Friday, March 20, 2015

Would today's schooling even be around - if teachers acted as if Quantum physics really exists ?

The big three of Modernity (the Nazis, Communism and Imperial Capitalism) were all given a helping hand up ... when the pedagogy of Reductionism muddled into pedagogical reductionism.

So if I were a high school teacher, I would stop all that pedagogical reductionism and stop lying to my students.

Pedagogical Reductionism : plenticiding inconvenient scientific truths ...

I would stop pretending that our real world is accurately conveyed by the theories of Newton, Lyell, Dalton and Darwin.

Stopping doing so, simply because this outdated set of science theories makes reality pedagogically simple for teachers to teach and grade students.

Stop doing so, simply because this outdated simple stable (Classic)(Modern) scientific view of reality remains very ideologically attractive to the powerful blocs of 'experts' and 'professionals', that ultimately determine the level of teachers' salaries and pensions.

Teachers who themselves view themselves as fellow 'experts' and 'professionals'.

If I were a teacher, I would freely tell pupils it is often good enough (even for grownup paid professional engineers) to simply subtract 30 from a temperature in Fahrenheit and then divide that result by two to get an approximate value in Celsius.

However, I would also add, that for true scientific accuracy, they must actually subtract 32 and divide by 1.8.

I would tell them that an adult paid professional engineer is usually safe in assuming the approximate atomic weight of an unknown sample of oxygen to be 16.

I would add that a true, scientifically accurate, atomic weight could only be determined by a painstaking chemical analysis of the actual percentages of the various oxygen isotopes contained in that sample, because each isotope has a different atomic weight.

I would tell my students that I would accept either answer on my upcoming exam - as long as the students explained what figure they are using and for what purpose.

I would stop lying to students in exchange for what seems to me, working at minimum wages, big pay ...

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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