared that the pace of progress had slowed, while the rate of retractions in scientific literature had accelerated. … Part of the problem, he argued, is that young scientists are rushed to specialize before they learn how to think. They end up unable to produce good work themselves and unequipped to spot bad or fraudulent work by their colleagues.” —David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
5. H-index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index
6. R3: https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2018/03/revolutionizing-with-r3-a-new-ph-d-program-seeks-to-train-scientists-as-critical-thinkers/
7. Rice: https://ga.rice.edu/programs-study/departments-programs/engineering/engineering-leadership/
8. In a debate involving two scientists and two philosophers, “Richard Dawkins said ‘You know, I’m not a philosopher, I’m a scientist. I’m only interested in truth.’
...
A Frenchman in the audience said ‘What is truth?’ “
—Dennis Noble, in Episode 2: Harnessing Randomness, of the Big Biology Podcast (https://www.bigbiology.org/podcast#episode2)
9. "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man)
10. Henry David Thoreau, at several points in Walden, discusses similar things to what Michael says when he says that sometimes, when something seems boring, the cause is that it is us who is boring.
a. "By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations." --Henry David Thoreau, in the chapter Where I Lived and What I Lived For, in the book Walden (see: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt02.html)
b. "Pause! Avast! Why so seeming fast, but deadly slow?" --Henry David Thoreau, in the chapter Where I Lived and What I Lived For, in the book Walden (see: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/hdt02.html)
11. We mentioned J Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, Galileo Galilei, Leonardo Davinci, Bernd Heinrich
12. A free online lectures by the philosopher Leonard Peikoff: The Art of Thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkXlg0ypjqg&list=PLqsoWxJ-qmMvupo-OGr21AUS9nv3COQRw
See also:
1. "I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident." —David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialized World
2. "In 2013, Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations for Google, told The New York Times that the company would no longer consider candidates’ GPAs when hiring – because ‘they’re worthless’.
"A little later, he explained why: 'The No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not IQ. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.' ” --Why Critical Thinking Skills Are Essential in Business (the website seems to no longer support this content, which was at http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/develop/cpd/why-critical-thinking-skills-are-essential-in-business)
3. " 'Schools are no longer routinely teaching basic thinking processes, such as rhetoric or the scientific method,' Lawrence told Business News Daily. 'Many companies find that they need to provide training in critical thinking.' " https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7532-critical-thinking-in-business.html
4. "If not experience, repetition, or resources, what helped creators make better comics on average and innovate? The answer, in addition to not being overworked, was how many of 22 different genres a creator had work in, from comedy and crime, to fantasy, adult, nonfiction, and sci-fi Where length of experience did not differentiate creators, breath of experience did. Broad genre experience made creators better on average and more likely to an innovate.
"Individual creators started out with lower innovativeness than teams. They were less likely to produce a smash hit. But as their experience broadened they actually surpassed teams. And individual creators who had worked in four or more more genres was more innovative than a team who's members had collective experience across the same number of genres.
"Taylor and Greve suggested that 'individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.' They titlled their study Superman or the Fantastic Four. When seeking innovation in knowledge-based industries they wrote 'it is best to find one super individual.'
If no individual with the necessary combination of diverse knowledge is available, one should form a 'fantastic team.' Diverse experience was impactful when created by platoon in teams, and even more impactful when contained within an individual." —David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialized World
5. TheTaylor and Greve article mentioned above: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20159795?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
6. "Here’s my main point. We are now in a new era of biology. it is in the major transition just sited, of evolution, that biology, I believe, will predominantly dwell. The age of reduction in biology has largely passed. While enormous amounts of new information will continue to be yielded by the cleavage and analysis of systems -- you know, like taking apart a cell membrane; figuring out the exact structure of a mitochondrion and so on — the big problems in each discipline now are those that require a resynthesis of reduced systems. To be complete in a scientific explanation of living process, you have to be able to take it down to its basic elements and processes — you’ve got to break it apart, you have to understand how it works, item by item, pair process by pair process — but you're not done. It is complete only when you re-enter the stage of synthesis, meaning you put it all back together again, either literally by creating life from these elements, or at least by models [i.e., theories] that exactly duplicate what’s happening: you actually create a higher level, and you create life that way.” — E.O. Wilson, “Darwin & The Future of Biology” at Emory University’s Evolution Revolution (See: http://www.emory.edu/evolution/ and https://podcasts.apple.com/lu/podcast/darwin-the-future-of-biology/id422850975?i=1000091633826)
Image courtesy Scott Harris.
