CompuServe Messages

Gary, >> I highly advocate the teaching of the sciences, but from what I have seen after being in college for 5yrs is professors deliberatly trying to weed out students to the point of frustration. Many students have the desire to persue the sciences, but aren't given the chance and get fed up at some point and quit. << I'm convinced that a *lot* of students have that desire wiped out long before they get anywhere near college. My public school system was pretty typical for a suburban school system that served a largely middle-class area. The quality of the science courses I took was putrid. It was all dull memorization and dreary repetitions of experiments that had been done a thousand times before, where the textbooks and the teachers *told* you what would happen even before you did it. No challenge at all. What the hell is even remotely interesting about that? The *only* reason I'm still interested in science is that I was and still am a voracious reader and thinker, and reading about science gives me things to stimulate that. I was in college before I got a teacher (rather, a professor, of geology as a matter of fact) who could teach science the way science should be taught. We didn't stay in the classroom listening to him drone on about "this means this, and that indicates thus-and-so." No, we by-God went out into the field and *saw* what he was talking about. Talking about faults and folding and metamorphic rocks? We didn't look at diagrams and photographs. No, we all piled into vans and drove two hours southeast, which put us in the best outdoor lab for such things in the continental US: the mountains of West Virginia. And we saw faults and folds and metamorphic rocks up close and in person. Then we talked about what we'd seen, what could make rocks look that way. *THAT'S* how science should be taught. >> It's appears that for the greater part you have to be in the top 5% before you can be accepted or get anywhere. << That depends on where you're trying to get. <g> >> I don't fully agree with this. Take a philosophy or critical thinking class or classes to learn how to analyze what you read. I don't need to understand calculus or physics to realize there is no loch ness monster, or that the crop circle are a fake. I can read the "Skeptical Enquirer" and see what spawns the pseudoscience and antiscience movements. << Critical thinking is a *part* of science. See, this is another aspect of what I was talking about: most people think "science" is memorizing lots of arcane trivia, talking in esoteric jargon, compiling huge tables of numbers, and creating monsters behind locked lab doors. Science isn't any of those things. Science is a way of looking at the world. Logic, critical thinking, analysis, observation and deduction — *those* are science, not memorized lists of jawbreaker words derived from long-dead languages. For a whole variety of reasons, the American school system actively discourages critical thought, and so most kids never develop the skills they need to make good scientists. As to your examples of "the Loch Ness monster and crop circles" — you might do well to pick others. The only real reason either of those are considered 'proven' frauds is that orthodox 'scientists' who have themselves forgotten what science is all about have declared them frauds because they don't conform to current theory. At best the evidence in both cases is inconclusive. Pseudoscience and antiscience movements thrive because people don't understand science. Writers for the SI can cover it in whatever psychotalk they like: the reason at bottom is that people don't understand science, and we humans tend to fear what we don't understand. Jon W.