Fumblings in the Dark
A thought for the day or two.
Sam Harris doing a spot of the ever-popular ‘religion-bashing’:
It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist.
Ben Goldacre getting cross with pseudoscientific burbling:
I’m waiting to be very impressed by any kid who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage, but it’s going to involve dissection with the sharp scissors that only mummy can use…Children listen to what you tell them: that’s the point of being a child, that’s the reason why you don’t come out fully-formed, speaking English with a favourite album…I’ve just kicked the Brain Gym Teacher’s Edition around the room for two minutes and I’m feeling minty fresh.
Ben Goldacre a week later getting cross with mindless reactions to his strictures on pseudoscientific burbling:
Nothing prepared me for the outpouring of jaw-dropping stupidity that vomited forth from teachers when I wrote about Brain Gym last week. To recap: Brain Gym is an incredibly popular technique, in at least hundreds of British state schools, promoted all over government websites, and with a scientific explanatory framework that is barkingly out to lunch…So I attacked the stupid underlying science of Brain Gym – I even said I actively agree with exercise breaks – and in return I got a whole load of angry, abusive emails from teachers defending exercise breaks.
And for dessert, one that Chris Whiley sent me last month:
From Diderot, lifted from Philipp Blom’s ‘Encyclopedie’; “Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly’. This stranger is a theologian.”
Blow out your candle, stimulate your carotid arteries by massaging your rib cage, and have a nice day.
http://volokh.com/posts/1144112305.shtml
You may enjoy this comment, backing up your observations on the penalties of open atheism in the US.
I read Ben G’s 2 articles on this upon publication and was curious as to why so many teachers buy this crap. I guess, in some sort of ‘placebo’ fashion, it must allow for some classrooom control and help give the group ‘focus’- if there was no discernable benefit I can’t see our overstretched school staff giving it the time of day in any great numbers. But it is embrasingly stupid. And what on earth does the DofE think it is doing to childrens’ understanding of science ?
“I read Ben G’s 2 articles on this upon publication and was curious as to why so many teachers buy this crap”.
How about boredom? Teachers are well educated and reasonably intelligent, yet must spend their careers teaching the same material over and over again.
I’ve often wondered if a lot of the upheavals in teaching over the last few decades are not ultimately motivated by teachers’ desire to have something new.
Paul Power – maybe – I think you’d need to discuss that with some teachers, although I somehow think the top-down changes since Kenneth Baker in 1987 have happened for other reasons than professional ennui. There has been an enormous increase of ticking relatively ‘meaningless’ boxes to satisfy league tables and the introduction of dubious SATs. These have been as a result, in my estimation, of politically motivated changes, and have happened along with an erosion of terms and conditions of employment. Most teachers I know feel that the education process is being continually compromised, with a reduction in meaningful contact and preparation time and an increase box-ticking time just to satisfy stats for the politically motivated rather than being led by those who should be in power and concerned with improving education. So now they – the overstretched, the demoralised – also have to deliver this snake oil. And yet, they like it… I quite like teachers, and I am still really curious to know what Ben G agitated in some of them to make them so mad. Their stress levels perhaps? Any teachers out there who can help ?
Although anecdotally women are more susceptible to a lot of new age hocum, the brain gym has all the hallmarks of the pseudoscience prevalent in the business world – and we know who dominates there!
Thanks PM — point taken. I hadn’t thought of that.
Weirdly – if women are more gullible, a lot of that is the result of social influences, stereotypes, expectations, ‘identity’ and the like – including via ‘difference’ feminism. As I’ve mentioned to the point of tedium, it’s an irony of second-wave feminism that one (large) branch of it ended up reinforcing the dreary old stereotypes of women as intuitive and emotional and hostile to logic and reason. The upshot is that a lot of women now think it’s right, it’s authentic and real, for them to be gullible. This is a deeply embarrassing and irritating outcome.
Allen’s article on Mileva Marić is about one glaring example of this. Evidence-free (evidence-denying) feminist history – oh goody.
Haaa! Thanks, Don! Scathing, useful, and funny, all at once.
No offence taken with Murkan motivational speaker thing – I know all too well it’s true. (Once when I was working as a seasonal laborer for the Parks department [I have a taste for outdoor manual labor which doesn’t show up much onscreen] we had a ‘crew meeting’ at which a woman from Management told us about some swell motivational tapes that we could, you know, listen to while we picked up litter or, erm, cut the grass. We all just stared at her in blank silence; not one person said ‘Oh yes please, I’ll have that.’ Later we all hung on each other’s shoulders crying with laughter.)
Hey, at least Brain Gym isn’t Scientologist training, like some corporations and schools in Califruitland have been using. Ugh. Hail Xenu!
OK Don — not ‘most teachers’. Let’s say ‘many teachers’ or ‘some teachers’ or ‘a couple of teachers’.
Some of my best friends are ….
I used to be one myself, BTW (TOEFL)
To Nick S: I was thinking more about the changes in teaching methods and subject matter since the 1960s.
To G.Tingey: even as I was typing that “Teachers are well educated and reasonably intelligent” I was pondering if I should qualify it. On balance I decided to leave it as such statements are always relative by implication, and I do not like subjecting the reader to death by a thousand qualifications. I try to keep in mind Bertrand Russell’s comment that “most people would sooner die than think – in fact many do”.
Cathal – TOEFL -was that some sort of English teaching thing ? If so, I hope you taught it as a ‘second’ language and not a ‘foreign’ language… you know how demeaning it is to call foreigners ‘foreigner’
;-)
Nick,
It’s an alphabet soup in the English teaching racket;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESL/ESOL/EFL/ELT
Did a few years of that myself, great way to see the world.