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Learning by doing



Excerpt from P & I (to be published)

I expect much response from this.

bc

P.s. Write if "you" want the whole interview.


DB: Lets talk about a theme that we return to periodically, and that is
propaganda and indoctrination. As a teacher, how do you get people to think
for themselves? Can you in fact impart tools that will enable that?

I think you learn by doing. I'm a Deweyite from way back, from childhood
experience and reading. You learn by doing, and you figure out how to do
things by watching other people do them. That's the way you learn to be a
good carpenter, for example, and the way you learn to be a good physicist.
Nobody can train you on how to do physics. You don't teach methodology
courses in the natural sciences. You may in the social sciences. In any
field that has significant intellectual content, you don't teach
methodology. You just watch people doing it and participate with them in
doing it. So a typical, say, graduate seminar in a science course would be
just people working together, not all that different from an artisan picking
up a craft and working with someone who's supposedly good at it. I think the
same is true of these things. I don't try to persuade people, at least not
consciously. Maybe I do. If so, its a mistake. The right way to do things is
not to try to persuade people you're right but to challenge them to think it
through for themselves. There's nothing in human affairs of which we can
speak with very great confidence, even in the hard natural sciences that's
largely true. In complicated areas, like human affairs, we don't have an
extremely high level of confidence, and often a very low level. In the case
of human affairs, international affairs, family relations, whatever it may
be, you can compile evidence and you can put things together and look at
them from a certain way. The right approach, putting aside what one or
another person does, is simply to encourage people to do that. The way you
do it is by trying to do it yourself, and in particular trying to show,
although its not all that difficult, the chasm that separates standard
versions of what goes on in the world from what the evidence of the senses
and peoples inquiries will show them as soon as they start to look at it. A
common response that I get, even on things like chat networks, is, I cant
believe anything you're saying. Its totally in conflict with what I've
learned and always believed, and I don't have time to look up all those
footnotes. How do I know what you're saying is true? That's a plausible
reaction. I tell people its the right reaction. You shouldn't believe what I
say is true. The footnotes are there, so you can find out if you feel like
it, but if you don't want to bother, nothing can be done. Nobody is going to
pour truth into your brain. Its something you have to find out for yourself.