Scientism--what a great word

I linked to this post earlier today:

The Problem of Scientism in Conventional Education, by Jason Barney, at the Circe Institute Blog. "Educational schools have become labs, where white-coated practitioners test the latest theories on the thousands of children scattered in their suburban and inner-city habitats across America. The best teachers read the educational journals and carefully follow the latest research on how to most effectively manipulate the environments of their subjects in order to attain society’s desired ends. Scientism listens to evidence and data, not to history or philosophy."

In Norms and Nobility, David V. Hicks says this (page 8):

"Man's lust for power, not truth, feeds modern education. But this fact does not worry the educator....[the new way] better suits his scientific problem-solving approach....the the old self asserting a knowledge of man derived from the transcendent ideas and inherited truths of religion, art, and letters, and the new self insisting that man can know himself only by examining the composition of the material universe and drawing his inferences from that."

"I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: “Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?” My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grownups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained." ~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Education is a discipline: Mrs. Dowson and the great realities (Part Three)

Part One is here.  Part Two is here.

Abridged and slightly adapted from "The Discipline and Organization of the Mind,"  by Mrs. Dowson, L.R.C.P & S.,I. (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ireland), in The Parents' Review, Volume 11, 1900, pgs. 83-92

Mama Squirrel: You said that we are standing in peril if we either believe "excessively" everything we see, or if we disbelieve everything we don't see; that in fact "overbelieving" is a kind of superstition. Do you mean that we are trying to say that there is no meaning beyond the bare facts? How is it too much to believe in what you do see?

Professor Hinkle: You silly children believe everything you see. When you grow up, you'll realize that snowmen can't come to life.
Karen: But we...
Professor Hinkle: Silly, silly, silly! ( Frosty the Snowman)

Mrs. Dowson: It can get out of focus, out of right proportion. We need to offer science that includes the truths of experience as a whole...yes, they do need to be using their intellectual powers to be able to describe a thing with precision and with clearness, to say all that needs to be said about it and no more, to seize its characteristic differentia from similar things, and the essential points of its likeness to them, and to express the whole notion about it in just the right words. This too, like the power to observe accurately, is an accomplishment and will reveal, in its use, a pedant or a prig.

M.S. I have heard that somewhere else recently.

Mrs. Dowson:  We do need analysis, yes! It has its proper uses. It is only by a process of abstraction, by taking a thing out of its full context in the universe of things to which it is related, by cutting the bonds that tie it to all else and to its true meaning in relation to all else, that we are able to give it precise definition at all. But Nature--our experience of reality--defies our exactness and makes a mock of our descriptions; and unless we know she does our power to impose definitions upon the superficial bits of her that we gaze at in the contracted field of scientific sight must give us a false conception both of her and of ourselves and of our intellectual gains. The great realities of human life, moral and spiritual facts, are entirely beyond the reach of any such precise definition.

M.S.: So there is a danger of concentrating too much on only what is right in front of us?

Mrs. Dowson: There are also things that have their very being through mutual inclusion; and thus, they limit their mental field of view by an artificial horizon shutting out the most precious truths in the possession of mankind. But even greater than this danger is the rather lofty idea that our science-centred students will achieve the the splendid mental qualities developed, for example, in Darwin and Newton.

M.S.:  Isn't that a good goal to have?

Mrs. Dowson:. But the fine qualities displayed by Darwin and Newton are no more to the point in this matter than is the greatness of Caesar or of Wellington in connection with the educational value of learning the date of Waterloo or the successive stages of the Gallic War. Students do not acquire Wellington's powers of generalship by having a school acquaintance with his campaigns, or even by 'getting-up' his admirable Despatches; nor are they in the least degree more likely to gain the power of mental concentration and selection, and the sound judgment and untiring intellectual patience of Newton or of Darwin, through learning physics and biology even by a better method than that in vogue at the present time.

M.S.: You've named several points of both of character and of intellect: courage and wisdom; then sound judgment, intellectual patience and power. But as you say, knowing the facts of science does not give one the qualities of a scientist. So, that makes me think...are we being presumptuous when we encourage young children, or teenagers, to think of themselves as writers, or artists, or scientists? Doesn't that just give them a sense that their own thoughts and ideas are valuable? And isn't it good that the ground has already been so much broken for us?

Mrs. Dowson: On the contrary, the very fact of being able to roam over vast territories in the kingdom of science conquered and opened up by other men not rarely turns the weak heads of those who follow, and makes them, like lunatics at large, think themselves potentates when they are only tramps.

M.S.: So is it humility that we're lacking?

Mrs.. Dowson: Perhaps humanity. If we were tied down to a choice between science and letters, in the name of all that is human and living and universal, we should choose letters....those great organizers of our chaotic democracy of knowledge--the subjects which treat of the mind of man, of his knowing, feeling and acting, and of cause and purpose and meaning in the great whole of things.

M.S. But we don't have to choose between science and humanities.

Mrs. Dowson: No, we may safely make use of both, if we employ, as a necessary corrective to their separateness and their peculiar limitations, those subjects by means of which alone we can shew their fundamental relations.

This is the end of Mrs. Dowson's Part One; but she wrote a Part Two, still to come.

Education is a discipline: Mrs. Dowson and Synthetic Thinking (Part Two)

Part One is here.

Abridged and slightly adapted from "The Discipline and Organization of the Mind,"  by Mrs. Dowson, L.R.C.P & S.,I. (Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons in Ireland), in The Parents' Review, Volume 11, 1900, pgs. 83-92

M.S.: How would you describe a good school environment?

Mrs. Dowson:  Is provision made there for giving a child's mind the discipline it needs to enable him to overcome the difficulties of the general distracting intellectual disorganization? Is the need, not only for giving him knowledge, but for giving him the chance to organize it as it comes, practically recognized? Do his teachers always recognize that, only if he has this chance and acts upon it, will he be in a position to overcome the troubles that are sure to come upon him in consequence of the prevailing specialism and the lack of unified knowledge in those with whom he will have to deal?

M.S.: Have you found this to be true of many schools?

Mrs. Dowson: We shall hardly go too far if we say that most teachers and most students are sadly wanting in this respect. We may even venture to say that many teachers would be hard put to it to tell us how the fullest possible organization of mental powers and mental possessions can be effected; and what form the necessary discipline should take.

M.S.: Why is this so?

Mrs. Dowson: The art of education lags behind the science; and the science is not listened to, nor heeded when it cries aloud.  The leaders in educational science are applying the lessons of personal experience, and they are telling us how we may bring its benefits to bear in the mental discipline of our children; but, unless I am doing them a grave injustice, the practical teachers of England remain, for the most part, either opposed or unconvinced.

M.S.: So you're saying that the evidence is out there, but it's not acted upon?

Mrs. Dowd: In some places it is. We hear that in Italy young people in the highest classes of the Lyceums are taught about their own minds and the way they work, are shewn how to reason well and find out when reasoning goes ill; they are led on to know when they do not know, and to discern the difficulties of knowing at all and of knowing what knowing means; they are made aware of the oneness of things in their apparent diversity and of the steps men take in trying to get at the heart of the simplest of those things and of the whole.

M.S.: Let me see if I understand this: bringing the "scraps of knowledge" together is like synthetic thinking. There needs to be more unity of thought in education, some way of organizing knowledge. Is this the only approach that seems to work?

Mrs. Dowson: It is true that there are other instruments of discipline--a good piece of Latin prose is one; but I doubt whether there is any other way, except one which is outside the range of 'practical politics,' by which knowledge can be redeemed from the evils of specialism.

M.S.: What about science? Wouldn't it work to emphasize scientific training, teach the students to approach any question with the scientific method?

Mrs. Dowson: The cyclone of science with its practical application sweeps regularly over and through the midst of us, right into our mental lungs....but for the most part, what is taught in schools in the name of science is the thing aptly called 'the brute scientific fact.'

M.S.: What do you mean by "brute fact?"

Mrs. Dowson: The brute scientific fact is of little more educational value than the equally brute historic date, or king, or battle, in which our grandmothers took pride. Botany, for example, is usually taught in schools just as the lists of kings and queens and ware were taught to our grandmothers: it is taught as a more or less cooked-up arrangement of brute facts about plants, their characters, their structure and their functions, served with a sauce of scientific moralizing about heredity and environment and the like. Its chief advantage over the strings of royal names and the glib questions and answers of a Child's Guide, accompanied by historical platitudes about the 'greatness' of one person and the 'cruelty' of another, lies in the fact that the plants are not dead and buried out of sight like the kings, but are alive and may be looked for, and picked, and brought into the schoolroom. Botany may be taught in a way to train the mind to accuracy of observation, a power the value of which, for the wise person, it is difficult to over-estimate. This is one of its advantages; but even the advantage brings a danger.

M.S.: What sort of danger?

Mrs. Dowson: I repeat with some emphasis that, for the wise person, or for the child whom his teachers are seriously and intelligently trying to develop into a wise person, the power of observing accurately is of enormous value, but for the foolish person and for the child taught by foolish persons of a certain type, there comes with it a grave intellectual peril, never more perilous, perhaps, than at the present time--the peril in which a man stands who has the essentially superstitious habit of believing excessively what he sees, and either disbelieving, or posing to himself and other people as disbelieving, everything he does not see.

(To be continued tomorrow, and I promise it is going to be very interesting.)

The Parents' Review on Geometry and Synthesis (and the argument over taking flowers apart)

"Before the child has to work at geometry, see that he realizes:-- That there are in nature no lines, except the edges of solids, nor surfaces, except the sides of solids. That natural movements and growths take place usually in curves, not straight lines. That axes, diameters and co-ordinates are not part of any natural figure, but measuring rods introduced for man's convenience. Connect in the pupil's mind these devices with that earlier invention, mentioned in the former paper, of breaking big numbers into tens and hundreds; explain that man extracts no more real instruction out of such devices than a monkey gets by breaking things in bits, unless he completes the cycle of study by the transcendental (or supra-simian) act of synthesis. The parent will translate these words into such as she finds suit the child; the essential thing is for the parent herself to grasp the idea clearly. If she does not, she should get herself taught to do so by some competent person.

 "In connection with this idea of synthesis, a child should be taught that if he wants to learn anything about an object by breaking it open, he should not break it till he has taken a good look at it in its original state, so as to be able to reconstruct it in his mind as a whole.'  ~~ "Home Algebra and Geometry," by Mary Everest Boole, in The Parents' Review, Volume 3, 1892/93, pgs. 854-857

And check this one out (emphases mine):

 "May I make an example of flowers to illustrate the application of the science of appearances? Amongst other sciences applicable to them is horticulture, which treats of their civilization, the robustness of their constitution, their span of life, their propagation, their cultivation, the improvement of their characteristics of form and colour, the soil suitable to them, its texture, and its chemical constituents. There is also botany, a science which deals with their habits, their structure, their organs, their classification and variety. These are all concrete facts, to acquire which we examine the flowers from every point of view. We uproot them, we dissect them, we remove them from their surroundings, and consider them almost without reference to them. The facts of their appearance are different. They depend, not only upon the aspect and condition of the flowers themselves, the relation of the parts to the whole, and of the parts to each other, in different qualities and characteristics, but their aspect also depends upon their relation to surroundings, and to the aspect and condition of surroundings, and to relations, conditions, influences outside themselves and their immediate surroundings.

 "We may be able to change their surroundings and the outside influences, but we cannot disassociate them, We may take flowers from the field, or hedgerow, or garden, and bring them indoors, place them in a vase or upon a table or in a box, we may change their conditions in a countless number of different ways, but do what we may, we cannot see them without some surroundings. Any change of surroundings or change of relation of outside influences will cause change of appearance. Their appearance amongst the green grasses in the field will be different from their appearance as they grow in the garden soil against the red-brick wall, or as they lie indoors upon a polished mahogany table. They will appear different under the influence of sunshine, or gray weather or rain, at a distance from us or near at our feet. The appearance of the flowers will in every possible case have certain fixed relations to surroundings and outside conditions and influences. We cannot see or conceive flowers or any other object except under aspects influenced by outside conditions, for that is the way nature conveys to us the impression of them."  ~~ "The Fine Arts and Education, Part 1," by Francis Bate, in The Parents' Review, Volume 7, 1896, pgs. 561-571.

Do you get the feeling we're talking about a lot more than botany here?

Analyze that

"In our eagerness to solve the material deficiencies of the old civilization, we imported into our schools a method as humble as the English sparrow--simple analysis--but now, the immensity of our success threatens with Toynbeean predictability to overwhelm us.  Like the thinker whose brilliance we universally acclaim, Alfred North Whitehead, we have cultivated a perverse form of modesty and self-deception that, in the absence of dogma (the working yet scientifically undemonstrable hypotheses of the old civilization), has allowed us to forget who we are and what our purposes are, as well as to neglect to teach these lessons to our children."--David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility (1981)

"Now you must remember, whenever you have to do with him, that Analysis, like fire, is a very good servant, but a very bad master. For, having got his freedom only of late years or so, he is, like young men when they come suddenly to be their own masters, apt to be conceited, and to fancy that he knows everything, when really he knows nothing, and can never know anything, but only knows about things, which is a very different matter. Indeed, nowadays he pretends that he can teach his old grandmother, Madam How, not only how to suck eggs, but to make eggs into the bargain; while the good old lady just laughs at him kindly, and lets him run on, because she knows he will grow wiser in time, and learn humility by his mistakes and failures, as I hope you will from yours."--Charles Kingsley, Madam How and Lady Why (1869)