One of my colleagues sent the following article around our departmental email list last week:
In case you’re paywalled, it’s an argument that we need to significantly alter the way we teach introductory college science courses, because obviously the common people of the West can’t reason scientifically.
OK, sure, on some level I agree with the sentiment. I’ve been a vocal advocate for higher education reforms for quite some time now, and I teach my own classes using the kinds of “active learning” reforms advocated by the article’s authors. Broadly speaking, there’s a conflict amongst college instructors on whether it’s more important to “cover all the content” in a class, or instead focus on deeper engagement with core competencies and practical skills. The former argue that there is a massive knowledge base necessary for somebody to understand modern biology, which is true – and therefore that we have to cover all of it in our two-semester introductory biology sequence. The latter (including me) argue that it’s pointless to have a professor stand at the front of a class and recite the litany of biology sensu lato if the end result is basically students “drinking from a fire hose” and retaining less than 10% of the content, which is what survey after survey shows is what they actually get out of intro bio. The authors of this article, and I, believe it is more effective to choose a good 10% of “content” and cover it in greater detail, making sure to relate it back to the core themes of the discipline so that students build a strong base that they can expand on later as they take more specialized higher-level courses.
Ok, but whatever, nobody reads ASD to get my hot takes on university pedagogy. What struck me about this article was how they started it. Here’s the first paragraph:
The rapid development of highly effective vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was a monumental achievement, yet a large fraction of the public rejected this means of defense, resulting in far too many preventable deaths. This response reflects a shocking failure of science to produce citizens who understand and respect scientific evidence, and it demands a rethinking of science education goals.
First it strikes me as wild that you would lead off an article about scientific illiteracy with a highly dubious claim – that lack of vaccination in some portion of the public resulted in increased deaths – without any citation to a published study, relying simply on what we were all supposed to imbibe from the CDC’s press releases about the effect of vaccination on COVID outcomes. I’ve expressed my skepticism of this claim – based on data – before.
But that’s not even the worst bit. To me, what really stands out about this paragraph is its utter lack of engagement with the arguments made by that “large fraction of the public”. I suspect that the large majority of you who are reading this sympathetically (as opposed to the commie trolls that stumble in here from time to time) came to your mistrust of the COVID vaccines because of scientific reasoning, not because of some half-baked conspiracy theory or a lack of “respect” for science. If you were like me, alarm bells started flashing like crazy when the CDC maintained that even people who had recovered from COVID infections could garner some benefit from the vaccine. That claim was utterly baseless – the CDC “study” supporting it was laughably bad – but to a first approximation everybody in professional science took it as gospel. There was also the evidence that the vaccine failed to stop infection and transmission, that I’ve written about before, which made it obvious that the vaccine would fail in short order. And of course eugyppius documented so many more of your reasons for mistrusting the party line on vaccines, all of them reasonable, all of them based on data and observation – in short, reflecting the best kind of citizen science we could possibly hope to see.
So far from reflecting a failure of scientific education, it seems to me that the mass rejection of the baseless claims of the vaccinators reflects a remarkable success of scientific education. Our leaders attempted to hoodwink us with garbage statistics and opaque data sources to get us to take a drug they had to already know would not provide any kind of long term benefit, but we caught them because we can think scientifically. We obviously aren’t as stupid or as gullible as they thought, and we obviously learned a thing or two from our science teachers about scientific reasoning.
But perhaps that opening paragraph has a nugget of sensibility in it after all – consider this phrase (emphasis mine):
a shocking failure of science to produce citizens who understand and respect scientific evidence
It seems to me that science education can get people to either understand or respect scientific evidence, but not both. What does it mean to “respect” scientific evidence? Probably what the authors intend is the idea that one should be willing to change their view about something based on solid scientific evidence. But based on what we know about the reality of the vaccine, one has to conclude that their idea of “respect” for science means “respect for scientists”, or better yet “submission to scientists’ opinions”. Far from wanting the public to be more capable of scientific reasoning, they want them to be less capable, and more dependent on the received wisdom from the academic Cathedral rather than their own reasoned opinion. Were it otherwise, our scientific vicars would have acknowledged our criticisms of their data and attempted in good faith to refute them, rather than doubling down with propaganda and government force and coercion. The fact that, at this late date, you can get an article like this published in Science without acknowledging that vaccine critics made at least a few concerning points, is prima facie evidence that capital-s Science has no concern whatsoever for the general public’s ability to think scientifically for itself.
Ironically, like many professional scientists, the authors of this article appear to live in an isolated world where they don’t have to actually think about much. Basically, everybody you see every day either agrees with you about basically everything of consequence, or else is too afraid of being cancelled to contradict you. Scientists like this are so cloistered that they can just tell themselves, with no evidence, that vaccine rejection is caused by lunatic conspiracy theories about lizard people or white genocide or whatever, and the public are just rubes who will fall for anything. Their “blaming” of science education is sort of a humble-brag – it highlights their superiority over you plebe losers, who can’t grasp scientific arguments because you haven’t been fully blessed with their gnosis. If you want a better explanation for the utter failure of our response to the coronavirus, look to the insularity, uninquisitiveness, and authoritarianism of academic science, who, having pushed as many dissenting voices into the outer darkness as possible, have lost the capacity to effectively “peer review” their own attitudes.
The Antisocial Darwinist 