Teaching Scientific Thinking

Finally, I'm answering comments that others posted to the entry below, on teaching evolution and Intelligent Design in public schools. If you're just arriving, you might start by reading the next entry down, and then the comments that others added. I'm starting with a new entry because a lot of visitors don't drill down to the comments. But take a look: there's thoughtful discussion there.

Okay. Following my assertion that we ought not to pretend the Intelligent Design contingent doesn't exist when we teach evolution in schools, Norton said:

High school science...rarely teaches about the process of science. It usually presents the results of scientific research that has been published and evaluated by the scientific community... Evaluating scientific claims is not easy...If we are going to start presenting dubious scientific claims to high school students, we would also need to modify the curriculum to spend considerably more time talking about the philosophy of science and how different claims are evaluated.

Yes, and yes. I think there's a serious gap in our high school (and middle school) curricula on precisely this score. There might be less time to teach facts if we devoted time to talking about how to assess claims, but I think that's a tradeoff well worth making. Norton was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a philosophy class, but I doubt that many school do—and even if they did, what percentage of kids would take them?

And yet, all kids are headed into a world that's full of claims, whether about the latest diet, or UFOs, or Intelligent Design, or how to avoid a heart attack, or the latest from the Hubble telescope. Not all claims are equal. But do we teach kids to distinguish among them? I don't think so. Not nearly well enough, anyway.

I'm not talking about assessing claims at the PhD level. I'm talking about doing it as ordinary citizens—the way web-savvy people must learn to evaluate the trustworthiness of things they read on the net.

Face it, when we teach science in middle and high school, we're not teaching most kids to become scientists. We're teaching them to become informed citizens. They're going out into a world that's awash with purported facts, and they aren't going to have peer-reviewed journals at their sides. But they might have a better chance of applying reasonable judgment to claims if they have some idea of how science is done, and why findings that have passed peer review and been supported by follow-up research are more reliable. Otherwise, why should they believe Discover Magazine over The National Inquirer? Why should they pay attention to the "scientific establishment," which from time to time appears arrogant, disconnected from ordinary people, and filled with researchers who fake data? Why, in fact, do a large number of people in the U.S. distrust science?

When I suggest that Intelligent Design (ID) ought to be addressed in the school curriculum, I don't mean to teach it as a co-equal with evolution, but to raise it for discussion in the above context. I wouldn't mind seeing this happen in middle school. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing a unit in the curriculum addressing a range of fringe science, doubtful science, and pseudoscience. Don't just stand at a distance and dismiss the claims, but talk about where the claims fall short (as they generally do), and how to make reasonable judgments when confronted by claims. And yes, how to recognize the boundaries between faith and science. (Not to set up one as superior to the other, but to clarify that they are different, and they serve different functions in life.)

In short, do a little teaching in how to think.