Re: [Phys-l] Solving American ______________

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

What I see in this discussion is the usual paradigm problem.  When you have
a particular paradigm such as "conservatives are correct", there is the
tendency to hang onto it by denying facts that shown that there is a
substantial problem.  Notice that conservatism might be better either
economically or socially, but at the same time the people who are supporting
this paradigm can have a number of ideas which would not be labeled correct.
This problem of course happens with students all the time.  They misremember
things that they were told because they concepts conflicted with their
current paradigms.

Radical conservatives have a notion of "truth" which is in conflict with
modern psychology, sociology, biology, and all other sciences.  So I have
experienced the conservatives saying but this is "true".  This is one of the
reasons why they have often opposed "constructivist" ideas.  The idea that
you tell people the truth in a lecture is appealing to this mindset, but it
produces inferior results to getting the students to do the thinking and
constructing of ideas.  I saw both sides of the coin in my brother.  He
flipped from a liberal atheist to a conservative Fundamentalist.  His
previous way of thinking was open to various ideas, and he would discuss
things.  Now he tells you that the schools must teach the "truth".  Of
course he means his truth.  One can argue about the balance between
socialism and capitalism.  Make no mistake, we do practice socialism in the
fire departments, police, army, water systems, roads, bridges, Erie canal...
So it is really not an either or situation.  "Truth" is often relative.

This is not saying that which philosophy is better, but denying that one
political party is now being dominated by anti-science groups is an example
of denying a "fact" as shown by the quoted web page.  Eventually the global
warming deniers will be confronted by facts, but it may take too long.  Our
educational system will have difficulty in reforming if the current
paradigms are allowed to trump evidence.

Here is an example:  Part of the "conservative" philosophy has been to
demonize the teachers and now they want to put "value added" assessments as
the major evaluation.  But studies have shown that these assessments show
vary random results and are only at most 14% accurate.  Unfortunately this
paradigm has also penetrated the current administration.  The conservative
philosophy has been based on "competition", but the Japanese used the idea
of cooperation to beat us at the car manufacturing game.  So competition is
useful in the marketplace, but not necessarily everywhere in society.
Companies sometimes work much better on a cooperative model.  Some schools
have reformed by getting the teachers to cooperate rather than being
isolated and competitive.  This has worked very well and has brought up test
scores.  There was an NPR report on this a few months ago.

The cooperative model in the PER based classrooms works very well and is in
line with research.  So the "conservative" paradigm of competition is not
something that needs to be universally applied.  This is actually and
example of how students fail to learn physics.  They apply concepts that
work in one situation to inappropriate situations.

Let us look at a foreign example of "conservatism" run amok.  Indian society
is very traditionally conservative.  So they deny that their children could
have a problem such as dyslexia or ADD.  They punish them for bad behavior
that comes from the inability to learn.  There is a wonderful movie "Taare
Zameen Par" that shows how this plays out and should be watched by anyone
who teaches.  This does not mean that liberalism can't run amok, but
currently the conservatives have gotten in bed with some snakes.  I wish
Buckley were still around to cast them out.  He was an intellectual and also
well respected by conservatives.  Now anti-intellectualism seems to be the
in thing.  But the US has often had an anti-intellectual bent.  Egghead is
an old well worn epithet against intelligent educated people.

I daresay most people on this list would be classified as eggheads.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> > There are very few people that are true deniers of climate change.
>
> That's certainly true within the scientific community and probably true on
> a world-wide basis, but not at all true for the American public and
> especially not true for "conservative" Republicans.

  
See http://people-press.org/report/556/global-warming