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    • The Philosopher’s Lexicon: Theodicy

      Posted at 5:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on May 6, 2016

      Welcome back to The Philosopher’s Lexicon. My primary goal in this series is to explore common philosophical vocabulary, hopefully transforming these words from useless jargon into meaningful terms. My secondary goal is to highlight how contentious some of these terms can be – especially those which seem obvious. These definitions will not be comprehensive by any means, so please feel free to add your own understanding of each term as we go. This week’s edition is part of a sub-series on theological terminology, which will continue for a few weeks.

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      The first time I heard today’s word – “theodicy” – spoken aloud, I thought the speaker had cleverly merged the words “theology” and “odyssey” to convey a thinker’s spiritual journey. I thought “theodyssey” was an exciting bit of jargon, and I still think it should be taken up officially. After some time, I began to notice that there was only ever one kind of theodyssey taking place, and I began to doubt my understanding of the word. Sure enough, when I finally saw it in print, the meaning became clear.

      Theodicy is the word used to describe a theologian’s answer to the problem of evil – or at least their attempt to figure it out. As many thinkers found this to be a faith-testing problem, you can see why I was content to see it as a kind of spiritual journey, fraught with temptations and tests and questions and difficulties that would threaten to undo the entire edifice of a given thinker’s trust in God or religion. In the end, a thinker engaged in theodicy is trying to find a way to defend their faith against the difficulties and demons that lurk in the shadows.

      Though the initial questions behind any theodicy are simple – Why would an omnipotent God allow evil to exist? Why would a God who is Good let innocent people suffer? Why would a just God create people who desired to harm each other? – there is no such thing as a simple theodicy. Nearly every potential difficulty comes with its own set of new problems to solve, logical inconsistencies, troubling thoughts, and more.

      In Confessions VII, among several other texts, Saint Augustine reflects on the questions that tormented him prior to converting to Christianity, wondering if perhaps God could the source of goodness while materiality was the source of evil (for those familiar with Augustine, I am referring to his time with the Manicheans). But this proposal, he finds, threatens both God’s role as creator and his omnipotence:

      What then is the origin of evil? Is it that the matter from which he made things was somehow evil? He gave it form and order, but did he leave in it an element which he could not transform into food? If so, why? Was he powerless to turn and transform all matter so that no evil remained, even though God is omnipotent? Finally, why did God want to make anything out of such stuff and not rather use his omnipotence to ensure that there was no matter at all? Could it exist contrary to God’s will? – Chadwick translation.

      His rejection of the ontological dualism of Manicheanism comes out most clearly in “On the Nature of the Good“, where he argues fairly effectively against the claim that evil could be an equal opposing force to good. The argument is thus: if God and Evil were equal forces existing in the world, then they would be naturally opposed, each attempting to destroy the other. But if that were the case, then there would only actually be Evil; evil, by its nature, aims to destroy Goodness. If God were aiming to destroy Evil, then God too would be a destructive force, rather than a creative one. This would mean that God was actually Evil – and thus would not be God, as Goodness would not exist at all. There would only be one force – Evil – operating against itself.

      The answer for Augustine, then is that there is only one ultimate force of reality. Since there is goodness in the world, and that goodness must come from somewhere, the relation above must be the inverse of what was initially presented – Evil is a privation of being, and Goodness the creation of it. Evil thus, Augustine, cannot be a true existing force, but the absence of goodness (this thinking both stems from – and feeds – Augustine’s engagement with the books of the Platonists), while God remains utterly good and creative, acting to restore that which is lacking, giving order to the orderless.

      This, of course, does not resolve Augustine’s torment, but it does provide a foundational step. His full theodicy is rich, troubling, salvific, unsatisfying, hopeful, and more – as any sincere quest to justify God’s goodness in the face of evil would have to be. While many theologians come across in purely intellectual, pastoral, or even preachy terms, their humanity is difficult to miss when it comes to the problem of evil. In Book 19 of the City of God, Augustine turns to God to help him through the pain of being mortal, and facing the destructive acts of others, and here frames his theodicy as a lifeline – it is his desire for God’s existence that pulls him from the depths of mortal despair. While a thinker’s meditation on trinity or proofs of God’s existence can read like linguistic puzzles, a thinker’s theodicy often reads out the vulnerability that lies underneath, and as such can make for the most interesting – if least satisfying – part of a theologian’s work.

      So when you see reference to a theologian’s “theodicy”, this is what is being referenced: their fear, their mortality, their hopes, and their attempts to understand and make sense of what seems to threaten not their faith, but their ability to cope with the world. A theologian’s theodicy shows you what they need and desire, and often what has prompted them to turn to the project of intellectually engaging with God in the first place.

      Next up in the theological sub-series of the Philosopher’s Lexicon: soteriology.

      Posted in Series | 14 Comments | Tagged academia, Augustine, city of god, confessions, lexicon, on the nature of the good, philosophy, religion, the problem of evil, theodicy, theology
    • A Little Bit More on Language, Teaching, and Learning: “This is a Pen”

      Posted at 1:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on March 31, 2015

      As a follow-up to my recent post “On Teaching and Learning” where I discuss the problems of approaching education as if it were a mere transfer of information (most often through the reduction of concepts to vocabulary), I offer some thoughts on the process of learning language. For this post, I have drawn heavily from a paper I submitted for a graduate seminar on the philosophy of language, and as such I owe much of my understanding to the guidance of my professors.

      Ludwig Wittgenstein opens his Philosophical Investigations with St. Augustine’s memory of learning to speak. According to Augustine, he could remember his family members pointing to objects and saying the objects’ names, and decided that this was how he learned to converse. On the surface, this does not seem a particularly objectionable thesis. In fact, it seems rather intuitive, and we do this all the time: to teach someone a word, we point to the object and say its name aloud. Of those who taught him to speak, Augustine says:

      Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.

      But Wittgenstein ultimately finds this understanding of language acquisition problematic, arguing that

      Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one (32).

      It’s a bit surprising that Augustine would reflect on his learning process this way, given what he says in De Magistro (touched upon in my original post), but working out that confusion is a project for another day. The point here is that simply naming an object carries with it no intrinsically ostensive meaning; for this method to work, says Wittgenstein, “one has already to know (or be able to do) something in order to be capable of asking a thing’s name.” (30) One has to have some experience with the object in question in order to take the meaning of the word associated with it – something that a first-time speaker like young Augustine would not have. The native speaker would have to learn the meaning alongside the word, often simultaneously.

      When we teach concepts by defining words, we assume that the concept is already grasped, or that by knowing the right terminology, the concept will automatically follow, as if the vocabulary word were a magic spell (although I dare say not even magic spells are really that simple).

      For Wittgenstein, this would be a kind of language-game (what Wittgenstein calls the union of symbols with actions or objects). He argues that, depending on its usage, the gesture of pointing out an individual object could mean a number of things, even when measures are taken to contextualize naming in the form of sentences (because no language can make any claim on fixity or completion, it is difficult to discard the relevance of a language game based on how complex it may seem).

      Wittgenstein explores the complexity of this language game with a primitive example consisting of a builder and his assistant, neither of whom have additional experience with language (2). When the builder “A” wants the assistant “B” to bring him a slab, he says the word “slab.” The gesture of pointing is vague, and empty of meaning, leaving room for both a lack of variety as well as an incorrect specificity. For B, “slab” is not simply the name of an object, but also a command that corresponds with an action.

      Yet even if B knows that his action is something separate from the object “slab”, there is still room for doubt once the lingo is taken out of its immediate context. Is “slab” the name of the individual slab in particular? Could it mean the color of the particular slab? How is the assistant to know that “slab” refers rather to a kind of thing than to simply those examples of slab that exist in the stone pile? How is “B” to know that “slab” does not refer to the material of the object, such that “pillar” and “block” are made of “slab” (Wittgenstein specifically mentions confusing the name with the shape of the rock in 10)? Solving these difficulties requires something more than merely naming the action or action – it requires a wide array of experiences, or else, says he, “With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding” (6).

      Even when the concepts are there and a complex language has already been functionally acquired, the trend in second language instruction is to attempt to recreate the experience of a native speaker learning the language for the first time. This is the promise of the famous Rosetta Stone language series, as well as Annenberg Learner’s French in Action, and the Laubach method[1], in which I was trained about ten years ago when I became a volunteer ESL tutor.

      The premise behind all of these methods is roughly the same. When teaching the name of a new object to a student, for instance, a pen, it is advised to say the phrase “This is a pen,” approximately five times, each time holding up a different example of a pen, using both actual pens and pictures of them. Then you add a bit more to the equation, asking: “What is it this?” and answering: “This is a pen.”

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      After another five or so times, the tutor drops the original phrase, and keeps only the question, motioning to the student in an exaggerated manner and mouthing the answer until the student catches on and responds. You repeat this until the student can answer you solidly without prompting, and then you move on to a new object. The structure stays the same with a new object – a ball, for instance – so that the student can learn to associate the changing part of the phrase with the object being held up. They also then learn that the phrase “this is a” signifies the object being named, but is not part of the name. The purpose is not to achieve memorization, but association between objects and words. As a tutor, you start small, and build the student’s vocabulary only through new combinations of previously acquired English words.

      The Laubach method (and also Rosetta Stone and the Annenberg Learning series) attempts to train learners in such a way as to avoid the confusion in Wittgenstein’s assistant’s understanding of “slab”, namely by providing a variety of contexts that are meant to eliminate as many variable possibilities as it can. Boiling language acquisition down to nothing more than naming is to see the similarities between words but to ignore their differences in function. It ignores the importance of the role of how words are used. In the world of the builder and his assistant, the training is such that labels correspond not simply to objects, but to commands. To learn any new words in this primitive language is to learn a language “only of orders” (18). To learn the word “slab” is to learn the sentence “bring me a slab” in its active specificity. It is but one facet of language, one kind of language-game.

      Nevertheless, the Augustinian method is a functionally popular theory in not just language learning, but in all learning (as evidenced by the examples in my original post on teaching and learning). Many parents teach their children the names of objects in this manner, unaware of Wittgenstein’s warnings that we are missing something vital in our understanding of our own language system, and many teachers test students on nothing more than rote memorization.

      Wittgenstein stresses that any singularly focused vision of teaching is limited in this way, and as such suggests that we need a multiplicity of language-games, matching them to the multiplicity of word-uses (and in the case of education in general, equation uses, fact-uses, etc). When he asks just “how many” there are, he answers:

      There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once and for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten (23).

      One of the missions of ESL teaching programs is to create scenarios in which this growth and multiplicity can be fostered. To teach colors, the tutor may take a known object – say, a pen – and gather a number of examples of the known object in a variety of colors, as well as a number of examples of a single color in a variety of known objects: “This is a blue pen,” “This is a red pen,” etc..

      The emphasis is the color-word. The different color pens emphasize to the student the element of the object that is changing – this is the first step, and it is here that we are teaching the function of the word as an descriptive quality. The second step is to teach each individual color names by using the variety of known objects. “This is a blue ball.” “This is a blue square.” And so on and so forth. The student learns to associate the name “blue” with the color “blue”, learning that the term isn’t just a way to describe pens, but is in an adjective in general.

      But this might be inadequate for learning truly new concepts, as this method only works if the student has a working knowledge of descriptive adjectives. After the successive repetition of a question such as “What is this?” a child learning to speak for the first time and an ESL student may have different reactions. It is not unusual to see a child in a store moving from object to object asking a parent this same question over and over. It is not that the child truly wishes to know what each item is for the sake of keeping that information for the future, but rather that the child is learning the function of naming. To ask “What is this” begets the name of an object. In all likelihood, the child will forget the name of the object shortly thereafter. The ESL student may ask “What is this?” a number of times, but the impetus guiding him or her is completely different; they’ll likely catch onto the game quickly, and move right to learning the names of the objects. Even if an ESL student has no knowledge of certain types of words, be they pronouns or articles, this student is yet equipped with an understanding of the multiplicity of language games, including facial expressions, the notion of using separate words to form sentences, and other such intricate paradigms that allow the ESL student to make associations, consciously or not, and even assumptions – which can be affirmed or discarded based the reactions of others.

      This isn’t always the case in learning new subjects or concepts in mathematics, the sciences, literature, history, social studies, and more. When we treat teaching as a project of translation, assuming that students understand our question innately such that they need only have understanding of the answers we want in order to excel, we miss out on the chance to build the contextual scaffolding students need to discover things for themselves. We think all we need to do is drop the information into their minds and then everything will become clear, and of course, it’s much more complex than that.

      If not even basic vocabulary can be taught this way, it stands to reason that deeper concepts cannot be taught this way either.

      For more on contextual language acquisition, check out Blogging Is a Responsibility’s informative post on “Authentic Language Learning“.

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      [1] This is a method developed by Frank C. Laubach in 1930 in order to increase literacy in the Philippines. While literacy was the initial purpose of this method, it has become one of the most popular methods of teaching ESL in addition to its popularity world wide for the expansion of literacy. Most of the information in this essay is based on training sessions and my experiences teaching English for two years, with the emphasis less on the specifics of the method, and more on the practical application thereof. For further reference, particularly on the literacy aspect of the Laubach method, see: http://www.sil.org/linguaLinks/literacy/ImplementALiteracyProgram/TheLaubachLiteracyInternationa.htm

      Posted in Essays | 4 Comments | Tagged academia, Augustine, language, learning, philosophy, speaking, teaching, Wittgenstein
    • On Teaching and Learning

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on March 11, 2015

      Over the past few weeks I’ve been collecting articles, posts, and quotes on the nature of teaching and learning with the idea that I would compile them into a longer essay. But as my list grew and my thoughts crystallized, I decided instead to keep my comments brief and let these vignettes take center stage. To put it succinctly, what all of these examples suggest is that teaching is not preaching, no matter what the subject, and that learning is far more than simply receiving knowledge – no matter how brilliant the source.

      First, from Richard Feynman on his time teaching teaching physics in Brazil:

      After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant. When they heard “light that is reflected from a medium with an index,” they didn’t know that it meant a material such as water. They didn’t know that the “direction of the light” is the direction in which you see something when you’re looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, “What is Brewster’s Angle?” I’m going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, “Look at the water,” nothing happens – they don’t have anything under “Look at the water”!

      Later on:

      I taught a course at the engineering school on mathematical methods in physics, in which I tried to show how to solve problems by trial and error. It’s something that people don’t usually learn, so I began with some simple examples of arithmetic to illustrate the method. I was surprised that only about eight out of the eighty or so students turned in the first assignment. So I gave a strong lecture about having to actually try it, not just sit back and watch me do it.

      After the lecture some students came up to me in a little delegation, and told me that I didn’t understand the backgrounds that they have, that they can study without doing the problems, that they have already learned arithmetic, and that this stuff was beneath them.

      So I kept going with the class, and no matter how complicated or obviously advanced the work was becoming, they were never handing a damn thing in. Of course I realized what it was: They couldn’t do it!”

      He draws an analogy between the way these students are being taught science and the act of learning a language merely by its sounds and rules:

      Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren’t many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek – even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, “What were Socrates’ ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?” – and the student can’t answer. Then he asks the student, What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?” the student lights up and goes, “Brrrrrrrrr-up” – he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

      But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

      What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Greek words actually mean something. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has ever translated them into words the students can understand.

      The entire essay is worth reading – actually, all of his essays in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman are – but these excerpts illustrate an attitude still present in a lot of educational environments.

      Second, an essay from Mere Inkling on C.S. Lewis and the transfer of knowledge:

      When I attended the University of Washington, we had to learn the old-fashioned way—by studying. Now they are anticipating downloading information directly into students’ brains.

      Literal brain dumps are actually still in the future . . . but researchers have documented the first indisputable brain-to-brain interface between humans!

      My first paragraph is not an exaggeration of what researchers think may one day happen.

      The project could also eventually lead to “brain tutoring,” in which knowledge is transferred directly from the brain of a teacher to a student.

      The student would view this shortcut as advantageous. (It could also save a great deal in tuition expenses, if each course only took, say, an hour or two of brain interfacing.)

      The university sees another advantage—circumventing limited teaching skills.

      “Imagine someone who’s a brilliant scientist but not a brilliant teacher. Complex knowledge is hard to explain – we’re limited by language,” said co-author Chantel Prat, a faculty member at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and a UW assistant professor of psychology.

      The editor of Mere Inkling, Robert Stroud, goes on to counter this idea with some questions and quotes form C. S. Lewis on education which are highly worth reading also, but my thoughts turn to the above-quoted Chantel Prat.

      Even if we were able to transfer knowledge in this way, we would fail to truly teach or learn by that method. As shown in Feynman’s experience, learning is not just about the collection of information, but rather training ourselves to figure it out. Teachers, when they’re good, guide their students through that discovery, and geniuses who come up with new and better ways to do things enable us to discover more things more quickly, but invariably, we still have to struggle through the process ourselves. Memorizing “2+2=4″ gives you no knowledge unless you can walk through the process yourself and then reapply it to other equations.

      Simply transferring the knowledge from the brain of the scientist to the brain of the student wouldn’t give you any better handle on the material than if the scientist said that same information out loud – it would still need to be unpacked and rebuilt by the student, helped by a teacher who can walk them through the process.

      Third, St. Augustine explains in De Magistro (Garry Wills translation) why teaching is so difficult, even when we have great knowledge:

      The most, then, that can be said for the scope of words is that they afford us an occasion for examining something, but they do not demonstrate it to our understanding. -36

      And later:

      Do teachers advertise that they verbally transmit their own acts of understanding, or the truths of their discipline, for students to receive and retain? What father sense a child to school with the silly aim of finding out what the teacher’s understanding is? Rather, when all subjects, even those concerning virtue and wisdom, have been expounded by those who profess them, then students, if they are really to be called that, investigate within themselves whether what they are hearing is true, strenuously putting it to the test of their own interior truth. That is the point at which they learn. And when they read an inner conviction of truth, they praise their teachers, not realizing that, even if the teachers knew what they were saying, the praise rightly belongs tot he taught ones not the ones who taught. – 45

      Even if you don’t believe we have an interior truth (either in terms of innate reason or in the image of God), the point is that knowledge is be gained by the experimentation or problem-solving act of the student, effectively prompted by the words of the teacher, but not executed by the teacher.

      Fourth, we see a similar rendering of this idea from Thomas Aquinas in De Veritate, Question 11:

      In effects which are produced by nature and by art, art operates in the same way and through the same means as nature. For, as nature heals one who is suffering from cold by warming him, so also does the doctor. Hence, art is said to imitate nature. A similar thing takes place in acquiring knowledge. For the teacher leads the pupil to knowledge of things he does not know in the same way that one directs himself through the process of discovering something he does not know.

      Now, in discovery, the procedure of anyone who arrives at the knowledge of something unknown is to apply general self-evident principles to certain definite matters, from these to proceed to particular conclusions, and from these to others. Consequently, one person is said to teach another inasmuch as, by signs, he manifests to that other the reasoning process which he himself goes through by his own natural reason. And thus, through the instrumentality, as it were, of what is told him, the natural reason of the pupil arrives at a knowledge of the things which he did not know. Therefore, just as the doctor is said to heal a patient through the activity of nature, so a man is said to cause knowledge in another through the activity of the learner’s own natural reason, and this is teaching. So, one is said to teach another and be his teacher. This is what the Philosopher means when he says: “Demonstration is a syllogism which makes someone know.”

      The teacher is here useful, but not necessary, for the act of learning.

      Fifth, we see this idea taken even further in a blog post from Book Geeks Anonymous on the damaging effects of teaching people that they need teachers:

      In an interview with CUNY TV, Irish poet Paul Muldoon advanced his theory for why so many people, particularly students, struggle to understand and enjoy poetry. According to Muldoon, it has to do with the way that poetry is taught in schools: in high school, he says, students are given the impression that they will never be able to understand poetry without a teacher or other sort of “expert” there to tell them what they’re reading.

      Muldoon makes a good point: most schools’ ways of teaching–not just poetry, but all subjects– cause students to doubt or neglect their own abilities. Because they, from the time they were waist-high, were spoon-fed their lessons, they become convinced that they cannot accomplish anything academic without involving a teacher. I believe college professors call this “freshman syndrome.” But this, I think, is only part of the reason why students struggle with poetry.

      When we make the teacher a source of knowledge, rather than a guide through the process of learning, we set very specific, arbitrary standards – teaching students not how to interpret poetry, but how to interpret the teacher, to find the “trick”, identify the “catch” in any question of evaluation. And we don’t just do this in the humanities.

      Sixth, another Feynman essay illustrates how we start this process early on, even in our elementary science textbooks:

      For example, there was a book that started out with four pictures: first, there was a wind-up toy; then there was an automobile’ then there was a boy riding a bicycle; then there was something else. And underneath each picture it said, “What makes it go?”

      I thought, “I know what it is: they’re going to talk about mechanics, how the springs work inside the toy; about chemistry, how the engine of the automobile works; and biology, about how the muscles work.”

      It was the kind of thing my father would have talked about: “What makes it go?” Everything does because the sun is shining,” And then we would have fun discussing it:

      “No, the toy goes because the spring is wound up,” I would say.

      “How did the spring get wound up?” he would aks.

      “I wound it up.”

      “And how did you get moving?”

      “From eating.”

      “And food grows only because the sun is shining. So it’s because the sun is shining that all these things are moving.” That would get the concept across that motion is simply the transformation of the sun’s power.

      I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, “Energy makes it go.” And for the bicycle, “Energy makes it go.” For everything, “Energy makes it go.”

      Now that doesn’t mean anything. Suppose it’s “wakalixes.” That’s the general principle: “Wakalixes makes it go.” There’s no knowledge coming in. The child doesn’t learn anything: it’s just a word!”

      Even if it were the right word (and here Feynman argues vehemently that “energy” signifies far too broad of a concept to possibly be the right word), the word itself is merely a symbol representing a concept – learning the word by itself gives you nothing, and teaches students that the answer to a scientific question isn’t about figuring out how things work and why, but is instead about learning – or guessing – the right vocabulary word.

      Seventh, in offering a new way to teach shapes, Christopher from Talking Math with Kids, makes a similar claim about how vocabulary-centric learning often denies us conceptual learning:

      Most shapes books—whether board books for babies and toddlers, or more sophisticated books for school-aged children—are full of misinformation and missed opportunities. As an example, there is nearly always one page for squares and a separate one for rectangles. There is almost never a square on the rectangles page. That’s a missed opportunity. Often, the text says that a rectangle has two short sides and two long sides. That’s misinformation. A square is a special rectangle, just as a child is a special person.

      He goes on to describe a book of shapes that allows for children to think a bit more freely, and get a lot of new information – all without the arbitrary limitation of insisting on a set answer to a particular question. Each page displays four shapes, and asks the question: “Which one doesn’t belong?” And there are a variety of possible answers:

      If you are thinking, “It depends on how you look at it,” then you’ve got the idea… There is no answer key. This is intentional–to encourage further discussion, and to encourage you to return to the book to try again.

      The book will be available in PDF form for free download until the author makes it available for sale in hard copy.

      Eighth, we can trace this same pattern to the teaching of ethics and values by looking at a recently popular opinion article by Justin P. McBrayer in the New York Times questioning “Why our children don’t think there are moral facts”:

      This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.

      In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.

      However while I think this is a great essay, McBrayer himself falls into the exact trap he is criticizing. I agree with Self Aware Patterns’ dissatisfaction with McBrayer’s assumption that there are moral facts:

      I can certainly understand the strong desire for moral precepts to be facts similar to mathematical truths or scientific conclusions. I wish they were myself. It would make ethical debates so much easier. It would merely be a matter of testing a proposition or perhaps putting together a logical proof. But moral values can only be proven in relation to other moral values. Eventually, as you dig down through the moral axioms, you unavoidably hit a wall of subjectivity.

      He later adds that:

      Moral values are more than just whimsical opinion, but they don’t rise to the level of being absolute facts.

      What comes through is that the dualistic understanding of all knowledge as either “fact” or “opinion” is damagingly inadequate. In this case, the “fact/value” distinction is important, as is the “fact/opinion” distinction, but it is just as important to explore a “value/opinion” distinction, a “fact/axiom” distinction, a “fact/theory” distinction, a “theory/hypothesis” distinction, and more. Perhaps university is the right place to introduce these sorts of complexities, but I can’t help but think that it’s disingenuous – and damaging – to teach students that ideas are either correct facts you cannot question, or else utterly dismissible opinions that you cannot treat with rigor or respect.

      Generally speaking, when we treat teaching like the mere transfer of unquestionable data, school becomes a place to leave the real world (and the real way we do things) behind, leaving us no tools with which to apply whatever we do learn in class. Of course, facts and definitions and details are absolutely necessary for both clear communication and for guiding students quickly through discoveries that others have already struggled to make, but the goal should always be to enable students to go out of the classroom and use what they learn in both expected and unexpected ways – to stand on the shoulders of giants, not cower in their shadows.

      And of course, that is far easier said than done.

      Posted in Essays | 13 Comments | Tagged academia, aquinas, Augustine, de magistro, education, ethics, feynman, learning, links, longreads, morality, philosophy, quotes, selfawarepatterns, shapes, talking math with kids, teaching
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