“Is our children Learning?”

This is not a comment on the verbal acuity of our esteemed leader. Rather a reference to a subject that has been bandied about in education circles for over a decade, yet doesn’t seem to be changing. The difference between mental regurgitation and learning.

Techno idiots, huh? Then we have our work cut out for us is a recent entry at ZDNet about teaching methods based on 1950’s standards being applied to Google-era kids. The problem is that anything students can be made to memorize is always a few keystrokes away, yet the education system is geared toward memorizing and old methods of looking things up. What graduates are often missing is the ability to parse information, to get reasonable sense from a pile of data.
This ties in neatly with the recent postings (one sample) about conspiracy theories. Schools are churning out experts in copying and pasting, but thinking skills are left behind.

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Teach secular morality in public schools

Silence implies acquiescence.

We live in a culture that is rife with moral controversy, but public education is largely silent with regard to many of these controversies.

In a Free Inquiry article titled “Wanted: Moral Education for Secular Children” (December 2006), Paul Kurtz asks why we aren’t doing a better job of stepping into the moral void to give our children a secular moral education:  “Secularists, humanists, and naturalists face a pivotal and deeply practical challenge: how to develop educational curricula and institutions that can provide moral guidelines for our children.”

Kurtz crowns pop culture as a prime contributor to the problem:

“banal and demeaning values often permeate the mass media: popular television, movies, music, radio, the Internet, and literature read by children. These values can herald violence, greed, vindictiveness, and immorality.”

Teaching children to be moral without reference to religion is easier said than done, of course.  Secular versions of morality conflict with many authoritarian versions of morality:

[The authoritarian tradition] holds that “deference to authority” is essential and stresses moral commandments that children simply need to accept and obey. The primary emphasis is on obedience to ancient creeds and codes. Second is the liberal tradition, which encourages young people to be responsible and to think for themselves. This approach stresses personal autonomy and freedom of thought. It is part of a new morality that has become influential since the Enlightenment: an effort to improve the lives of individuals in the current world.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult to

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SEX

I know, a catchy title.  A little unfair maybe, since there’s nothing particularly titillating in what follows.  Or maybe there is, depending on what–what’s the saying?–“pumps yer nads!”   But in view of Erich’s post about our newly appointed head of Family Planning, I thought this might be the time to indulge more than a little in a topic rather close to my heart (depending on where one locates said metaphorical organ).

Did you know that the last week of October is national Protection From Pornography Week?  Yes, indeed, signed into law by our illustrious president, Mr. Bush back in 2003.  I for one had no idea I needed to be protected from it.  How reassuring to know that we are being defended from dangers both real and imagined by the ever watchful gaze of our very own homegrown clerics.

We’ve spent tax dollars on this.  Here is the link to the official White House proclamation.

Seems innocuous enough, even homey.  All that stuff about the destructive effects of porn on children, who can argue?

Has it occurred to anyone throughout the last two decades (beginning, in my opinion, with Ed Meese–anyone remember him?) of the war on pornography that–like alcohol and tobacco–pornography is simply not for children?  It seems a ludicrously simple idea to me–it was never intended for them.  We manage to have reasonable laws about things not intended for children.  We don’t let them drive cars (except at amusement parks, in specially constructed rides), we don’t let …

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Apollo 13, early course corrections and the soul

Erika Price’s article about the soul, “Soul Searching,” intrigued me.  I’ve always assumed that people believed in the soul because they were terrified at the thought of being permanently deprived of the companionship of those they love.

I think, though, that there is a often-unnoticed prerequisite to believing in souls.  One first needs to make an intellectual move that is so commonplace and subtle that it is easily missed.  This early profound move, that of presuming that the soul is a thing, is a critical move with profound ramifications.

Subtle early changes often play out profoundly in the long run.  Consider, for instance, the sensitive dependence on initial conditions within chaotic systems popularly known as the butterfly effect. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long-term behavior of the system. 

Here’s another example of a subtle early adjustment paying off in a big way.  In 1970, when it was still 321,860 km from earth, the Apollo 13 spacecraft was damaged by an explosion, causing the Service Module to lose its oxygen and electrical power.  The astronauts were required to carefully fire the engines briefly and manually to correct their course to achieve a re-entry angle of 6.49 degrees. That short burst of the engine thus effected a tiny course correction that was a matter of life and death by the time Apollo 13 hit Earth’s atmosphere. 

We also make subtle language moves that eventually make huge differences in …

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