Elliot Frank sent the following letter (response sent from mail@cartalk.com).
Dear Click and Clack:
RE: Education
OK, OK, so I'm a teacher. But I have done honest work in my life, too, including about 18 years banging nails, and stints doing things like making grinding wheels in Waltham, MA. So I've actually done some tangibly useful things in my life, and did not go back to teaching simply to exploit the taxpayers and ogle their daughters' exposed bellybuttons.
I teach biology, because understanding living things is important to me and because I think it's important for people to understand, people being living things themselves (with a few possible exceptions, a list of which we can all contribute some names to...).
I think understanding ourselves and the way the world works is an important and necessary part of being civilized people. The problem is getting to be (in the sciences, at least) that we know so damn much. There are limits to how much information we can cram into our students' compliant little heads. So we have to attempt to both cram their heads with necessary essentials (so they do not imagine that demons animate the living things around them) as well as begin to teach them how to think in a scientific way. The latter is a much tougher assignment for all of us.
I am eager (if not yet as adept as I might wish) to teach them about scientific thinking, but it is not simply a matter of that dull list everybody learns about the scientific method (i.e., make a hypothesis, design an experiment with controls, blah, blah, blah.) It actually comes down to very complex and sophisticated ideas about how we view the world, unfortunately.
As we were in the midst of dissecting dead leopard frogs the other day, I committed a philosophical digression. The response was largely annoyance. Or, in the words of one of my very bright young students: "Philosophy has nothing to do with frogs."
Well, I think he's dead wrong. I cannot in one year of high school biology teach him everything we know about living things; the day we could do that is long gone. But he does have to learn how to think, which will make it possible for him to learn even more when he needs to. To do that, he and his friends have to be able to examine their own ideas about the world, and be able to be critical about their own assumptions and adjust the parts of their personal theories about the world that filtered into their helpless brains before they reached the age of reason. Understand philosophy, in short. Maybe they're just too young?
Anyway, there are a lot of us out here trying to figure out how to deal with this complicated problem. It obviously didn't work on your caller tonight, who thought she could understand something about you by asking for your astrological signs. It's the unlearning of such things that is the hardest part, and the kids come to me filled with such nonsense. And, I'm not convinced that we (society in general) really want these kids to give up this and other more commonly accepted ideas. For instance, almost 150 years after Darwin's Origin of Species, we are still made very uncomfortable by the scary implications of human evolution.
So, it's not just us useless teachers...teaching well may just go against society's wishes, and good teachers may be subtly subversive in a way that we are not yet prepared to accept.
Good luck on your quest. Oh, yeah...thanks for all the laughs and all the information. (So what kind of cheap, easy-on-gas-type vehicle should I be thinking of buying next when my kids literally outgrow the present Dodge Shadow? The 13-year-old is six feet tall, threatening to be 6' 5" before he's done, with his little brother and sister looking ready to commit similar crimes in the next few years....soon no one will be able to sit in the back seat!!)
Thanks.
Elliot Frank
Newton, MA
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