Do you really mean that people would be better off never being exposed to (“interesting but useless”) natural science? Would you prefer a society where most people doesn’t have a clue about how things around them came to be or how they work?
I suspect that your are making and destroying a straw man here. The original (admittedly rather rambling) post did not advocate never exposing students to science, but rather a specific way of doing it, a sort of a loose version of Socratic questioning.
shend, shimux. I am not questioning the overall thesis of the post. Just reacting to:
“I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most? ”
It depends on how you define ‘use’. People are trying to make sense of reality all the time. Different scenarios needs different tools and different ways of thinking. Basic high school science helps you understand parts of the news flow, some aspects of the mechanisms of your household appliances, transportation related concepts like time, velocity, acceleration, your body and so on.
As a general principle, resolving ambiguities in other people’s assertions so those assertions are true is more charitable, and more likely to allow us to understand their point.
If a sentence “people don’t use X in daily life unless they are professionals” is followed by “why not learn things that we think about every day”, it’s reasonable to assume that “use” in the former sentence means the same as “think about” in the latter, not “use professionally”.
I suppose I can see how one could interpret the post the way you did, though the author emphatically did not advocate teaching art instead of science, just a different way of teaching (or, rather, not teaching) in general.
I suspect that your are making and destroying a straw man here. The original (admittedly rather rambling) post did not advocate never exposing students to science, but rather a specific way of doing it, a sort of a loose version of Socratic questioning.
shend, shimux. I am not questioning the overall thesis of the post. Just reacting to:
“I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most? ”
Isn’t this statement true?
It depends on how you define ‘use’. People are trying to make sense of reality all the time. Different scenarios needs different tools and different ways of thinking. Basic high school science helps you understand parts of the news flow, some aspects of the mechanisms of your household appliances, transportation related concepts like time, velocity, acceleration, your body and so on.
As a general principle, resolving ambiguities in other people’s assertions so those assertions are true is more charitable, and more likely to allow us to understand their point.
If a sentence “people don’t use X in daily life unless they are professionals” is followed by “why not learn things that we think about every day”, it’s reasonable to assume that “use” in the former sentence means the same as “think about” in the latter, not “use professionally”.
I suppose I can see how one could interpret the post the way you did, though the author emphatically did not advocate teaching art instead of science, just a different way of teaching (or, rather, not teaching) in general.