The Enemy of Reason

[_Mary]

Just to say that the whole family watched Dawkins series on the enemy of reason last night.

It was brilliant stuff, and he dealt with spiritualism and dousing actually!

With the dousers they used the double blind method to see if they really could find water. Guess what.
None of them (and there were quite a few) scored any better than random chance.

I wonder how Joseph would have faired with treasure digging. That's a serious point by the way and not
a dig!! (metaphorically).

Interestingly each of the dousers found an excuse and carried on believing anyway.

Spiritualism was looked at, and particularly the ability of some of the mediums to twist and develop an idea
based on the information that the person gives them. Obvious stuff I suppose.

One medium, (who doesn't do it for money) explained that when his relative died he felt great strength from
beyond and wanted to offer that strenth to others when their loved ones passed away. He was convincing and also firmly
believed in his abilities. There was no way Dawkins was talking him out of anything.

Dawkins, (as usual) did come across as pretty arrogant, but everything he said was pretty much spot on I think. Particularly
when he started talking about a lot of the unscientific tripe we get on the internet in terms of conspiracy theories.

He mentioned that over here in the UK, science is going out the window. They can't find science teachers, and kids are giving up
science in droves. That's really, really worrying...

Do you guys have the same problem in the States or is that just a UK thing??

Mary

[QuestionEverything]

Do you guys have the same problem in the States or is that just a UK thing??

Mary

It's a problem over here too....no one wants to teach math and science, they all want to be lawyer, psychologists, or doctors going into college. That's where the money is....

[_The Nehor]

I think the issue is money, not a fight against reason though money is one of the great enemies of reason.

If you have a scientific or logical mind there are ways to make more money than teaching. If your love is literature you either teach or starve.

Though when I was on my Mission to the UK the people did seem more superstitious and prone to the supernatural than people in the US. Despite this there is less religious interest there. Admittedly this might have just been in the area I was in.

[_Ray A]

Interestingly each of the dousers found an excuse and carried on believing anyway.

I continue to believe in lots of things that have no "empirical verification". I find things like "intuition" and "synchronicity" interesting. Why we seem to meet certain people at times when we need them, and they need us. I have had too many experiences of knowing beforehand things that eventually happened in my life. This is all silliness to "empiricists", but seems beyond coincidence to me. Such things will never be verified, yet they leave strong impressions (some would say "delusions") in the mind. I have also had experiences which have no natural explanation, though doubters put it down to things like "memory lapse", even though I did have evidence this was not the case. We live in anything but a simple, straightforward universe where everything can be explained. In fact, so very little can. I am not a fan of dogma, religious or scientific. My brother knows more about NDEs and the afterlife studies perhaps than anyone in Australia, yet privately he has told me he has no certainty that there is a life after death. These are things we come to believe through impressions, experience, and intuition, not "empirical evidence". I think. Our corpses may rot in the grave forever, or perhaps our spirit and consciousness carry on in some form. But we have no certainty of this, "empirically speaking".

Experiments to prove, or disprove, water divining, ESP, and such like, are flawed. I told the story of a man who saw his daughter's death from a runaway car some time ago. He saw this in a dream, down to the make and colour of the car, and when it actually happened, he saved his daughter's life. How can anyone "empirically" prove this? Abraham Lincoln apparently dreamed of his own death days before he was assassinated, and he saw it in vivid detail. He dreamed that he walked into a room where people were mourning, and he asked what happened. The reply came: "The president has been assassinated." Lincoln knew what awaited him, and was advised to avoid the theater, but he nevertheless went. This is a secondary source, but nevertheless interesting:

"About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."

http://members.aol.com/RVSNorton/Lincoln46.html

http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/ins ... ubjectID=2

I do believe that in our senses we possess something beyond the capability of science to assess. I'm not a reductionist in any sense. Reason and intuition (revelation?) may never meet, but I believe there's more to life and experience, far more than can be "empirically measured".

[_harmony]

Do you guys have the same problem in the States or is that just a UK thing??

Mary

It's a problem over here too....no one wants to teach math and science, they all want to be lawyer, psychologists, or doctors going into college. That's where the money is....

There are two problems in education in the US.

#1: the old guard in the education world wants to keep the status quo. New teachers with innovative ideas are fired for being good teachers.

A story: my daughter has a Masters in Teaching. Her first position was teaching 6th grade math. She had some innovative ideas of how to do that (the Friday Project), and she implemented them with the permission of her supervisor but without the permission of the building principal. Her reviews throughout the year were fine. When the end of the year test scores came back, 161 of her 165 students made annual yearly progress plus one or two quarters. The rest of the 6th graders (330) did not score nearly as well. What was her reward? She was fired from her position. Why? Because she hadn't followed her principal's wishes to teach with the same method as the other 6th grade math teachers. In other words, she had refused to be mediocre, to stay within the lines he'd drawn. He told her she was a great teacher, but he would never recommend her as a math teacher. He would highly recommend that she could teach anything, but math.

She teaches in a different district now, one that appreciates innovation in their teachers. She doesn't teach math though. It's not that they wouldn't let her; she just doesn't want to. She teaches Fitness, Health, and Journalism. Incidently, the test scores in both Reading and Writing rose significantly the first year she taught Journalism.

#2: the pay scale is mediocre at best.

My son with a Bachelor's in engineering was offered a salary of $65,000 for his first job out of college. My daughter, with a Masters in teaching, started out at $41,000. His raises are larger, and he gets bonuses for good work. She's stuck with the 3% raises mandated by the legislature and the only bonus she gets is if she coaches, if you can call her coach's stipend a bonus. He supports a family of wife and two children on his salary. She has to have a roommate in order to get by. He is a process engineer who makes toilet paper. She influences hundreds of young minds a year. They are not equally valued by our society.

[_Scottie]

It's a problem over here too....no one wants to teach math and science, they all want to be lawyer, psychologists, or doctors going into college. That's where the money is....

There are two problems in education in the US.

#1: the old guard in the education world wants to keep the status quo. New teachers with innovative ideas are fired for being good teachers.

A story: my daughter has a Masters in Teaching. Her first position was teaching 6th grade math. She had some innovative ideas of how to do that (the Friday Project), and she implemented them with the permission of her supervisor but without the permission of the building principal. Her reviews throughout the year were fine. When the end of the year test scores came back, 161 of her 165 students made annual yearly progress plus one or two quarters. The rest of the 6th graders (330) did not score nearly as well. What was her reward? She was fired from her position. Why? Because she hadn't followed her principal's wishes to teach with the same method as the other 6th grade math teachers. In other words, she had refused to be mediocre, to stay within the lines he'd drawn. He told her she was a great teacher, but he would never recommend her as a math teacher. He would highly recommend that she could teach anything, but math.

She teaches in a different district now, one that appreciates innovation in their teachers. She doesn't teach math though. It's not that they wouldn't let her; she just doesn't want to. She teaches Fitness, Health, and Journalism. Incidently, the test scores in both Reading and Writing rose significantly the first year she taught Journalism.

That is just disturbing...

#2: the pay scale is mediocre at best.

My son with a Bachelor's in engineering was offered a salary of $65,000 for his first job out of college. My daughter, with a Masters in teaching, started out at $41,000. His raises are larger, and he gets bonuses for good work. She's stuck with the 3% raises mandated by the legislature and the only bonus she gets is if she coaches, if you can call her coach's stipend a bonus. He supports a family of wife and two children on his salary. She has to have a roommate in order to get by. He is a process engineer who makes toilet paper. She influences hundreds of young minds a year. They are not equally valued by our society.

Yes, the most important jobs are the least paid. Police officers, fire fighters, teachers, etc.

But the upside to this is that you REALLY have to love what you do to take a job with so little pay. Most teachers I know are excellent teachers, and they knew they wanted to be teachers from early on.

I'm a programmer, and you would not believe how many people get into programming for the money with absolutely no idea what they are doing. They produce sub-mediocre work and hate their jobs.

[_Mary]

Ray, thanks for your response. I can't go so far down Dawkins road but I really, really like him, and feel that we need people like him in popular culture (his book 'The God Delusion' is on the best seller list in paperback over here) to say, hey ...think this out...where's the evidence? We've been struggling for years to come out of a culture that burns witches, protestants and Catholics and a host of other things that lead us to live by fear...and he's saying...let's think about this rationally. We need him, and for what it's worth, if God exists, I think God needs people like him too!!

He did say that he can't say the supernatural does not exist only that the evidence is not compelling at the present time, and if it were to become compelling he would change his mind. He's cool in my opinion!!!

Harmony, we are just starting to get a little more freedom over here in the curriculum. When the statistics are examined, what with all the millions spent and supposed improvements, the test results still show a significant failure rate, particularly for boys, which is incredibly worrying. I maintain that boys need male teachers both in primary and secondary education. More worrying over here is that many of the 'math' teachers didn't actually study math at degree level. That's really scary. My son is a math and science geek and even though they put him 2 years ahead for those subjects, they still aren't tapping what he knows, and he bores the heck out of his contemporaries because they don't have a clue what he is on about half the time. (His favourite show at the moment is the American series called Mythbusters....cracks me up...watching him...watching them!)

I get what you are saying about money also. My husband is in the engineering field (commercial at present) and he earns more than double what I earn. I teach primary ed (nowadays up to age 11) but there is more money in secondary, and even more in lecturing if you can patent a design and bring in the royalties (which is what my BIL has done) to top up income....so there is money to made in those fields, particulary engineering.

I hope my son goes into lecturing/teaching, I figure since he likes to talk about science so much, it would be great if he could do it for a living to people who are really interested!!!! Having said that, he needs to follow his own course. We live right near the OU, so he has inspiration right on his doorstep...if he does choose that path...

Dawkins said that they are closing down whole physics depts over here for lack of students....that is just so scary....Maybe they should bring back the good old apprentiship, where you can train for a career at the same time as studying...??? Or just raise the pay for maths and science teachers to encourage men (and women) back into the profession....??? (Trying not to be sexist there...my best math teacher was a woman...I hated maths till I was taught by her)

Mary

[_Blixa]

If you have a scientific or logical mind there are ways to make more money than teaching. If your love is literature you either teach or starve.

Because who needs logic or scientific thinking in the study of culture, huh?

The U.S. is a profoundly anti-intellectual society. Children are not taught philosophy or foreign languages, let alone a good grounding in math or general sciences. I'd be happy if most of the college students I deal with had any inkling of geography, frankly.

I don't fear the educational "establishment" as much as I do other elements, though I don't disagree with harmony about its pernicious influence. I place the blame with those who allocate funding (on both a federal and local level) and the ill-educated population of parents who end up in positions of power on local school boards.

A lot has to change. The idea that thinking is valuable, that intellectual inquiry beyond finding short-term fixes for structural and endemic problems of the economic system itself is worthwhile, has to be not just encourage but created pretty much from scratch.

Abroad, I am often met with remarks like "your parents must be so proud of you" and treated with respect as an intellectual. At home nobody knows what an intellectual is.

[_barrelomonkeys]

Blixa, it's because our schools are spitting out ready made workers, not thinkers.

Intellectual is a four letter word in America.

[_barrelomonkeys]

Do you guys have the same problem in the States or is that just a UK thing??

Mary

It's a problem over here too....no one wants to teach math and science, they all want to be lawyer, psychologists, or doctors going into college. That's where the money is....

There are two problems in education in the US.

#1: the old guard in the education world wants to keep the status quo. New teachers with innovative ideas are fired for being good teachers.

A story: my daughter has a Masters in Teaching. Her first position was teaching 6th grade math. She had some innovative ideas of how to do that (the Friday Project), and she implemented them with the permission of her supervisor but without the permission of the building principal. Her reviews throughout the year were fine. When the end of the year test scores came back, 161 of her 165 students made annual yearly progress plus one or two quarters. The rest of the 6th graders (330) did not score nearly as well. What was her reward? She was fired from her position. Why? Because she hadn't followed her principal's wishes to teach with the same method as the other 6th grade math teachers. In other words, she had refused to be mediocre, to stay within the lines he'd drawn. He told her she was a great teacher, but he would never recommend her as a math teacher. He would highly recommend that she could teach anything, but math.

She teaches in a different district now, one that appreciates innovation in their teachers. She doesn't teach math though. It's not that they wouldn't let her; she just doesn't want to. She teaches Fitness, Health, and Journalism. Incidently, the test scores in both Reading and Writing rose significantly the first year she taught Journalism.

#2: the pay scale is mediocre at best.

My son with a Bachelor's in engineering was offered a salary of $65,000 for his first job out of college. My daughter, with a Masters in teaching, started out at $41,000. His raises are larger, and he gets bonuses for good work. She's stuck with the 3% raises mandated by the legislature and the only bonus she gets is if she coaches, if you can call her coach's stipend a bonus. He supports a family of wife and two children on his salary. She has to have a roommate in order to get by. He is a process engineer who makes toilet paper. She influences hundreds of young minds a year. They are not equally valued by our society.

Harmony I agree with everything you said! Really imaginative teachers make other teachers nervous as well. Some just don't want to change and they teach the same way they have for 20+ years. Most teachers (unfortunately) teach the way they were taught.

My daughters go to a Middle School that is for the visual and performing arts and the teachers MUST be imaginative. It's a marvel to walk into the school and see children stimulated and excited to be there. It's a shame many administrators discourage out of the box thinking. Our children suffer for it!