My position is that we need a plan. A long-term, comprehensive strategy to maximize the utility of our individual efforts toward making the world a more rational place. We need not only to study the best ways of teaching rationality on the level of personal interactions and small classes, but to plot a path from the current state of society to a world in which people are trained from childhood in the methods of rationality. I’m giving a talk on this very topic to my university’s secular student alliance. My main message is simply that “we need a plan”, but here’s the specific proposal I’m going to toss out there for consideration.
Use the grassroots movement(s) in secularism, humanism, science advocacy, etc. to prepare the memetic landscape for education renovation.
--Broaden conceptions of science.
~~Let “science” include the analysis, interpretation, and implementation of information gained through empirical inquiry.
-The positivists have a narrower conception, but it’s not very historically accurate anyway.
-The broader conception lets us teach parts of rationality in science classes as science that the one infected by positivism doesn’t.
~~Get the paradigmatic “scientist” out of a lab coat and into the Real World so that everyone’s a scientist and the people who design space ships are simply professionals.
--Get involved in math education reform. See Hemant’s efforts. Mathematical methods are methods of rationality. Math is not graphing parabolas. Math is creative rigorous problem solving.
--Learn about and promote cognitive science. Popularize the term “cognitive psychology”. I know it kinda hurts to drag down cog sci like that, but the plan is to sneak the study of heuristics and biases into high school psychology classes.
Insert rationality into math and science classes. Focus psychology classes toward cognitive science. (It may prove more feasible to add cog sci to the options for science classes along side chemistry, physics, etc., but I think this will be easier at least early on.)
Slowly increase the number of schools with philosophy so that extra-empirical methods get their own spotlight.
Get states to adopt curricula that focus on higher order information.
Implement such a curriculum on the national level.
My position is that we need a plan. A long-term, comprehensive strategy to maximize the utility of our individual efforts toward making the world a more rational place. We need not only to study the best ways of teaching rationality on the level of personal interactions and small classes, but to plot a path from the current state of society to a world in which people are trained from childhood in the methods of rationality. I’m giving a talk on this very topic to my university’s secular student alliance. My main message is simply that “we need a plan”, but here’s the specific proposal I’m going to toss out there for consideration.
Use the grassroots movement(s) in secularism, humanism, science advocacy, etc. to prepare the memetic landscape for education renovation.
--Broaden conceptions of science.
~~Let “science” include the analysis, interpretation, and implementation of information gained through empirical inquiry.
-The positivists have a narrower conception, but it’s not very historically accurate anyway.
-The broader conception lets us teach parts of rationality in science classes as science that the one infected by positivism doesn’t.
~~Get the paradigmatic “scientist” out of a lab coat and into the Real World so that everyone’s a scientist and the people who design space ships are simply professionals.
--Get involved in math education reform. See Hemant’s efforts. Mathematical methods are methods of rationality. Math is not graphing parabolas. Math is creative rigorous problem solving.
--Learn about and promote cognitive science. Popularize the term “cognitive psychology”. I know it kinda hurts to drag down cog sci like that, but the plan is to sneak the study of heuristics and biases into high school psychology classes.
Insert rationality into math and science classes. Focus psychology classes toward cognitive science. (It may prove more feasible to add cog sci to the options for science classes along side chemistry, physics, etc., but I think this will be easier at least early on.)
Slowly increase the number of schools with philosophy so that extra-empirical methods get their own spotlight.
Get states to adopt curricula that focus on higher order information.
Implement such a curriculum on the national level.