What’s more serious about this spat is the foundational flaw that runs through it–– our failure to separate real science from activities that reflect scientism: Dressing up ideological beliefs or even fads in the quantitative data and forbidding jargon of real sciences like physics or engineering. . . .
The biggest problem with scientism is that it assumes human beings can be known and manipulated the same way real science has come to understand nature and then create life-improving (and life-destroying) technologies. This assumption is false. With their minds and free will, humans are too complex to be understood with the same rigor with which science can understand the material world. They are unpredictable and spontaneous, in a word, undetermined unlike any other creature. As Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei says, “What science can there be in a matter which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment, and no one can tell when that moment will come?”
Teaching is an art, not a science. The only preparation needed is the knowledge of subject matter––something today’s credential students in the “soft” disciplines sorely lack. Everything else needed to teach successfully is learned from experience, and advice from successful veteran teachers, if one can be found. Any classroom is too diverse in so many different ways––upbringing, ethnicity, levels of intelligence, work ethic, home life––to be amenable to some totalizing theory or methods cooked up in some ed school.
Nor is there some magic pedagogical technique or technology that allows students to bypass the drudgery that all learning requires. The poor performance of our schools can also be marked by their eagerness to adopt any new fad or computer program that promises to “make learning fun” and protect students from failure and damage to their “self-esteem.” Yet such goals tend to thrive in schools of education. The “different ways of learning” fad––visual learners, kinetic, logical, social, and the rest–may work with very young children, but the age quickly comes when a student needs to learn to read and memorize information, and practice foundational skills through repetition. Of course, the ed schools dismiss this as “drill and kill,” even though for thousands of years until the last fifty that’s how human beings across the world learned cognitive skills.
