Beyond School

When only 40% of American adults are scientifically literate enough to accept the theory of evolution, science teachers in American schools clearly need all the help they can get to pull America out of the tenth century and at least up to the educational level of, say, Bulgaria.

Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds via kwout

The National Academy of Science has published a free, 88-page pdf to address this crisis in American science education. I’m doing my part here by putting the word out. Hope you’ll do the same.

From the website of the (US) National Academy of Science:

Description

How did life evolve on Earth? The answer to this question can help us understand our past and prepare for our future. Although evolution provides credible and reliable answers, polls show that many people turn away from science, seeking other explanations with which they are more comfortable.

In the book Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a group of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine explain the fundamental methods of science, document the overwhelming evidence in support of biological evolution, and evaluate the alternative perspectives offered by advocates of various kinds of creationism, including “intelligent design.” The book explores the many fascinating inquiries being pursued that put the science of evolution to work in preventing and treating human disease, developing new agricultural products, and fostering industrial innovations. The book also presents the scientific and legal reasons for not teaching creationist ideas in public school science classes.

Mindful of school board battles and recent court decisions, Science, Evolution, and Creationism shows that science and religion should be viewed as different ways of understanding the world rather than as frameworks that are in conflict with each other and that the evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith. For educators, students, teachers, community leaders, legislators, policy makers, and parents who seek to understand the basis of evolutionary science, this publication will be an essential resource.

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Did you ever notice that we have no holidays in which we revere history’s true - in the sense of “backed up with evidence” - miracle-workers, those hard-working saviors we call “scientists”?

Think about it: scientists, through the “miracle” of human reason, have eradicated diseases for literally billions of people through medicine, created light and warmth in winter through electricity, bread for the hungry through improved agriculture, knowledge of “the heavens” through astronomy, knowledge of creation and generation through biology and genetics. They’ve literally given man the “miraculous” power to fly around the earth and to the stars; to speak face-to-face from opposite ends of the earth (and from the moon); they’re close to creating life itself, and have already created a doubled average lifespan for all of us in a mere century.

Why we don’t give thanks at Temples of Science, and donate our tithes there to promote more Good Works, is a question for future historians - if our future is not cut short by nuclear- or bioweapon-armed religious fanatics in the name of one authoritarian book or another (and it’s funny that Buddhists, of all world religions I’m aware of, are the only ones not to claim knowledge of any god at all, and also the only ones not to be engaged in violence in the name of their creed). Why we take our children to hospitals when they’re sick - we used to take them to priests - but turn around and attack the teachings of science in our schools….this saddens and frustrates me to no end.

As a history teacher and humanist, as a simple human amazed at the changes over time in human history - women’s liberation, civil rights, the triumph of modern science and reason over medieval and Iron Age ignorance, and so forth - I’m keenly interested in the rise of the “new atheists” in Western culture (again, “atheism” makes no sense in Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian Asia, since it was never “theist” to begin with). Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others have led a fascinating movement to challenge one of the last unreasoned taboos - the desirability of religion in modern civilization.

Yesterday, I was reading the Science Blogs in my Bloglines, and came across a post that had the following 2-hour “coffee klatsch” conversation of four of the earth’s leading contemporary “heretics” (in Latin, this simply means “ones who choose”) and champions of science. While I’ve seen them all featured in the media in one place or another, it has usually been in situations in which they argued their positions from an editorial soapbox, or else engaged in a somewhat sensationalistic debate with a proponent of one faith or another.

In the videos below, though, things are remarkably different: they’re among friends and fellow-travelers. No name-calling, no thumping of Darwin or Moses here. Instead, they unwind into a wonderfully intelligent discussion of their motives for attacking superstition, their fears of its untrammeled progress in the future, their frustrations at our culture’s ignorance of the basic principles of science and scientific “knowledge” and “truth” and, perhaps most remarkably, their own misgivings about both what they are doing, and how they are doing it.

In this setting, we see different sides of these men. Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling The God Delusion, who has often seemed peevish and combative in discussions with such religious leaders as the fallen “cocaine-with-male-prostitutes” megachurch preacher and Bush-adviser Ted Haggard (here) (and to be fair, Haggard castigated Dawkins with all the self-righteousness of the best of our American Elmer Gantry’s) and with a Jewish convert to Islam in Jerusalem (here), emerges in the videos below a much milder, more humble and likable man.

Similarly, Sam Harris, whose The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is a masterpiece of style and rhetoric in its arguments against religion, but at the same time threatens to alienate the very audience it hopes to reach through that very force, poses in the talks below some exquisite questions about these rationalists’ own assumptions of their “righteousness.” It’s scientific humility in action, and at its best. (Harris gave a brilliant speech in 2005 at Canada’s version of TED Talks, “Idea City,” here, but thankfully seems since then to have reconsidered the efficacy of calling religion “bullsh*t,” as he does in an ill-advised moment at the end of this speech.)

Daniel Dennett is Professor of Cognitive Studies at Tufts, author, and a staff writer of my favorite intellectual science-and-culture blog, The Edge, (don’t miss his “Thank Goodness” post for a beautiful paean to the good works of scientists worldwide working together for a universal good, rather than against each other for a tribal one. Dennett wrote it after surviving

a nine-hour surgery, in which [his] heart was stopped entirely and [his] body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping

–and it is a truly beautiful, inspiring piece of writing from a man recently back from the final precipice.) Dennett comes off as warm and civil as his Santa-white beard suggests he should (and I just discovered he gives three TED Talks here).

Finally, Christopher Hitchens, author and staff writer at Vanity Fair, contributes his own spice to the mix. He frankly annoys me by dominating so much of the conversation, ignoring others’ attempts to weigh in, and otherwise showing a lack of social intelligence. But his discussion of the fateful event which Hannukah celebrates, and his argument that it was actually an unparalleled disaster for the future of civilization, was one of the high moments, intellectually, for this history buff’s experience of the film. It’s in the last ten minutes or so of the second video.

Before embedding the videos, I’ll add the following caveat: as an educator tasked with inspiring critical thinking abilities to the next generation, and as a person who simply stands up for advancing the Good as he sees it, I hope I don’t have to apologize to anyone for asking valid questions like this. I’ve said it before in these pages, and I’ll say it again: the problem with schools, generally, is they only practice critical thinking about safe subjects - and that’s an increasingly tragic oxymoron for our world.

I hope you’ll find a couple hours to be entertained by some sorely needed, very civil, conversation about one of the chief questions in our shared historical moment.

Hour One:

Hour Two:

Best holiday wishes to you all, by the way. You’ve enriched my life (with the aid of this scientific miracle called the read-write web) over the past year in ways for which I am truly thankful.

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[This is a re-post from last summer. I was too young a blogger then to realize summers are not prime time for effective edublogging. We like our vacations, and our NECC. But this post, warts and all, marks a moment I'm still trying to be true to. It seems timely to re-post after the Students 2.0 launch. And a million - a google - thanks for the support in that young venture.]

Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: On Fear and Irrelevance in Education

“See, Hear, Speak No Evil” by AndyRamdin on Flickr

[This post extends a critique of my own teaching, and typical schooling in general, that starts in "I'm Nobody. Goodbye to All of That." Makes sense to start there, if you haven't read it already.]

I think I’m figuring out a way to make school more relevant - at least in my classroom. And how to liberate the young adults in my high school classroom from the diapers the classroom makes these infantilized physics-, calculus-, and Shakespeare-capable young adults wear and, worse yet, find natural, in the first place. I think I’m figuring out a way to give them the initiation into the world of adult citizenship, adult community, adult participation, adult empowerment, which they wish I’d invite them to enter.

You remember how angry you were, when you were in high school, to be treated like a kid by the adults, don’t you? How you knew you were capable of more than the adults allowed you to show? I think I’m figuring out how to stop being one of those adults myself, now. And how to stop being one of those teachers.

It occurs to me that this should be easy for a high school language arts teacher who has managed one Big Project - albeit it an ultimately trivial one - on web 2.0. I’ve already written about that, and have students in Seoul actually acting on it, with the year-long Global Cooling Project. That’s step one: re-design my fay little web 2.0 student showcase from the merry-go-round blue-print of last year - gee, kiddies, isn’t this fun? - to something modeled after the real-world campaigns in the adult world. Need examples? Check out the presidential campaigns in the US using YouTube, check out Live Earth’s website and its actions, praise goodness, beyond the “producing informational products” fetish of the current stage of our “school 2.0″ visionaries (that’s not aimed at you, Will). As if going from text only verbiage to multimedia verbiage is going to change anything.

Going back to Suzie Boss and the WorldChanging.com article, and back to the talismanic power the tagline of her forthcoming book holds on me now - “Real World Project-Based Learning in the Digital Age” - it’s clear that the notion of school should evaporate as much as possible when designing projects for my young adults. John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary, Giuliani, even Bush (if he ever learns to email and use “The Google”), Gore, Micheal Moore: all these adults use the media and the read-write web to “produce informational constructions of meaning” (as we so clumsily put it) for real world, relevant, important purposes.

And here’s the rub: these world-changing adults are all still “learners” engaged in their own, adult, versions of “real world project-based learning.” It’s not like web 2.0 is old hat to them, either. You can bet your last dollar they’re learning up a storm on a minute-by-minute basis in all these campaigns.

Again, the difference: they’re applying that learning with a real-world purpose that can produce real-world change, for problems that matter. In school, our projects are usually lacking that vital element. Again, they’re just nice little diversions that for some tragically unfathomable reason we, as teachers, generally cannot think beyond. (Maybe it’s very fathomable, this shackling force. Maybe it’s simply fear of parents, administrators, community leaders, or the fear of being uncommon generally - though why trying to make engaged citizens out of young adults is a controversial issue among educators, of all people, is indeed tragic.)

So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.

Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader - as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen - instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.

I know. Wordy. I have a headache. I’ll move on.

The task of last year’s 1001 Flat World Tales “project”?* That task was something like, “Write a story that reveals your local culture for readers from other cultures.”

Cindy Barnsley, who worked on the project in Australia (with Shanghai and Serbia - it crashed, but not without lessons learned, so it wasn’t a failure), has taken me to task for damning my own baby, and she’s partly justified. The conceptual objective of the project was a more conscious, more critical, understanding of the students’ own, and their global peers’ “Other,” cultures. The skills? To use process writing coupled with the 6 Traits of Effective Writing to refine those writing skills, giving and receiving peer feedback from across the globe.

I’m not saying it’s garbage, Cindy. I’m saying that, when all is said and done, and all that energy in bringing together, in my workshop alone, 130 students from the Korean peninsula, the mid-Pacific Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains - when all that energy has been expended, what’s the result? Students have written a story for their English class. And it’s been published in a little e-Book (sorry, but I still think it’s true in the grand scheme of things, though I loved some of the writing that happened there).

Couldn’t that immense amount of energy have been expended on something more consequential?

Yes. And how it could, by the way, is the idea that spurred me to sit down and write this post now. Here’s how:

Real-world literature - the great works we tame in our classrooms - invariably consists of precisely the critical thinking and literacy skills we aimed to develop in the 1001 Tales. But that project was fatally flawed by it’s lack of real-world literature’s concomitant element: a social problem worth criticizing.

“Reveal your culture” is so pathetically fay and schooly by that standard.

These young adults are screaming their critical attitude toward the roles we’ve limited them to in our culture in everything they do, from their attitudes to their music, fashions, and past-times. They live in passive revolt against what schools, parents, communities at large are doing to them. And having no constructive outlet, they either self-destruct or seek solace in the trivial.

So why not let them write about that?

A bit more: They’re also woefully oblivious to the burning issues of their futures (and that pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming admission that schools fear relevance.

The logical corollary? Fear makes schools irrelevant.

Etymology time: “Educate” - “to lead out.” If we’re afraid, as educators, to lead our students “out” to anything important in the real world, what exactly are we doing? I mean, besides paying the bills and perpetuating worldly ignorance?

So back to those “burning issues”: Diane got me thinking about the need for educators to serve as “futurist guides” to remedy the “soft news diet” of mainstream media and community ignorance of what scientists of all stripes, social as well as natural, are unable to get us to notice. (Another etymology check: “science” - “knowledge”; one hopes schools would defend science, especially in the anti-scientific US, against its detractors, but I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing more cowed, fearful, silent educators.)

Again: “Our past is not their future.” If the international community of scientists is dismissed as crank Cassandras by the Bush administration, by fundamentalist churches, and by all the followers in our communities of the information campaigns so powerfully managed by both of those camps, how do our children stand a chance of meeting future challenges if we’re afraid to talk about them? We’re like the current Democratic congress: we have the power, but we fail our constituents by fearing to wield it for the best interests, scientifically-grounded, of that community and of the globe.

So instead of a writing project that limits students to expressing what they already know too well - that they’re subtly ticked off and passively rebellious over their infantilization and the irrelevance of schools - why can’t we, as “futurist guides,” “lead them out” to questions posed by science about their futures?

That’s another “problem worth criticizing via literature.” Students around the globe comparing artfully-crafted, critically-observed notes in story form of the “consensus trance” of their local community as it trashes their futures with nary a thought. Students being encouraged to authentically express whatever satirical, lyrical, tragic, comic, or utopian variation on this theme suits them. Or to challenge the premise. This is not indoctrination, but “teaching the controversy,” as Doug so sharply frames it.

Or are we so afraid to educate (instead of merely teach) that we can’t even ask open questions like: “Is global warming a problem?”

If so, isn’t school kind of like studying for the SAT on the deck of the Titanic - post-iceburg?

Parting shot. On July 9, I mentioned in my little “personal commencement” post, which announced my graduation from the web 2.0 church and conversion to the temple of relevance, that one of my new goals is to become “less of a teacher and more of a community leader, and to expand my relationship with the young adults in my community beyond the 9-month term.” Something like that, anyway.

One of the things that has disturbed me in that respect is this: I’ve had expressions of interest from surely more than 30 adults about the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” project targeted to culminate, “flat world community service” style, on Earth Day of next year. I’m literate enough in the science to think it’s worth continuing to “flog” this idea on this blog, as Jeff Wasserman so pricelessly (and accurately) put it. I’m trying to be the change I want to see, and I insist that the time to get young adults involved in starting the “real-world project-based learning” so historically relevant to their futures is now, in the summer - before school swallows them back into homework and SAT-world for nine fallow months beginning soon. These young adults are free right now to be relevant. And if I’m right, some of them would like the opportunity to be invited into that relevance and treated like they could have some fun doing something good.

So here’s what’s bothering me: If 30 educators have expressed interest and even joined the project Ning, but only one has managed to produce a single young adult - while over 20 students here in Seoul are working on it, during summer, with no grades involved - does that indicate something troublesome about our relationships, as youth leaders (we are youth leaders, like it or not), with our youth? And is that troubling thing possibly rooted in some strange perversion of adult-youth community relations caused by the fact that schools make teachers “want vacations from the kids” because . . . beyond assigning them work, disciplining them, and branding them with grades, we don’t have human relationships to them?

I fear the answer is too often yes. If not, why are no world youths being told about this by their educators during the summer? Is it that hard to pass an email invitation to a few young adults in our communities, when we spend nine months a year with them? What’s going on there?

Finally: Cindy Barnsley’s blog has a great conversation going right now about “dissenting voices” and the need for them. I hope it goes without saying that I shouldn’t have to apologize for any statements critical of the status quo. I’m here to field comments and learn from those that teach me.

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*For those of you who don’t know it, it actually managed to get over a dozen schools from four or five continents writing together on a wiki in self-contained k-12 collaborative workshops, though some of those workshops crashed and burned. The one my students participated in with Arapahoe¹ and Honolulu made it to the end of the two-month unit.)

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Photo 2: “The Ghosts of No Evil” by lindes on Flickr.
Photo 3: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” by Auntie P on Flickr.
Photo 4: “Fear Squared” by seetwist on Flickr.
Photo 5: “Fear Limited Edition Tee” by spcoon on Flickr.

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1. Denver [↩]

E-School News just published an article (free registration may be required) about what we geeks would call “science digital storytelling.” What I find exciting about this is that it shows scientists in action, in their labs, explaining their real-world scientific experiments for the layperson. It links to four new online video sites, modeled after YouTube, that feature science films.

Here’s a clip from SciVee, an “online video-sharing startup designed to let scientists broadcast themselves toiling in the laboratory or delivering lectures.” The clip below, strangely, does not fit this description, but is instead a tutorial about the rain cycle. It’s notable for several things: quality of design, use of film, still photo, and animation, and its mash-up use of different video sources. (The embed screwed up my formatting and I couldn’t solve it, so click the screenshot to go to the site.)

Another site, JOVE (the Journal of Visual Experiments), is impressive for its inclusion of experiment abstracts, protocols, and videos. Unfortunately, the site doesn’t include an embed feature for the videos.

Two other sites discussed in the article are Lab Action and DNATube.

For the classroom, these sites obviously offer a way of learning about science beyond the textbook by watching and listening to real scientists at work on real research. Beyond that, though, they also invite science classrooms to film and upload their own lab experiments to the sites, a la YouTube.

As the E-School News article noted, such lab-filming classroom projects are a great way to facilitate learning by requiring students to articulate the why’s and how’s of real science, and thereby rise above the “trained monkey following directions” that I imagine many science lab lessons are liable to. You can’t fake understanding when you have to discuss and explain as you go.

One last note: the article mentioned that the digital storytelling skills we aim to teach in all our classrooms are decisive for the popularity of the videos on these sites. If the sound is bad, the camera-work is shaky, the editing bush league, and so forth - if the scientists, in other words, don’t “cut the crap” from their videos and embrace the “design matters” mindset Dean Shareski has been pushing - the real world “assesses with the mouse” by either rating the videos poor or not viewing them at all. The point here: scientists themselves are now studying the same skills our students are learning when they make iMovies, podcasts, and so forth. This is good to explicitly communicate to students, who otherwise might churn out digital products with the same indifference with which they write schooly essays or fill out worksheets.

Here’s how the article puts it:

Researchers who are uploading their experiments and lectures online are discovering that filmmaking is more art than science. If the narrators are boring or the image is shaky, viewers will quickly learn to click elsewhere.

“Scientists are not movie makers, so getting them to shoot their experiments and describe them properly can be a challenge,” said Anton Denissov, a broadband video analyst with the Yankee Group.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, SciVee encourages scholars with a paper hot off the press to make a short video, called a “pubcast,” highlighting the key points. It also accepts unsolicited submissions that have no connection to any published work.

Phil Bourne, a pharmacologist at UC San Diego, launched SciVee this summer after seeing his students hooked on YouTube. Bourne wanted a reputable virtual place where researchers could trade techniques without the potpourri of topics found on general video-sharing sites.

“It’s quite a quantum leap for scientists to present their research in this way,” Bourne said.

I really share this because, in my four-month old 1:1 school, I’m seeing students starting to display the “it’s just for school, so it’s irrelevant” attitude toward digital skills that they previously associated with pencil-and-paper work. This is a real danger to the whole enterprise of making schooling more relevant through digital literacy and connectivity.

One last thing: all of these sites invite submissions, so they’re yet another way for students to develop their e-portfolios for college applications by self-publishing their best science work online. Bonus: SciVee, I just discovered, includes video-making tutorials for iMovie and Windows MovieMaker. Too cool - science teachers can just provide the link and tell students to be learners by reading and following directions.

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I’m off to Bangkok for the Apple Distinguished Educator 2007 Asia Institute in 24 hours, so I’m crazy rushed: sub plans for 3 missed classes, packing, the usual teachery stuff (gradebooks and other banes), prepping a presentation for how 1:1 is working (and sometimes not working?) at our school. (I really look forward, more than anything Apple, to simply re-uniting with International School of Bangkok’s Kim Cofino and Justin Medved to hone our collaborative visions about the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling, plus whatever they’re cooking up that I might support from Korea. I’ve missed these two since seeing them in Shanghai for the Learning 2.0 Conference in September.)

But here are a few things on my mind before I go:

The Wrong Kind of Selflessness

I don’t care how wealthy, “elite” (silly word connoting “more shopping power” in today’s age), and conventionally “well-educated” a student body is. If the emphasis is on GPA, SAT, Advanced Placement overload, and hyper-extra-curricularism for the sake of college application bullets (”I was in student council, Model United Nations, Cheerleading, Basketball, Debate Club, and Future Workaholics of America”), the result is often painfully obvious: all of those extrinsically motivated pursuits are a Faustian Bargain.

What is lost in this mad rush for the killer college app is this: the soul itself.

Okay, I don’t believe in this Iron Age concept. Let’s be modern and call it “the self.” It’s every bit as precious, without the theological baggage. I’m talking about the sense of who you are, of what you want to do, and the path of learning and creating based on those two senses - learning about the world the individual self is called to, and creating a worldview on that basis, and creatively contributing to that world at some point. I’m talking about your freaking life story.

It’s an opportunity cost thing. Our time is finite. 24/7 is a reality we so far haven’t transcended. And if you are being force-fed college application steroids every waking moment - classes in school, schooly extracurricular activities after it, SAT prep night classes after school and on weekends, other tutors and AP prep classes ditto - then what is not being fed, again, is the Most Important Thing: the Self, the Essence of your own genetic thumbprint, the special meat-package of who you are as an individual.

You may gain the Ivy League, but you lose your soul. You lose your voice, your creativity, your sense of wellness, wonder, and self-impelled exploration. Outside of that GPA, there’s not much there there. “Bookful blockheads,” to quote Samuel Johnson, with “heads stuffed full of facts” (to tweak Eliot).

My evidence? Try this: 30 students with MacBooks, most of whom are sincerely committed to a Project Global Cooling, but who are bewilderingly unable to produce a single short film about it, a single podcast, etc, in over three months. Let me translate: they have the money, the wealth, the grades, the intelligence; but when it comes to a simple “create something, play, produce, get fertile”? Nada. Too busy outside of our 40 minute/week activity block with all those Faustian pursuits. And, I suspect, too conditioned by a life of “schooling” to relax and create with that true artist’s acceptance of failed sketches in pursuit of the successful one. Too success-driven (conventionally defined) to be creative. Too fearful of “failure” to create something that doesn’t work. Too over-scheduled to have time to even try. Shocking, really. And sad.

We celebrate one kind of selflessness, and rightfully so; but this is the wrong kind. It’s a selflessness, ironically, born of selfishness - of the desire (probably more parental, institutional, and cultural than anything) to get into a “top” college. What a devil’s conveyor belt we’ve built with our schools. Sell your soul, go to Harvard.

The Wrong Kind of Morality

Other bloggers know that curious fascination that comes while skimming your sitemeter stats for the search terms that bring visitors to your blog. Me? Since posting my “Teaching the F-Bomb” about my AP Lit students’ modern translations of the constant (but more sublime than today’s) cursing in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I’ve gotten a surprising number of hits from people who apparently consider student cursing a moral issue worth researching.

Again, how Iron Age.

Can’t we aim for a modern moral framework here? Instead of expending energy trying to stamp out certain vowel-consonant combinations that do no harm beyond ruffling a few Victorian sensibilities - and I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach the proper times and places for the use of colorful language - can’t we instead focus on student habits that do much more damage? How about:

• the throw-away packaging addiction (bottled water, fast food, etc)
• the consumer habits that support socially immoral practices (like buying diamonds, for example, or Nestle products that rely on child slavery in Africa - aren’t these worse than saying “f&#k” a million times?)
• driving two-ton pollution machines without a thought to reducing their use

I’m so tired of that hackneyed argument that “science without morality is dangerous.” The problem is more located in our morality itself. Whatever culture you’re in, it’s a safe bet that your moral framework comes from some variation of Iron Age goat-herder or nomadic warlord. The moral issues they faced are different from ours. Joseph Campbell said it well:

For a civilization that has sent a man to the moon, it’s absurd to follow moral imperatives written before the invention of the wheel.

Or something like that. I paraphrase.

We’re in dire need of a revised Ten Commandments if we want our species to survive the 21st century at all. Resisting coveting my neighbor’s ass isn’t going to slow global warming or reduce the population explosion. (Actually, if “ass” meant what it means today instead of what it meant in Moses’ time - sorry, King James’ - maybe it would reduce population growth.) (That was a joke.)

But really. We’re educators. The next generation learns from us how to think critically about right and wrong, good and bad. Can’t we think critically about it ourselves? (And if Google brought you here because you’re looking for a way to wash your students’ mouths out with soap, I hope instead you’ll consider a bit of a moral paradigm shift, some soap for your own moral mouthings.)

More on the Edublogs Award Question

Darren Draper has an interesting comment thread about the value of the Edublogs Awards. I’m learning from it, and enjoying the debate. Worth a look. There’s constructive discussion about how the e-b folks can improve this shindig in future years.

Students 2.0 Coming Soon

I have a privileged, behind-the-scenes view of the planning going on for the Students 2.0 edublog launch. These young adults - disguised as mere “students” - are so brilliantly fun, smart, and creative, they intimidate me. And I’m learning a lot as I get to know them. (News flash: they’re smarter than me in a good number of ways.)

Watch out, edublogosphere. They won’t be raising their hands and asking for permission to talk here. Stay tuned for more.

Photos: 96dotsperinch and meeware1

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