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Saleh@feddit.org 4 weeks agoWell, someone said this was knowledge important to have in general education, so people learned it in school.
Now people are told what they learned in school is either wrong, or not important, so they shouldn’t concern themselves with it.
This raises some important implications about education and its purposes and the role of schooling in manufacturing consent in Democracies, the question of how much an individual should trust the state and so on.
If you cannot express or understand these properly or if they contradict other core ideological believes of you, ending up with arguing about Pluto rather than these issues, is normal.
wewbull@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
Here’s the thing with “facts”. Every scientific explanation is just our current best explanation. They’re not all perfect and as we learn more the explanations change.
The lesson of Pluto is that science evolves and you have to stay up to date. They’ll be a bunch of stuff you learned as facts that has now been revised, corrected, reclassified or revoked. The other obvious one is how much the appearance of dinosaurs has been revised over the last few decades.
Saleh@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
Is that aspect taught in school properly?
Because i mostly remember the teachers telling me to shut up (at best) if i questioned the veracity of what they were teaching. I also got thrown out of math class for saying the method of the teacher is more complicated than what is needed.
Exams are designed so that you regurgitate mostly what you have been told. Maybe you get lucky to have a good teacher in the humanities who is open to individual thoughts and teaches how to think about things critically. Most of the time it is “here is the official and only correct interpretation of event X, place Y, article Z…”
School for the largest part leaves no space to teach about ambiguity and evolving knowledge. Even if the curriculum allows for it, the class size usually doesn’t.
Which brings me back to my thesis. People criticizing the changed status of Pluto are feeling betrayed by school.
wewbull@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
On one hand I agree with you, but I can also see that you can’t let every class decend into a debate about the material. Unless you have the time to build every “scientific fact” up from the evidence that led to it (and you don’t) you’ll forever be having arguments against every idea coming out of a bunch of 10 year old’s heads.
So you teach it all as solid fact, and then add the nuance later when they’re older. Trouble is, a lot of people either didn’t really understand the impact of the nuance or didn’t connect the dots back to the things they were taught early on.
As for the maths thing, consider that maybe…just maybe…they were teaching you a more advanced technique using a simple example. You didn’t need that technique for the simple example. You needed it for the next part of the course, but you learnt it before you needed it so you understood it when you did need it. You didn’t understand that because you only saw what was Infront of you.