The Left's Book Burning!

[Sparko]

???? that sentence makes absofreakinglutely no sense, RTT.

never mind. You REAAAAAALLY need to work on your punctuation, RTT.

FIFY
"If anyone (even if I agree with them on their view) does give Leonhard serious, disrespectful crap because of his view, they will be getting the full brunt of Tweb Mom's wrath."

commas, are, your, friends.

[rogue06]

never mind. You REAAAAAALLY need to work on your punctuation, RTT.

FIFY
"If anyone (even if I agree with them on their view) does give Leonhard serious, disrespectful crap because of his view, they will be getting the full brunt of Tweb Mom's wrath."

commas, are, your, friends.

letseatgrandma%u00252Bcopy.jpg

[Joel]

Your ideas about education are more reserved for college than for elementary school.

It's not just my ideas. What I'm describing was standard educational philosophy for thousands of years. C. S. Lewis, for example argues for this classical philosophy, arguing that the schools should be focusing on developing the human faculties, cultivating the human being. The place for a dedicated pursuit of learning is the university, after cultivating the human being.

Though it may be hard to accept, kids are not going to understand the complexities of these issues at that education level.
...
it's very difficult to convey a point to an audience that has zero background in the subject matter, so you unfortunately have to pick your battles.
...
There is no way to squeeze four years of training into a three month elementary school science class - you'll fail everytime.

If true, you shouldn't teach them the subject.

Don't try bringing in subject matter they don't have the background for. We shouldn't be wasting time training elementary students to parrot back conclusions from advanced subjects they don't understand.

As an example: I can show a student why Big Bang cosmology is the only theory in town that makes any sense, and rip Stead State cosmology apart.

What, in high school? Do you start with tensor analysis, study the Riemann curvature tensor, the Einstein tensor, the energy-stress tensor, Einstein's field equations, the Schwarzschild solution, and so on?

In the mean time, it's not going to do any good to give students the impression that all ideas are created equal science, when they most certainly are not. All you're going to do is confuse somebody that is starting from ground-zero in their understanding of the subject matter. Plus, you'll set them up to approach learning science they completely backwards way.

No, I'd more approaching it the forwards way (e.g. the way it was discovered, and ideas modified and replaced, through history).

You want to teach kids critical thinking? Fine. But don't poison the education waters with theories that failed among experts that paid their dues.

If the existing failed theories aren't good enough, then, to paraphrase Mill, it is indispensable to invent better false theories, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.

[RumTumTugger]

never mind. You REAAAAAALLY need to work on your punctuation, RTT.

FIFY
"If anyone (even if I agree with them on their view) does give Leonhard serious, disrespectful crap because of his view, they will be getting the full brunt of Tweb Mom's wrath."

commas, are, your, friends.

I know it looks like I used the comma's where I shouldn't have and did not put them where I should have sorry about that. I do try to get it right. In my defense I had a public school education and for some reason the primary school I went to didn't think that teaching proper grammar was important, only making sure that the students felt good about themselves.

[Joel]

I prefer the classically ordered Trivium and Quadrivium of education.

Me too. Cool.

When students are young they're presented with facts, taught elements of logic, grammar, rhetoric, it would also include rote learning about the world, facts, names of places. Simple presenting things we know to be true.

I don't think the rote learning of facts as you describe is historically classical. Younger ages were pretty strictly focused on grammar, logic, rhetoric, and arithmetic, and perhaps supplemented with history, & geography, usually as the subject of the reading material used in grammar.

One of these is that the world has been getting warmer since the seventies at an unprecedented effect, and that the cause of this is human CO2 pollution.

That includes conclusions from some very advanced science. I think Sea of Red gave a persuasive argument why we should refrain from teaching such in elementary school.

Later though education should try to teach students how to engage information. This typically starts around High School, where they really start to learn how to research papers, at least on a basic level, ask questions about sources (at the very least provide citations), engage in discussion with the teacher on a subject.

High school is more a development of modern education, not classical. Rather, a student would attend a Latin academy, mostly focused on studying the ancient Greek and Latin classics, from about age 11 to 14. Then they'd start at college about age 15. So today's typical high school age was a typical college age.

An education that does this, is doing something good I'd say. And yes there's plenty of genuine controversies in science that are interesting to bring up, especially those that aren't settled. For example, a very good discussion could be had about what response we should have to Global Warming? Indifferentism, deal-with-the-consequences, transition to renewables, radical deindustrialization...

Wow, then not only would they first need to spend years studying climatology (and all its preceding subjects of geology, oceanography, biology, etc, as Sea of Red pointed out), you'd also first need significant training in economics, political philosophy, and moral philosophy.

There isn't an opinion on whether the Earth is getting warmer, anymore than there's an opinion about whether vaccines saves live. They do and it is.
...
...unless its credible science, I don't think it should be taught as such.

This seems to reject what I (and Mill) was arguing, without addressing the arguments.

What some US conservatives want, is that they want their private disbelief in these facts taught as an alternative to the view of the scientific community.

That's not what I'm arguing for.