Preliminary Thoughts on Science Education

The world we live in is a place which we routinely dismantle from the top down and then attempt to rebuild from the bottom up. Science has been our latest plaything in this endeavour, a sharp and scintillating tool that illuminates more than it disclarifies.

But that is a little like demolishing a building, and then attempting to reconstruct the history of the people who lived in it, after reassembling it from its fragmentary ruins. The functions, the relationships, the transactions of and between each person and each person's deeds - these are lost for all time. And so it is with our universe.

For just as each building hosts phenomena which have external attachments (the working lives of each individual, the economic environment, and such), so too does our universe act that way. There are phenomena that we cannot apprehend, that work outside the framework of the building - or at least this is what our limited science hypothesizes so far.

It is probably time for new paradigms across the sciences. Too much is inexplicable by our present knowledge, although so much is already laid bare enough.

God and Mammon

There is no supernatural being or mythic deity by the name of Mammon. However, it is the Syriac and Hebraic word for 'riches', and according to some accounts, 'surety' or 'that in which one puts financial trust'.

It strikes me that when we put God and Mammon together as an antagonistic pair, we are also putting a qualitative paradigm and a quantitative one in opposition. God is uncountable, beyond measure, and willing to deal with absolutes; Mammon is that which must be counted, measured and evaluated exactly in order to mean anything to anybody.

When we educate a child so that values are inculcated and that pupil learns to develop those values (within the context of personal limitations and circumstances), it is qualitative development. When we educate a child so that the score on Test 1 is evaluated as a baseline such that the score on Test 2 is seen as 'improvement' or 'decline', that is using a Mammonistic approach — we have put faith in numbers which may not actually reflect the growth of a human being.

Perhaps that is why Christians are told to not conform to the world — it isn't a call to be unworldly, but to be non-conformist: to not easily lend oneself to description by numbers and words, or to not be controlled by the formal rubrics of human society. If everything is numbers, then we shall cast a wary eye over numbers and make sure they are servants and not masters.

That is not to say that science and engineering are of no value. On the contrary, they are supreme in their sphere of producing results that are eminently reproducible. We can have faith in switching on a light or in walking over a bridge. We can use the methods of the quantitative without fear. But we should be very, very careful in using those methods to handle the individuals we teach.

It is a simple argument even for non-theists: since humans are vastly different and very complex, specific means of evaluation and education are likely to have statistically measurable effects, but they are unlikely to have the same effects for each individual. Hence, when we use quantitative manipulations on humans, no single real human is likely to be optimally developed by those manipulations.

Then again, since humans are vastly different and very complex, we have to put our faith in something if we are to imagine that education is of use. And some education, as far as we have been able to see, indeed looks to be of great use.

How then to decide whether Mammon is of any use at all in education? The answer is a simple one: in Luke 16, the righteous are told to make righteous use of unrighteous Mammon — for if one is unable to be trustworthy with quantitative wealth, how can one be trustworthy with that which is more valuable?

And that is why we have to deal with both as honestly as we can, serving God and measuring Mammon — rendering to each its appropriate due.

Educational Research is a Crapshoot

In my inbox today, I found a piece of educational research which made me gasp in delighted horror:

Whiteboards' Impact on Teaching Seen as Uneven: While experts see whiteboards as powerful tools for improving instruction, teachers vary widely in their ability to use them effectively.

No, really? Haha, you could substitute 'whiteboards' with anything used in the classroom, and get the same conclusion. It's the teachers' ability to use anything effectively that is the main factor in teaching impact, not the type of tool. Morons.

Which leads me to the other thing that caught my eye — the use of the word 'crapshoot'. The etymology of this term is fascinating. 'Crap', like 'scrap', is one of a bunch of words that describe cast-offs, stuff thrown away after separation from the stuff that is useful. 'Shooting craps' is playing a dice game in which rolling the right numbers gets you something and all else is 'crap' — normally a roll of 2 or 3 on two dice.

It's also interesting to compare this to the etymology of 'raffles': late 14c., from O.Fr. rafle "dice game," also "plundering," perhaps from a Gmc. source (cf. M.Du. raffel "dice game," O.Fris. hreppa "to move," O.N. hreppa "to reach, get," Ger. raffen "to snatch away, sweep off"), from P.Gmc. *khrap- "to pluck out, snatch off." The notion would be "to sweep up (the stakes), to snatch (the winnings)." (Taken from my favourite etymology site.)

The reason this is related to educational research is Thomas Kühn, famed for his ideas on paradigmatic change in the sciences. Kühn talked about a situation in which there were plenty of scientists but no science, occurring when the vocabulary used by people doing research had not stabilised (i.e. not enough common definitions) and hence there was no way to conduct peer-reviewed or objective (objectivised?) analysis.

In other words, you have to restrict meaning artificially (and remove the rest as 'crap') or else you have no meaning. But you never know if your restrictions are meaningful — you restrict meaning solely so that you can conduct fruitful dialogues with others.

This is the real reason why educational research is a crapshoot. You throw the dice, discard what looks unnecessary, keep the good rolls. You record all the good rolls and pretend that this is all you need. On the face of it, there are more non-bad rolls than bad rolls. But what people often don't realise is that there are a lot of rolls that don't do anything at all, or which terminate a sequence but don't add value.

Nobody really knows how much value education adds to people except in terms of other social constructs which we don't really know the value of either — things like money, reputation, knowledge, power. But we have to assign values to all of these, because otherwise, our tenuous hold on human reality weakens and we either spin free of the maelstrom or are sucked under. Most of us prefer to just spin around in the whirlpool until our time is up.

Responses 007 (2010-2011)

This particular question got to me. On the surface, it seems reasonable: "How can we recognise when we have made progress in the search for knowledge? Consider two contrasting areas of knowledge." Closer inspection shows that it is one of those minefields that is dangerous because of the underlying, real, question.

What is the real question here? I'd say that it's, "How do we know when we know more than we used to know?" And since the problems begin with the definition of 'know', you're in triple jeopardy when answering this question — especially if the 'know' in each case is a different 'know'.

The second and less important issue is, "What constitutes two contrasting areas of knowledge?" To put this into perspective, if I asked you what the main difference was between a red sphere and a green cube, what would you say? And if I asked in what ways they contrasted, would you be able to convince me that they did? What if I said that my criteria were a) is the object coloured (i.e. not uniformly wavelength-distributed as in black, grey or white) and b) is the object a regular geometric solid (i.e. with rotational symmetry on the x, y and z axes)? If those were my criteria, they aren't contrasting objects at all.

Let's take the simplest approach first, though. I'll illustrate with an example, which you really shouldn't adopt without due consideration of the problems it entails.

Assume that there are two kinds of progress in the search for knowledge (however defined) — quantitative and qualitative. 'Quantitative' here means 'more facts' and 'qualitative' here means 'facts approached differently'. Assume also that we are going to say something like 'science and the arts are contrasting areas of knowledge'. Note that this is what I call the naïve approach — it's simple and you can decide (at your own risk) to ignore complications.

Then we have four cases to present, analyse, exemplify, explicate, summarise, and draw a conclusion from. These would be:

1. quantitative progress in science
2. qualitative progress in science
3. quantitative progress in the arts
4. qualitative progress in the arts

How would we know if we'd managed any (or all) of these four kinds of progress?

Again, to simplify:

1. do we have more data? did we convert that data into information? is that information like what we had before, but more so, or does it affect our consideration of previous information? if yes, then progress achieved.
2. do we have more data? did we convert that data into information? is that information of a different category from previous information? if yes, then progress achieved.
3. have we done more of the same kinds of art that we've been doing? do we have more data about how people respond to this? did we convert all this into information? does it affect our consideration of previous information? if yes, then progress achieved.
4. have we done a different kind of art? if so, then progress achieved.

Now all you have to do is illustrate with real-life examples, do your explication, summarise, and go on to your conclusion.

But it's obviously not that easy. How do your different ways of knowing relate to these areas of knowledge? How do you define 'data' and 'information'? Is this a valid way to consider 'progress'? And are science and the arts truly contrasting — and if so, in what way? (Some help in thinking about contrasts can be obtained from this post and its predecessors.) And what about the big picture of 'the search for knowledge' and not just bits and pieces of knowledge?

For that last bit, I'd say that you would have to analyse paradigms. At what point do we recognize that a seismic shift (in the underpinnings of an area of knowledge) has occurred? How is this process or event of recognition different in two very unalike areas of knowledge? This is the advanced version of the simple line of reasoning I employed earlier.

Enjoy yourself. But keeping it under 1600 words is not easy.

Illegal Operations

Over the last 35 months or so, I've become a lot more acquainted with the local penal code than I'd ever thought I would be after I put my dreams of law school away so very long ago. That has relevance to my current research as I look at the motivations and actions of many of the key players. You see, following on from my previous post in which I wrote about the punishment-reward and the altruistic motivations of the human brain, it only remains for me to make the connection between those concepts and the concepts of traditional virtue.

The punishment-reward motivation is dominated by the virtue called justice or fairness; the altruistic motivation is dominated by the virtue called mercy or grace. Each virtue has two faces.

In the former, two manifestations dominate: justice, in which people want everyone to suffer equally as some benchmark, rule or code allows; and fairness, in which people want everyone to suffer proportionally with respect to some other standard or benchmark. These manifestations can result in injustice or unfairness simply because the scale is actually bipolar and extensible in either direction; negative justice (in which not everyone suffers appropriately) is seen as injustice.

The latter also has two manifestations: mercy, in which an appropriate punishment is withheld; and grace, in which an inappropriate reward is given. 'Appropriate' and 'inappropriate' here of course are seen in comparison with the codes or laws implicit in what we have referred to as justice or fairness. In other words, mercy is unjust and grace is unfair, as far as strict legalistic approaches are concerned.

In practice, humans tend to temper one approach with the other. The problem is that as far as humans are concerned, overuse of one approach tends to corrupt the accuracy of the other.

This extends into the realm of explanations which people give for various phenomena. For example, consider the case of a man who has had a narrow escape from death. A justice/fairness explanation would be, "I survived because it would not be just or fair if I died just yet." A mercy/grace explanation would be, "I survived not through any personal virtue and I should be grateful."

In both cases, the man can rightly say that he has in effect a 'second chance'. It would be clear to observers exactly what kind of second chance he thinks he has from the way he behaves. If it is business as usual, then he clearly feels that he has the 'mandate', because of natural justice, to continue in his usual behaviour. If it is a radical change in favour of more qualitative approaches, then he clearly has a bit more of an altruistic approach.

It is of course not as cut and dried as all that. People are a lot more complex, and most of us will not adhere strictly to a code of rules or laws; neither will most of us totally scorn such regulations. Which brings us to the question of what an illegal operation is, given such a human context.

In computer science or mathematics, an illegal operation is one which is either proscribed by definition, or which has no definition at all. In medicine, I suppose an illegal operation would be surgery in which the release papers have not been signed or other conditions have yet to be met. The term 'illegal' can actually mean 'unlawful' as well as 'for which there is no law', unless it is in law, where 'illegal' means 'proscribed by the legal code'. In the more complex human context of occupational interaction, there are comparatively fewer clear-cut cases.

It's interesting though to see that for altruistic institutions, case-by-case illegalities tend to be more common. If the theory is correct, this is because an altruistic institution has to function more on a mercy/grace paradigm than a justice/fairness one. The problem is when the altruistic institution is no longer altruistic, but still retains the counterlegal paradigm. At this point, it become a hotbed of deliberately illegal operations justified by all kinds of wild claims about the greater good.

These last 12 months have been an education in that regard. I've had all kinds of illegal threats and manipulations observed and catalogued, with apparently no end in sight, within my research area. They don't fit into my dissertation, but they might one day fit into some beautiful paper on institutional dynamics.

Paradigms

I was asked the other day what paradigms I employed to make sense of the world. It's a good question. I routinely make use of three perspectives, all of which are found in one particular book of the Bible.

1) There need be no guarantees of causality. Things happen. Deal with them. Some can be constrained by logic and some may seem to fit laws based on observation over time. If the model works, it works. How come it works? We've no idea.

2) There need be no evidence for God. No direct evidence, anyway; most of it is circumstantial, ambiguous, oblique, apparently misleading, impossible to confirm. If the evidence were irrefutable, then human existence with logical free will is incompatible. We'd be angelic beings: knowing the truth, we'd have to stand against it deliberately in order to exercise will. God stands on His own merits and need not convince us of them.

3) There is no need to convert anyone. We are called upon to be witnesses, not transmuters. The Spirit handles conversions. We are only brokers, instruments, conduits. And if we're not believed, so be it.