Education

And, he says, there is no nice way to put it: A new survey by Gallup shows that only 48% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in academia, down from 57% in 2015. And it’s not just due to partisanship; confidence has fallen among people of all political persuasions. While it is true that confidence has fallen the most among Republicans (17 points), it’s also down among Independents (4 points) and Democrats (6 points). Alex Berezow, “Confidence In Academia Falls Nine Points In Three Years” at American Council on Science and Health Here’s the survey. About the only group enjoying a lot of confidence are the military and small business. Pollsters are not mindreaders, of Read More ›

That’s being suggested in Britain: Humanists UK welcomed the recommendation that humanist beliefs and values be taught. In general, the commission’s conclusions were a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to save the academically serious teaching of religious and non-religious worldviews in our schools”, said Andrew Copson. But the Catholic Education Service said the report was “not so much an attempt to improve RE as to fundamentally change its character … The quality of religious education is not improved by teaching less religion.”Harriet Sherwood, “Call for atheism to be included in religious education” at The Guardian Surely the Catholic Education Service is missing the point. Atheism is a religious stance and an important one, given that many prominent people are atheists. Teaching beliefs other than Read More ›

But maybe it doesn’t matter. For example, as British Psychological Society’s Research Digest’s editor, Christian Jarrett, tells it, Educational neuromyths include the idea that we learn more effectively when taught via our preferred “learning style”, such as auditory or visual or kinesthetic … the claim that we use only 10 per cent of our brains; and the idea we can be categorised into left-brain and right-brain learners. Belief in such myths is rife among teachers around the world, according to several surveys published over the last ten years. But does this matter? Are the myths actually harmful to teaching? The researchers who conducted the surveys believe so… But now this view has been challenged by a team at the University Read More ›

Should science pursue truth regardless of consequences? Or must we succumb to political correctness? Must selectivity of females always equal males? Consider:
Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole – by Theodore P. Hill
“In the highly controversial area of human intelligence, the ‘Greater Male Variability Hypothesis’ (GMVH) asserts that there are more idiots and more geniuses among men than among women. Darwin’s research on evolution in the nineteenth century found that, although there are many exceptions for specific traits and species, there is generally more variability in males than in females of the same species throughout the animal kingdom.” . . . Read More ›

Same ”Mathematx” prof, same bilge, more publicity, but no action: A U.S. professor who teaches future public school teachers will “argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge” in a keynote to the Mathematics Education and Society conference this coming January, says her talk description. “The relationship between humans, mathematics, and the planet has been one steeped too long in domination and destruction,” the talk summary says. “What are appropriate responses to reverse such a relationship?” We can already guess University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor Rochelle Gutierrez’s answer, from reviewing her published writings and comments. Her plans for “an insurgency by the people” to subvert public institutions and American self-rule through “ethnomathematics” will knock your eyebrows off your Read More ›

Let us soberly ponder, reading between the lines: Food for thought. END PS: By way of sharpest contrast:

It has been said that 99% of practical arguments rely on authorities, i.e. sources. We can start with dictionaries, parents, teachers, officials, records and serious writings, or even the news and punditry we all follow. (And yes, this paragraph is a case in point, here, C S Lewis making a general point; which I amplified.) The context is, that News just reported how Wikipedia (the po mo encyclopedia we love to bash that has driven traditional encyclopedias to despair and sometimes to ruin) is having a dispute that has gone to its highest internal tribunal. GUN and I had an exchange on sources that is worth headlining, not least as ID disputes often have to deal with quality of sources Read More ›

From multiverse cosmologist Sean Carroll we learn that eighty videos are about to hit YouTube: Some of you might be familiar with the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop I organized way back in 2012. For two and a half days, an interdisciplinary group of naturalists (in the sense of “not believing in the supernatural”) sat around to hash out the following basic question: “So we don’t believe in God, what next?” How do we describe reality, how can we be moral, what are free will and consciousness, those kinds of things. Participants included Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Simon DeDeo, Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Janna Levin, Massimo Pigliucci, David Poeppel, Nicholas Pritzker, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross, and Read More ›

From Jeremiah Poff at The College Fix: Two veteran academics who have diagnosed different plagues in modern higher education have little optimism for young people entering college for the foreseeable future, judging by their presentations to a conference this past weekend at Franciscan University of Steubenville, a conservative Catholic institution. College students have no passions today and “aren’t trained to pay attention to the things they feel connected to,” former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz told the gathering on the “crisis” in American higher education at the Veritas Center for Public Ethics. In fact, higher education has become “profoundly unintellectual” and student life has become about “accumulating gold stars,” said Deresiewicz, who publicly disavowed Ivy League education several years after Read More ›

This is a theme of increasing significance for the ID debate, but also it has overtones for an era where AI technologies may be driving the next economic long wave. Which is of instant, global importance, hence the Perez idealised Long wave illustration: However, this is not about economics (save, as a context for major trends) but about AI, Intelligent Agents as conceived under AI and the intersection with ID. Intelligent Design. Where, it is important to recognise that the concept of intelligence and of agency we will increasingly encounter will be shaped by the dogmas of what is often termed, Strong AI. Techopedia summarises: >>Strong artificial intelligence (strong AI) is an artificial intelligence construct that has mental capabilities and Read More ›

From Toni Airaksinen at Campus Reform: In the postmodern tradition, Gillborn and his team also argue that racism can be reinforced through numbers because they are social constructs. “Numbers are social constructs and likely to embody the dominant (racist) assumptions that shape contemporary society,” they write. As a consequence, they assert that “in many cases, numbers speak for White racial interests.” Despite the purported danger of statistics being used to reinforce white privilege, they predict that if used properly, statistics can “expose and delegitimize the racist (and sexist, classist, hetero-normative, and ableist) assumptions, policies, and practices that are currently supported by the uncritical use of quantitative data.”More. In short, statistics can useful if manipulated (“properly used”). Post-modernism, welcome to science! Read More ›

From sociologist Christian Smith at Chronicle Review: BS is undergraduate “core” curricula that are actually not core course systems but loose sets of distribution requirements, representing uneasy truces between turf-protecting divisions and departments intent on keeping their classes full, which students typically then come to view as impositions to “get out of the way.” BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance. … BS is the ascendant “culture of offense” that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university Read More ›

From Will Storr at the Guardian, on how the obviously false “self-esteem” bunkum in education received the status of “science”: In the 1980s, Californian politician John Vasconcellos set up a task force to promote high self-esteem as the answer to all social ills. But was his science based on a lie? The flawed yet infectious notion that, in order to thrive, people need to be treated with unconditional positivity first gained traction in the late 80s. Since then, the self-esteem movement has helped transform the way we raise our children – prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences. One manifestation of this has been grade inflation. In 2012, the Read More ›

A reader sends this: From EditorFrancis at Slashdot: 14 terabytes of “highly confidential” data about 5,120 financial aid applications over seven years were exposed in a breach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business — proving that the school “misled thousands of applicants and donors about the way it distributes fellowship aid and financial assistance to its MBA students,” reports Poets&Quants. … Half the school’s students are awarded financial aid, and though Stanford always insisted it was awarded based only on need, the report concluded the school had been “lying to their faces” for more than a decade, also identifying evidece of “systemic biases against international students.” More. So the people who insist that there are systemic biases, like these, are Read More ›

At Classical Conversations: There has been a growing trend to say that Americans need less algebra education. In The Math Myth, Andrew Hacker argues that algebra and other upper-level high school mathematics like geometry and trigonometry are largely unnecessary for students and can even get in the way of students preparing for the life ahead of them. Hacker is not alone in his assessment. The chancellor of the California community college system, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is trying to remove algebra as a requirement for non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors. This idea has been getting play in outlets from the Huffington Post to the New York Times. I don’t disagree that there are problems in mathematics and the way Read More ›