Maria Popova has an article about Richard Feynman and the Universal Responsibility of Scientists in the latest Brain Pickings.  Popova writes that “Speaking to the notion that Speaking to the notion that “every child is a scientist,” Feynman champions the true responsibility of science education — a responsibility and purpose sadly belied by the current education system”.   Feynman, as one would expect, emphasizes the importance of doubt and discovery as central to science.  In another Brainpickings article Popova cites Stuart Firestein:

There are a lot of facts to be known in order to be a professional anything — lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, teacher. But with science there is one important difference. The facts serve mainly to access the ignorance… Scientists don’t concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but minuscule, but rather on what they don’t know…. Science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it. Mucking about in the unknown is an adventure; doing it for a living is something most scientists consider a privilege.

Which brings me to our educational system and the textbooks that serve it.  Despite small gestures toward ‘discovery activities’ or whatever, our textbooks are overwhelmingly compilations of statements that students are required to accept if they want to pass the test and move on to the next set of statements and, ultimately, to a life and career that bows to authority.  The ultimate argument in a dispute becomes ‘ipse dixit’: ‘he said it’, the ‘he’ in question being whatever authority  is currently in vogue in a particular community.   There is nothing wrong with presenting students with the state of contemporary scientific thought.  It is, in fact essential.  However, listing facts is not teaching science.  Students need to be presented with genuine challenges to explore the world, not just books.

What is needed is a healthy spirit of doubt and exploration.  As Bertrand Russell said:

Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when wide-spread, produce social disaster.  (Russell, Education and the Good Life)

Aaron Brady has written an excellent article about MOOCs in The New Inquiry.  Written as a response to an article by Clay Shirky, he makes a series of astute observations of the MOOC phenomenon.  Among my favorites:

 I see a group of decision-makers who quite manifestly do not know what they are talking about and who barely try to disguise it, for whom “online” is code word for privatization. If I am against MOOC’s, I am against the way “MOOC” is being experienced in California, in practice: as an excuse to cheapen education and free the state budget from its responsibility to educate its citizenry.,,,,

When regents and administrators and edu-preneurs talk about MOOC’s, after all, they mean outsourcing classes at San Jose State to a for-profit corporation. That’s literally the privatization of a public resource. It is not a coincidence that San Jose State is a place where a lot of low-income, non-white students get their college degrees: it isn’t the children of the upper-middle class that go to Berkeley or UCLA who will be the canaries in this coal mine. And it’s also not a coincidence that SJSU’s press release uses the narrative of MOOC to describe a set of courses which are not free, and thus, not really “Open.” They’re not expensive, of course; for some students, they might actually be a better deal, if they stay cheap. But why would we presume that they will? For one thing, this MOOCification is explicitly a pilot project. If it works—and the self-fulfilling prophecy of these kinds of “experiments” ensures that they pretty much always “work”—it will be expanded. Unless the structural problem of California public education is solved—which is that it has to be paid for, and the state doesn’t want to pay for it—those classes will rise in price, as surely as the sun rises in the East.

In this way, the (misapplied) word MOOC becomes a license to privatize. When a public institution outsources its classes to a for-profit corporation, that’s not necessarily a bad thing—nor is it all that new—but that’s what it is: shifting the burden to educate the state’s citizens to a corporation who can make money from doing so. And yet, by using the magic word “MOOC,” the privatization disappears in a puff of euphemism. We are instead “expanding access.”

Read the entire article here.