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Vicki Cobb: May 2011 Archives

May 2011 Archives

Portrait of Galileo Galilei by Justus Susterma...


When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in his telescope, he couldn’t wait to share it with the world. So, in 1610 he hurriedly rushed The Starry Messenger, the story of his discovery, into print. Now in those days they didn’t have talk shows. So, to promote his book, Galileo took his telescope to dinner parties and invited the guests to see Jupiter’s moons for themselves. Many refused to look claiming that the telescope was an instrument of the devil. They accused Galileo of trying to trick them, painting the moons of Jupiter on the end of the telescope. Galileo’s response was that if that were the case they would see the moons no matter where they looked when actually they could see them only if they looked where he told them to look. But the main objection was that there was nothing in the Bible about this phenomenon. Galileo’s famous response: “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”

Galileo is considered the father of modern science, now a huge body of knowledge that has been accumulated incrementally by thousands of people. Each tiny bit of information can be challenged by asking, “How do you know?” And each contributing scientist can answer as Galileo did to the dinner party guests, “This is what I did. If you do what I did, then you’ll know what I know.” In other words, scientific information is verifiable, replicable human experience. Science has grown exponentially since Galileo. It is a body of knowledge built on an enormous quantity of data. And its power shows up in technology. The principles that are used to make a light go on were learned in the same meticulous way we’ve come to understand how the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen over the past 100 years leading to ominous climate change or that Darwin was right, and living species are interconnected “islands in a sea of death.”

Yet there are many who cherry pick science, only believing its findings when they agree with them.

(Documented proof doesn’t fare much better. Despite the recent publication of President Obama’s much questioned birth certificate, there is still a percentage of the population that refuses to believe he was born in the United States.) 

Nonfiction authors take pride in the rigors with which we verify the accuracy of the content we write about. We enjoy the satisfaction of knowing we are dealing with facts and when the facts are in dispute, we are careful to mention that that, too, is a fact. Yet, there are still those who are not convinced.

What’s going on here? Believe it or not, science has taken a look at so-called “motivated reasoning” where people rationalize evidence that is not in keeping with deeply held beliefs. Here are some of the findings: 

A large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs.
Many people rejected the validity of a scientific source because its conclusion contradicted their deeply held views.
Head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts—they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.
The problem is arguably growing more acute, given the way we now consume information—through the Facebook links of friends, or tweets that lack nuance or context, or “narrowcast” and often highly ideological media that have relatively small, like-minded audiences. Those basic human survival skills of ours, says Michigan’s Arthur Lupia are “not well-adapted to our information age.”

And finally the conclusion: “If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to it in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.”

In other words, sometimes a direct approach to the facts is NOT the way to go. 

So keep an open mind about this.

When Good Teaching Is a Subversive Activity

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I once visited a school where the principal conducted a morning pep rally to get the kids revved up for the day ahead. The kids politely and unenthusiastically parroted what he wanted them to say as he went through a litany of rote-learned bromides. The whole thing smacked of contrivance. Later, as the kids were walking out of my assembly program (where I had just blown up toilet paper) they were buzzing with excitement. Quickly the principal stepped to the microphone, “Let’s show Ms. Cobb how much we appreciated her program by how quietly we leave the room.” The kids were showing genuine interest and enthusiasm and he was being a wet blanket! 

He then told me, somewhat apologetically, that one of the older teachers, who was near retirement, had insisted that her class meet me although her grade was too young to be included in the assembly. Would I mind dropping in? He went on to explain that he was just enduring this teacher because she was tenured and he couldn’t get rid of her. Of course I assented and proceeded to a fabulously decorated classroom displaying the creative efforts of the children. The teacher greeted me warmly and told me that that she had shared my books with her students in preparation for my visit. Her first graders were sitting quietly at their desks, hands folded, each with a cup of cider and a sugared donut hole before them; a temptation waiting to be devoured. I was their excuse for a party and they exhibited remarkable restraint until I, too, could share in the refreshments as their honored guest. This amazing teacher, who hugged each student as they departed, was the “enemy” of a principal who couldn’t wait until she was out of there. She simply refused to do as he said and taught her own way. My question: how could an administrator, who clearly cared about education, get it so wrong?

Getting it wrong in education has been going on lately, ever since the enactment of No Child Left Behind. The high-stakes testing and corporate reform of education have backfired big time. Diane Ravitch, once a proponent of NCLB back when it was first passed in 2001, has since reconsidered. She has gone on a one-woman campaign speaking to more than 80,000 people this past year at various venues around the country. She is definitely worth listening to. She spoke two months ago at the National Conference on Education and you can see and hear her for yourself: Part 1,  Part 2, and Part 3.

Why do people ignore or discount facts when they don’t agree with them? Isn’t education supposed to make us use truth in a reasonable and logical way so that we can see the error of our ways? Diane Ravitch talks about how she changed her mind when she saw she was wrong, but that, apparently, is an exception to the herd mentality afflicting the politicians and corporate executives jumping into the “reform education” movement. (This is a subject I intend to explore in another post). 

But there are signs that the natives are getting restless. I met a principal from Pennsylvania at a conference this past March who said that the parents at her school were getting ready to file a lawsuit opting out of the assessment testing, which everyone felt got in the way of high quality education. In my last post, I recounted how John Kuhn, a superintendent, wrote what he wished he had said to the Texas legislature about the effects of public policy on education and why. Last week, Representative Ted Deutch called a town meeting in Boca Raton, Florida, to inform the public about how public policy had to change in order to return real learning back to public education. Diane Ravitch was there to energize the crowd, which became intensely involved. He will now go back to Washington to help revise NCLB. 

In oppressive societies people are controlled by fear. Our children would be faring much worse if not for the subversive activities of excellent teachers who refuse to be cowed by the slash and burn policies towards schools that don’t measure up to the test-driven metrics of the Bush/Obama policies. Subversion foments revolutions. Democracy has mechanisms for peaceful change built into it. Education historian Diane Ravitch quotes the reformers who say that democracy is the “problem” interfering with current reforms. Don’t they get that our very democracy depends on an informed and educated electorate? It’s more important than ever to educate our children in our country so that they continue to uphold and defend our brilliant American values. 
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