Proffering Garbage as Gems
Many educators are concerned with making
sure that students are presented with a shopping list of knowledge and
information. Curricular committees assemble and compile irreducible lists
of topics to which a student should be exposed before graduation. (We
would not want any of our graduates to have to express ignorance on topic
x, so we had better add topic x to our already long list of topics to
teach).
During the process of provisioning students
with a vast storehouse of knowledge, it would appear that little attention
is directed towards eliminating misinformation. The survey presented
below, albeit anecdotal and in only one field, would suggest that the
probability of having students being offered garbage as if gems is
amazingly high in all levels of our educational system.
Surely the elimination of proffered
misinformation should be as important a concern for educators (and
curricular committees) as the provisioning of proffered information. Yet
the results of the survey presented below seem to suggest that the former
does not play much of a role in the considerations of educators.
Comments
For any particular piece of misinformation,
nearly 90% of the students are likely to have been taught it (100% - 13% =
87%). That is an amazingly high probability of acquiring any particular
one of the six pieces of nonsense and represents a virtual certainty that
a student will be exposed to at least one of them.
Interpretation of these numbers is fraught
with problems. Even taking the average as I have, assumes an unjustified
equal weighting of the topics. But the numbers here are only viewed as a
hint at the issues.
Home At first it might seem that the
relatively low probability of getting any particular piece of scientific
misinformation in the home implies a greater concern for the truth there.
Of course, the more reasonable interpretation is that less scientific misinformation
is offered in the home because less scientific information is
offered there. During the next class, I asked my students whether this
was, in fact, the proper interpretation and they roundly asserted that
yes, it was.
Textbooks versus magazines and TV
Despite the better (but not good) showing of textbooks by comparison to
magazines and television, I suspect that this merely suggests that
students actually acquire more information (and thus more misinformation)
via the latter two than via textbooks. Certainly, my own reading of
textbooks suggests that they are a rich mine of nonsense.
Educational institutions The
probability of acquiring any particular piece of nonsense from an
educational institution is about the same as that for magazines or
television. This is a shameful indictment of our educational system! At
first it might be thought that the universities do a better job than the
grade schools or high schools. but each of the latter represents an
exposure of about six years while the students surveyed had in generally
only been at the university for a year and a few months. If one scaled the
data to give the probability of acquiring a particular piece of
misinformation per unit time, it is clear that the universities don't do
any better than the public schools: all do an abysmal job. |