More lessons in civility
Backlash against “new” atheists, chapter 479,811.
We were initially surprised that our co-authored book, Unscientific America, was so strongly attacked for observing that scientists should strive to improve their skills at public communication–and that this probably includes not alienating potential religious allies or mainstream America. But in a sense, the attacks made a kind of sense. Mostly, they came from those for whom this advice ran contrary to their particular project of denouncing much of America and the world for alleged ignorance and superstition–the New Atheists.
That’s “backlash” because it’s untrue, and distorted, and misleading. It’s dishonest and unreasonable, and those qualities make it backlash as opposed to disagreement or criticism. It is of course entirely possible to disagree with “the New Atheists” or “new” atheism in a reasonable and truthful way. It’s noticeable and interesting, though, that the vast bulk of the unfavorable reaction to “new” atheism is not like that, but is, rather, untrue, and distorted, and misleading. There has been a torrent of unfavorable reaction to “new” atheism, and I have seen very little of it – to tell the truth I don’t recall any, which of course is not to say that there isn’t any – that is not hostile and dishonest.
The quoted passage is untrue and distorted in several ways. One is that it doesn’t say who “the New Atheists” are, which means it leaves the impression that anyone and everyone that someone might consider a “new” atheist fits that hostile and dishonest description.
That’s an ugly trick. And the description itself is ugly – typical, and ugly. It’s typical of the shameless hyperbole that backlashers permit themselves to indulge in, as if it were simply self-evident that “new” atheists are on a moral level with Nazis or child-raping priests. I’m often considered and labeled a “new” atheist, and I consider myself to have a lot in common with people who are so labeled (and so I consider the label a compliment), so I’ll give my position on this description. I have no “project” to “denounce” much of the US and the world for alleged ignorance and superstition. That doesn’t describe me, and it doesn’t describe the “new” atheists I’m familiar with, either.
It’s a curiously anti-intellectual and paranoiac description of people who make arguments in books and articles and blog posts, too. It makes us sound as if we lead Nuremberg rallies against the majority of human beings.
In that, of course, it is simply typical of backlash rhetoric, which seems to be hell-bent on stirring up as much hatred of avowed atheists as it possibly can. It never stops surprising me how cheerfully willing the backlashers are to play with this kind of fire.
Hey, Chris. Do you get it now? They don’t want you to communicate. They want you to defer.
Then there is this further misrepresentation of their critics:
M&K never acknowledge that many scientists are first and foremost teachers and know a fair bit about simplifying complex ideas to convey them to students at different levels. They don’t understand that simply getting people to say they accept evolution in an opinion poll is not equivalent to people understanding the evidence on which evolution is based. They also are wrong about who the “traditionalists” are. We have been trying to appease religious believers about evolution since creationism arose from the dead in the 1960s by carving up the world into isolated magisteria, one for science and one for religion and it has had no effect on accepting evolution. They can’t accept that their book failed at communication.
Seems appropriate. (Hope images work.)
I guess not. Link: http://cdn2.knowyourmeme.com/i/000/047/818/original/1271726350193.jpg
Anyone who attacks powerful and rich institutions like the religion industry can expect a backlash. However, I think that certain aspects of the new atheism contribute to that backlash. The new atheists are very very intelligent and quite aggressive in their discourse. One is used to high intelligence hiding behind either donnish understatement or technical jargon. When high intelligence reveals itself, it scares people. True, the religion industry is equally aggressive, but they are wrong, they are stupid, and one can ridicule them, one can mock them. It is hard to mock the new atheists, because they are right and very very intelligent. Obviously, one of my premises is that most people don’t want to hear the truth (in this case, the truth communicated by the new atheism), but to be reassured in their conventional thinking and world-view.
I don’t, for a minute, doubt the high intelligence of the new atheists’ critics. All of that imperial fashion reporting may not be honest, but neither is it easy. It must, however, be embarrassing, and embarrassed people tend to be a bit touchy.
You got that right. None of the backlash is coming from evangelicals, for whom Satan ascendent is a godsend. The stress is with Anglicans and Catholics, who expect intellectual respect for their role in Western culture.
I am far from a “new atheist”, but I guess my little ol’ criticisms don’t count.
For the record, I have seen plenty of unfavorable reaction to what people are calling “new atheism” that is not hostile or dishonest. However, I seriously doubt that most of the criticism of Unscientific America comes from that “camp”.
Does he really think that criticisms of the book are just sour grapes? “Framing” is not the major problem, contrary to what he and his co-author would like to believe. The major problem, as I see it, is a cultural shift in which quantity, speed, and cost are more important than quality. Of course there is even more to it than that – education is another issue. But scientists brushing up on their communication skills? For me, the book can be paraphrased in the summary “I failed at my job, so I’ll just blame the people whose information I was hired to communicate to the public.”
What the hell does any of that have to do with “new atheism”?
I’m not done being an ‘Old Atheist’ yet.
Give me some bright, shiny, new gods to knock down and I’ll modernise.
Even people who didn’t complain about its treatment of “New” atheists — and who don’t often talk about science/religion issues themselves — found Unscientific America to be shallow and superficial.
. . . not to mention ill-informed to the point of being inaccurate.
Dang it, I managed to hit “submit comment” before I was ready. Eit. Anyway, to say what I was gonna say, but more concisely:
Several people I can think of offhand, some of whom openly criticize religion in the Dawkinsian mode and some of whom don’t, had serious complaints about Unscientific America which had nothing to do with its blind denunciations of the “New” Atheists.
Yes, very true. That’s another objectionable aspect of that passage: the implication that there is and can be no other reason to be critical of the book. I found it stunningly shallow long before I got to chapter 8 – a drastic falling-off from Mooney’s first two books.
Mooney would be infuriating if I considered him intelligent and thoughtful; as it is, I find his flailing desperation to tout his book very funny. Look at this:
In other words, because so many people thought the book was bad, it must have been good. I’ve learned that when two smart people tell me the same thing independently, I should pay attention to it. (Granted, they may both be wrong, but one should ponder it.) DOZENS of people have told Mooney that his book was lousy, and he’s not taken a single criticism on board, much less tried to respond. In fact, he uses the widespread criticism as a selling point!
He’s an intellectual lightweight and a relentless and disgusting self promoter.
Well dozens of people may have told him, but he didn’t listen! That’s why the bad reviews don’t show up in the “list of reviews” on the Intersection: he doesn’t know they exist.
I don’t think he’s an intellectual lightweight; I think he’s morally shallow. He’s more concerned with selling his book than with science literacy (disgusting self promoter, yes). That much is clear.
I take it as a compliment that he ignored my criticisms. It seems that “you just don’t like it because I criticized new atheists” is all he’s got.
Oh, Jerry, I’m sure if you counted the number of times he uses that phrase or “we seem to have touched a nerve,” you’d run out of fingers and toes within one article. While he may not collaborate with Le Marquis de Coiffure Matt Nisbet any longer, he learned well how to use limp, conditional, corporate-speak to cover up a deficit of substance.
I think Chris is understating the facts when he says that he and Sheril have touched a nerve.
They get on peoples’ nerves. Plural. It’s like listening to Gilbert Gottfried read Macbeth.
“Framing” always makes me think of the authorities fitting someone up. That seems about right for how the concept is being used in calls for science to communicate better. Where “better” means less effectively.
Those who are not familiar with the beginning of the argument between the ‘framers’ (at the time Mooney and Matt Nisbett) and the new atheists might not realize that many individuals, such as PZ Myers were quite open to suggestions for communication at the time. It was only when Mooney and Nisbett spelled out their main suggestion that people started to criticize them. This suggestion basically amounted to using an argument from authority with the public. Specific religion friendly evolutionists would be the ones who communicated the science to the public and those who were not religion friendly should remain publicly quiet for the good of the cause.
This plan was rejected for three reasons. One, that it amounts to censorship of a large proportion of evolutionary biologists; second, that there is no evidence that this policy would be effective in getting more people to accept evolution; and three, that evolutionary biologists are not some sort of hive mind with a single ’cause’ – why should we agree that Mooney’s cause is also our cause? For instance pandering to US sensitivities on evolution is hugely counterproductive to European based evolutionary biologists, such as Richard Dawkins since it precludes the sort of robust approach that is very effective in preventing creationist thinking from gaining a foothold in European schooling (which, remember, doesn’t have the same sort of constitutional protection from religions indoctrination that supposedly protects those in the US).
None of these points have been addressed by the framers who have instead taken a political stance – portraying the new atheists as extremists and themselves as moderates and in the case of Mooney and Kirshenbaum shamelessly self-promoting themselves as experts on communication while not contributing one useful novel idea to the field and alienating most of their supposed target audience. I notice Mooney’s rhetoric about the ‘New Atheists’ is getting close to labeling them as Un-American. It seems his study of history and communication is paying off.
Could it be that Mr. Mooney is just jealous that books written by the “New Atheists” get far more and far better literary reviews than “Unscientific America” gets?
Maybe Mr. Mooney honestly (and naively) thought he would produce an immortal masterpiece which would be the basis for future science policy in USA. It seems that now nobody is taking it seri0usly and even accommodationists praise it only in order to be polite. If his expectations were higher, I can understand why Mr. Mooney is pissed off.
By the way, Mr. Mooney was obviously the primus motor in producing UA. But what was the role of the co-writer, Ms. Kirschenbaum?
“America and the world”
He sounds more like The Onion every day.
How are people supposed to cilvilly point out that someone’s most basic beliefs are evidenceless superstitions and that they themselves are profoundly ignorant? Why is the common believers’ claim that everyone but themselves will go to hell and be tortured for ever and that this is evidence of god’s benevolence and mercy notconsidered uncivil?
Where can I read about the “framing wars” that took place between Mooney, Myers, etc? Because I’ve studied framing in grad school, and I’d like to know what the “framers” were arguing.
“I often long to be simple and good, never say a clever thing again, never bother about subtle points, but give up my life to love of my neighbor. This is really a temptation–but it is Satan in an angelic form.”
Bertrand Russell
“…toute bon Raisonnement offense.” All good reasoning offends. Stendhal Le Rouge et le Noir
Michael, the whole argument kicked off in April 2007 following two articles – a letter in science and a Washington Post Op-Ed, both by Mooney and Nisbett. The discussion is still archived at scienceblogs so you can read the original points there (search the articles in Pharyngula, The Intersection and Framing Science from around that time).
http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science/2007/04/dont_be_a_dodo_bloggers_weigh.php
Michael, I would start with the book we’re all talking about (Unscientific American), then move to the blogosphere from there. What was not discussed in blog posts was in the comments of articles written by Mooney elsewhere (HuffPost, among others).
I don’t recall anyone attacking the concept of framing itself, but rather its use as proposed by Mooney & Kirshenbaum and their insistence that framing is the answer to improving science literacy in the U.S.
Michael @ 23:
Searching Pharyngula for “framing” gave me this post with several links, mostly pro, sounds like a “con” from Orac as well. And of course, P.Z. Myers is not terribly enthusiastic about the idea. I think if you follow the links radiating from here you can get a pretty good idea:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/04/framing_still_baffled.php
We can expect much worse to come from Mooney, seeing as how he is currently in Cambridge (the original one) being indoctrinated by the Templeton Foundation.
I have to think what bullshit he will come up with on his return to the US. And, before you ask, yes you do have to have him back.
I found a lot of what the framers had to say quite appropriate at the time – but only if one accepted the mission proposed by the framers themselves. mooney and (more) nisbet seem to take as read that all science communication is intended to persuade those who are constitutionally and culturally antiscience (which simply isn’t the case) and that this is the most important aspect of science communication.
To be charitable i think this conviction is at least in part a product of the research mooney did for ‘the repub war on science’, which has left him convinced that this really is the most important mission. And this view has merely been consolidated by the battles over framing – it’s a common enough human response to become more entrenched in your views when under attack, especially when you have reputational capital invested.
I actually find the whole thing rather amusing. Mooney et al have screwed up their framing project – not least because the whole concept ends up stinking as badly of manipulation as the wedge document – but the critiques have also helped demonstrate how unpersuasive poorly framed criticism can be.
(i hope that’s comprehensible. I’m writing from a mobile and it doesn’t seem to be possible to scroll up and re-read what I’ve written. so sorry for any resultant inclarity)
Charles B, I think I’ve quoted that Bertrand Russell item here at some point! It’s a goody, innit.
Michael, one way to get some background on the “framing” wars is just to type
Matthew Nisbet
into the search box here. I just tried it and it turns up several items, going back to 2007. You would doubtless get some others (as well as some overlap) if you typed framing, or Mooney and Nisbet.
For me, it goes back well before 2007. Nisbet fired an opening round several years before that, in an article in Free Inquiry, which I commented on here – unfavorably. Nisbet replied here, much to my surprise. That post didn’t come up in the search…I’ll have to try other terms, or else google.
It wasn’t Free Inquiry, it was Skeptical Inquirer. It was June 2003.
Who’s Getting It Right and Who’s Getting It Wrong in the Debate About Science Literacy?
Drat. That was the month the server went down, and some items were lost; the post and Nisbet’s comments were among them. A follow-up post survived, just for the record.
I think the ultimate demonstration of the emptiness of Nisbet and Mooney’s “framing” is that they pissed off precisely the people they were trying to convince. We’re supposed to take the advice of these communications “experts” when they can’t even communicate to their target group without infuriating them?
And it cannot be emphasized enough that none of the recommendations of Nisbet and Mooney have any sort of empirical support. Despite being repeatedly asked for studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach, they provided none. So why should scientists take their claims to be true?
Because they keep saying it over and over and over!
“What I tell you three times is true.”
Lack of empirical data seems to be the problem with the whole “approach” debate, whether discussing atheism, humanism, science, or something else. I don’t think there’s empirical support for any of the arguments made about which approach is better — and I don’t know if there can be — so it all comes down to what sounds more reasonable.
Rationalists pride themselves on being amenable to reason but in practice it doesn’t work as well as they think it does (note: this is not an argument that one side is right and another wrong. Indeed, thinking an argument is just bad is not the same as being closed to reason). But I think that largely, the debate over approach ends up being a waste of our precious time. Some want it one way; some want it the other way. And I don’t see many minds changing. I just see a lot of agreeing with one side or another. So I think the answer is to focus on shared goals, and get on with trying to make the change we collectively want.
But perhaps I’m wrong. In some sense, I regret ever even putting a stake in the ground in that conversation (you know, the atheistic approach essay). Yet I did learn quite a bit during that whole debate, so it’s not like it was a total waste of time. But I don’t know if it was worthwhile enough to justify continuing to have that conversation.
I don’t think that’s true at all. Certainly my views have changed quite a bit over the past few years — although I was an ex-Catholic atheist, I was largely hostile to what I saw as the “stridency” of folks like Dawkins, until I actually started reading him and others like him. If you read Pharyngula and other like blogs, you will see a variety of people talking about their “deconversions” via the works of such writers. Anecdotes are not data, but they are existence proofs, and there are plenty of examples of formerly religious people who were convinced by the “New Atheists”.
Michael, sure. It’s not that I think rational arguments always work or work with all audiences or all members of all audiences…it’s that I think they’re the best arguments for the purpose (they’re certainly not the best tool for getting people to take out another credit card!), and that they are therefore the right ones. “Best” in that context means “most likely to get at the truth.”
But my reasons aren’t just empirical, or pragmatic. I can certainly see the point of doing one’s best to reach out, communicate to a broad audience, etc – but I think there are other values too, and that they can be in tension with a pragmatic approach.
The debate may not be a total waste of time! Because actually it’s not just that some people want it one way and some want it the other way – a lot of people want it all ways. That is, a lot of people (I’m one, though I don’t actually say it often) think all approaches are necessary. Or almost all…
Tulse, I think people can change their minds. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing for a living. And I’m an example of it myself, a former Roman Catholic. But when it comes to the approach debate within the secular movement, I haven’t seen many changed minds on either side/s. So I just wonder if the conversation is largely a waste of time.
Mooney points out that some degree of framing is inevitable in any argument. Sure, just like some amount of bias is inevitable in any sort of journalism. Does that mean journalists should be free from the obligation to try to minimize bias in their work?
Has it occurred to Mooney that poisoning the well — you know, Josef Stalin was an atheist — is a form of framing?
The approach argument may well be a waste of time…yet some aspects of it are interesting.
Or maybe I’m just warped. :- )
Dan, that’s an interesting question. The way Mooney talks about what he calls “the New Atheists” is certainly an example of framing. I wonder if he does realize how framey it is – if he does it in cold blood. I think I’ve been half-assuming he does it somewhat out of dislike.
This is why “framing” and journalism are or ought to be radically opposed. Journalists are supposed to do their best to discover and convey the truth of a given matter. Mooney’s way of “framing” atheists is exceedingly untruthful – it has nothing to do with accuracy.
Ophelia, after the recent debate over on the CFI blogs, I’ve become more open to other approaches. But I’m not sure I’d say all approaches are necessary. That is, I can accept the benefits of other approaches within the movement, but I might not call those approaches desirable. For example, take PZ Myers. I can see that he has created a number of side conversations on religion, which is great. He also seems to keep secularists informed on his blog, which is updated very often. And at least I have someone to point to when I’m accused of being strident. But I’m still not sure I see the necessity of his kind of approach. To just say “all these approaches are fine” seems like the kind of soft liberal approach to belief and morality that we so often condemn.
I don’t know how Mooney frames atheists, and framing can be very bad, but framing is not inherently untruthful. Framing at its best is about how to best convey ideas to the public. Still, I would agree for the most part that journalism and framing should not go together, despite the fact that they often do.
No, quite right, Michael – I was sloppy. (I’m rushing! Lots to do, and I’m hungry, and and and.) Not all approaches. Not, for instance, the approach common to the more rowdy of the commenters at Pharyngula. All reasonable approaches – all approaches within reason – and then we can argue about what’s reasonable…But anyway no, you’re dead right, I don’t believe in that “accept everything!” wool. A variety of approaches – there, that’s better. More than one approach.
I think there’s a slightly deeper problem with framing, which is a little harder to put into words than the poisoning the well problem.
Basically, if I follow the reasoning behind framing advocacy, it seems like the premise of it is that when each side of a discussion has a different “worldview,” that the arguments from each side have to be translated into a form compatible with the other side’s “worldview.”
But what is a worldview? To me, it’s the set of implicit presuppositions on which the arguments depend. But if that’s the case, and if framing doesn’t actually reconcile the presuppositions of the two sides but simply translate from one “worldview” to the other, then the two sides inevitably end up talking past each other. Meaningful progress in a discussion simply can’t take place when each side is arguing under a different set of presuppositions.
We need to be able to have a discussion about the worldviews themselves, to be able to argue about the validity of presuppositions. And this requires a certain amount of self-doubt and humility — and a certain amount of vigorous disagreement. When you simply rephrase an argument so that it’s palatable to someone with different presuppositions, you haven’t actually convinced anyone of anything — you’ve just obscured the real meaning of your argument.
I agree that we don’t have much empirical data, but I disagree that we can’t get it – we can do experiments to test the effectiveness of different approaches. This is what education schools do all of the time. The problem is the tendency to tiptoe around religion when teaching a topic like evolution, but that doesn’t mean a well-designed study couldn’t be done.
Michael, the trouble with that approach is that it presupposes that Mooney is correct in terms of the ultimate aims of scientists. I happen to disagree with him. In terms of increasing the rate of acceptance of evolution by the general public in the US I think this is a rather minor side issue and should not be the primary goal – at least not for the short term. For working scientists the low levels of acceptance by the public is really not currently inhibiting research to a major degree. In fact other things probably impact our lives to a far greater extent. Things like the influence of religion on the availability of birth control, discrimination against people based on their sexuality or discrimination based on religion (or lack of religion).
Now Mooney might actually be correct in how he suggests we approach the evolution question in the USA. We don’t know for sure but it is a plausible hypothesis to suggest that the quickest way to get the overly religious US public to accept it is to use overly religious proponents to teach it. Then again this approach might not work – in any case we have no figures to directly compare. The trouble is that Mooney’s ideal solution of silencing the assertive atheists means all these other issues that we care about are also silenced. At the moment religious based discrimination is frequently considered the norm and even something like the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy is considered a moderate (and to many an extreme leftist) solution! Most of these issues of discrimination do not originate from rational policies but from religious dogma and avoiding challenging this dogma, a Mooney advocates as a general policy, privileges religion more than it deserves and can only lead to the continuation of inequities that should be addressed today.
I don’t, actually. The only approach prior to Harris/Dawkins/Hitchens busting onto the scene in 2004-6 was the accommodationist approach. That’s just a fact. Yet the percentage of Americans who “believe in” evolution, or who report they’re willing to discard their religious beliefs if science contradicts them, hasn’t budged an inch in decades.
Does that prove a more confrontational, direct approach will necessarily work? No. But it certainly shows the deferential, “I respect your faith, now, if you’ll just compartmentalize” approach has been a complete failure. There’s no debate about that. It’s done nothing. It’s reasonable to think a different approach – putting religion on the same footing for public critique as any other topic – might prove more fruitful.
Josh, there is another way of interpreting the same statistics. The teaching approach taken in the US is not so different to that taken in places like Europe or Japan and Korea, where the acceptance of evolution is so much higher. One can argue that it is the presence of high levels of evangelical Christianity that is the major hindrance rather than any specific approach of using a religion friendly or religion unfriendly proponent. The accomodationist approach is the one that has been historically used but despite its low success rate it might be the best you can hope for if you don’t tackle the underlying problem.
Are there any actual examples of successful “framing”, when employed with a non-deceptive intent? I don’t just mean in the culture war, I mean anywhere.
Perhaps I’m just bitter over the ways that it has been employed, repeatedly and with deceptive intent, in American politics. Obama should get some kind of a medal for framing neoconservatism and perpetual war using the language of progressives.
Hmm. Isn’t framing deceptive by definition? Isn’t that the point? It’s about persuasion as opposed to inquiry or truth.
Or am I being simplistic.
Sigmund,
You say the teaching approach in the US is similar to that in Europe and parts of Asia. But is it really? I have no knowledge of this, but “conventional wisdom” is always suggesting public school is more rigorous in those areas. Again, I don’t know, but your statement struck me as odd.
You also say the presence of evangelical Christianity is the major hindrance. Well, yes, sort of, but that doesn’t address how to change peoples minds away from that religiosity. It also doesn’t address how to change the mainstream discourse such that public conversation does not automatically defer to religious sensibilities. That is the project I’m interested in. That’s “the underlying problem” on my list of priorities. Yours may differ, it’s just that I’m not sure we’re talking about the same things.
What do you think the underlying problem is?
Josh, I think things like the amount of evolution in the curriculum is not too different between the US and other western countries. There are, however some differences that are entirely related to the evangelical influence – for instance something like 12 -15% of US science teachers are creationists. I don’t know the figure for other western countries but that sort of thing is incredibly rare in Europe. The only place I’ve heard of it is in some ‘faith’ schools that are run by US style evangelicals.
I don’t know any good way to teach evangelicals evolution. Even the posterboy of the accomodationists, Francis Collins is not a good example. He claims to have become an evangelical after he had become qualified as a physician. In that case he probably believed in evolution prior to his conversion. It seems much harder the other way around – getting a traditional evangelical to accept evolution. There is no example that I know that has been shown to work.
On the other hand, a lot of catholics and anglicans don’t actually know their own churches position on evolution and to send someone like Ken Miller out to remind them sounds a reasonable policy.
Perhaps my last point was more of a case of being the devils advocate in advancing Mooneys case in the best possible light since I don’t happen to agree that it is a better option than tackling religious control as a primary objective. In my opinion the evolution question is a minor issue for Mooney whose prime objective is raising an alliance between religious leaders and scientists on the issue of climate change. He seems very committed to making sure science is not seen as being associated with godless ‘extremists’ and is thus safe for religious leaders to join with in tackling the climate problem.
“Yet the percentage of Americans who “believe in” evolution, or who report they’re willing to discard their religious beliefs if science contradicts them, hasn’t budged an inch in decades.”
However, perhaps more people now understand evolution, whether or not they “believe in” it. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me if some”believers” in evolutioon understand it better now than before as a result ofthe debate.
I can’t comment on the amount of evolution in curricula in other countries but there is plenty of documentation of differences in both teaching strategies and approaches to learners across the world.
I recall some research I worked on for a professor in graduate school. We were interviewing British teachers from inner city government supported schools (e.g. not private schools) about students learning to write and asked them to to show us some materials – worksheets, handouts, guidelines, anything they passed out to students. (Such materials are ubiquitous in the US. At my university students complain and whine if they don’t get paper handouts. They especially love Powerpoint handouts). And they were stunned. And said things like “Worksheets? We don’t do that.” “That’s an American thing.” One of them said that in her view in the US we have a one size fits all approach, so square students just get crammed into round holes. In the UK teachers reported that they take square students and figure out how they can construct a square hole. Self-reports but the UK teachers were quite consistent. And their reports line up with reports about British instructional beliefs and methods. There is also loads of research on teaching in Japan, and cooperative lesson studies that teacher do among themselves.
Also, South Korea is a very very VERY evangelical Christian place. Almost unbelievably so.
It is simply not rational to think that teaching approaches are similar over the world. Not supportable.
Last, one of my doctoral students surveyed her very Catholic primarily Latino class on the US Mexico border about evolution. When she asked them about evolution almost all of them said said “It’s against my religion. I don’t believe in it.” Then they studied natural selection. At the end of natural selection, all of the students reported that they “believed in” natural selection. Some of them were having their doubts about evolution too. Any good science teacher is not going to drop evolution on the students and leave it there, but actually teach where it came from, the evidence, the mechanism of natural selection. It’s silly to pretend that evolution is just one thing, just as silly as it is to say that it’s “only a theory.”
Where’s my handout?!
Claire Ramsey said:
“one of my doctoral students surveyed her very Catholic primarily Latino class on the US Mexico border about evolution. When she asked them about evolution almost all of them said said “It’s against my religion. I don’t believe in it.””
This problem with evolution seems very foreign from a European perspective. I grew up in Ireland and went to the usual Catholic run schooling system and yet I never came across a single instance of someone claiming evolution was against their religion. Evolution was included in biology lessons (not so much of it but it certainly wasn’t ignored or skipped over). I get the impression that the other Catholic countries of western Europe have a similar lack of conflict in this area.
I agree with Claire that there are a lot of differences with overall teaching techniques in different parts of the world but I still don’t think, for instance, that the average US student is exposed to less evolution than I or my classmates experienced in school. I suspect it is other factors that are at work there. Perhaps a comparison with the South Korean situation might be useful, for instance comparing the acceptance of evolution between members of the different religions in that country. Evangelical Christianity is still the religion of less than 20% of the population of South Korea, with almost 50% being non-religious, so there is a decent sized group in which to do the comparison.
The current problem with evolution seems very foreign from a US perspective too, if you have half a brain. My primary, secondary and university education took place in the 1950s to 1970s, in Seattle, and none of this silliness was going on in my day. I think it’s important to remember that the pride in ignorance demonstrated by the “I don’t believe in evolution, it’s just a theory” is relatively new. Doesn’t make it less disturbing. I blame Reagan. He was the first national politician that made it OK to just go ahead and be ignorant and bigoted, and say it out loud. I think. Goldwater was the early conservative that set the stage but I don’t recall Goldwater being proud of being stupid.
It’s all mortifying and I’m sick to death of it. There is absolutely no reason to “frame” anything so that religiosos who are proud of their ignorance don’t get upset with us. I know how to explain shit. If they refuse to engage, it’s not because I’m failing to explain it right.
Hm, that might be a bit simplistic. At least to me it is, because framing doesn’t include pushing ideas that are either false or else partially false (which I consider deception). It has more to do with considering how the public might best digest one’s ideas, true though they may be. But it surely is a complex issue.
On that note, has everyone here read the July 17, 2005 New York Times story by Matt Bai, “Framing Wars”? I consider it essential reading on this matter. Here is one interesting sentence (from a story that is 8,600 words long).
There is one pointed example of the science framing war that IS deceptive and dishonest. That is the tactic of portraying the new atheists as being just as much extremists as the fundamentalists they condemn. This is a constant refrain from both accomodationists and many of the religious moderates who oppose the new atheists. This is plain and simple demonization of the new atheists in order to make their views beyond the pale of reasonable public discourse. The fundamentalist ‘atheists’ that have existed in history – such as Pol Pot – actually behaved very similar to religious extremists (I realize that it wasn’t the atheism per se, it was the communism etc that was the justification for their murderous acts) – so this is the ‘frame’ of the accusation. Does any accomodationist seriously think that Dawkins, Coyne or Myers support the sort of society that the khmer rouge introduced to Cambodia? Of course they don’t, but they find it a useful image to conjure up in the publics mind and then portray themselves as the moderate medium.
Thats just one point. There are other specific issues that have been used dishonestly in the accomodationist campaign – such as the charge made by Chris Mooney in a newspaper Op Ed that Jerry Coyne opposed Francis Collins as head of the NIH simply because of Collins’ religion, or the misleading description of the the background to the Crackergate incident. There is also the fact that accomodationism doesn’t seem to be able to survive in situations where both points of view are aired – hence the constant use of strawman arguments by accomodationists (in the science/religion compatibility argument, for example) and the banning or avoidance of non accomodationists on the accomodationist blogs. Or perhaps the more recent technique of arranging public discussions of issues that completely exclude the non-accomodationist point of view and promote the ‘extremist’ slur.
Framing involves insulting in the eyes of criticism’s receivers and framing is part of rhetoric, not the most popular subject but nonetheless legitimate. When I was demonized for “the way” I said “it” I was ostracized to some degree amongst my acquaintances who were adult educated individuals and should have known better. Look, I voted as an atheist, in every election I have voted, for a believer. I am an accomodationist. We are all accomodationists – or Berliners! Seriously, if the believers don’t want to be insulted, they should themselves refrain from saying insulting things such as: “God is Great” or worse, “God Wills It”. Nonetheless, I am given to reflection upon being criticized even if latterly I have taken a harder line, and care less about people’s religious “feelings.” There, I have framed framing in terms of feelings and insults and just don’t care! Some atheists are witty, some caustic, some offensive, some brilliant. God wills it!
This puts me in mind of Harry Frankfurt’s definition of bullshit, something along the lines of:
“An assertion or statement by a speaker who is not concerned with the truth value of the statement, but of the impression caused in the audience by the fact of the speaker having made the statement.” Bullshit isn’t necessarily false and the bullshitter doesn’t necessarily care whether it is or isn’t. What matters is what people think of the bullshitter after he’s said it.
“There are some questions science can’t answer,” and “the purpose of religion is to guide humankind’s inquiry into proper values,” strike me as “bullshit” under this definition. I don’t either are true; at the very least, either is arguable. The impression I get from the framing camp, thought, is that we should say these things regardless of whether we’re true, because they’re part of the message.
So, the very definition of bullshit.
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