One of the interesting things about the Skeptics is the wide range of opinions that can be found in our group — not to mention the ever-readiness to express them. So I was interested to read Frank Haden’s column on the conference and how he found it.
Of particular interest was Frank’s interpretation of two speakers who, although speaking on different topics (science education and health ethics) nonetheless expressed a common thread. At least that’s my view — Frank heard something quite different. So just to show that there’s more than one side to a coin, here’s my penny-worth.
I think that at the heart of both presentations was the intention of having us recognise the need to take into account the beliefs and knowledge that a student or patient brings to the classroom/surgery if you are to educate/treat them appropriately.
This doesn’t have to be a cop-out for trendy constructivist approaches to education or a mad rush to take on jungle cures (and I don’t believe either speaker was advocating such). What it does recognise is that people do bring along their own ideas and concepts and that these can have a major effect on the way in which they react, whether it’s a child who is firmly convinced that the world is flat or an adult who is convinced that a chicken sacrifice is the best possible treatment for their illness.
If you are to teach that child, you have to have some idea of what they think they know — we’re all aware of the dangers of hidden assumptions. I recall one example (at another meeting) where students were happy to apply the classic MRS GREN mnemonic for living things to fire (after all, it moves, reproduces, grows, eats and excretes etc). By not being aware that they believe this, getting children to differentiate between living things and non-living things is made more difficult. Science is full of difficult concepts, made all the harder by the weird and wonderful “knowledge” we absorb from parents, friends, television etc.
If you want to challenge beliefs, you have to know that they are there in the first place whether within ourselves, our children/students or our patients. That’s something on which I think all Skeptics would agree.
