[mikeash]

If any of my math classes had wasted a bunch of time on, "While we know that 2+2=4, there are a bunch of people who believe that 2+2=5, here's why they're wrong," I would have been rather annoyed.

The space of things that are wrong is too vast to explore thoroughly. Stick to what's right.

[13years]

I didn't expect anyone to take the example as a literal. The example was only a concept in response to the original poster who used it as a concept prop for their argument.

"Stick to what's right" lol, that's the point. Who decides what is right? The government? The teachers? Education should be more about how to learn and how to discover truth, not about force feeding what some bureaucrat thinks is right or wrong or important. The greatest period of geniuses per capita in history were during time of when the socratic method was used for teaching.

[pvaldes]

> Who decides what is right?

The scientific method. This is what we call it 'science' and not just 'opinion' or 'novel'.

[13years]

Sure, and the method by which government makes decisions certainly is not the scientific method and should not weigh in on such matters.

But still, even if you constrain yourself to such a definition of what is right, in reality you still may be wrong.

For example: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/odds-are-its-wrong and https://plus.google.com/+ChrisReeveOnlineScientificDiscourse... and http://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken

[pvaldes]

Hilarious links.

I'm pretty sure that neither "Tatties last trendings: tasty scran or cancerous shite? nor "10 things that doctors don't want you to know about wrinkles" are or will be in the curriculum of the scottish students, never, ever... You can trust me with this.

[13years]

huh? Hilarious response. Was that even suppose to be a reply to this thread?

[olavk]

Off topic I know, but what time is you talking about with "genius per capita"? I wonder how this have been measured.

[13years]

So here are a couple of references. This one makes the assertion, but doesn't describe how it was derived. http://www.winwenger.com/socmeth3.htm

However, this one does describe how probably such an estimate has been derived and used. http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2007/09/mysteri...

And as an additional FYI. Some more modern related research. http://www.wired.com/2013/10/free-thinkers/

[olavk]

Sure golden age Athens had many brilliant minds, but the relation to the Socratic method is dubious. The Socratic method was pioneered by Socrates in opposition to contemporary education, which is the environment where all these minds grew up.

So it is absolutely not the case that everyone in golden age Athens was educated through the Socratic method. It seems to have been more of a fringe school. After all, Socrates was controversial enough to be executed for corrupting the young! If the satire in Aristophanes "The Clouds" represents the mainstream view, Socrates was considered kind of a nutcase.

In any case, the Socratic method might be useful for teaching critical thinking and philosophy, but it has pretty limited use for the natural science, since it doesn't help you to discover new facts about the world, only to think logically about the facts you already know.

The Socratic method will not help you decide if the earth is round or flat, and neither will it help you decide if evolution or creationism is the most correct theory. You need observations and experiments in addition to logic to discern that.

[13years]

"relation to the Socratic method is dubious". Possibly, but what a coincidence that at least 4 such notables were his students. Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes

"The Socratic method will not help you decide if the earth is round or flat, and neither will it help you decide if evolution or creationism is the most correct theory. You need observations and experiments in addition to logic to discern that."

Yet the information we are talking about is readily available to make such decisions. Therefore it is precisely the critical thinking process which is important to how the information is consumed and utilized. Most people don't error because the knowledge isn't available. They error because they can't accept or evaluate new knowledge.

The final article I listed I think makes a good case that the concepts behind this method improve discovery and learning through experimentation as well.

Many people attach themselves to whatever theory they were first taught. They accepted it as true because in their learning process they accepted their educators as a source of truth. Instead, if they were taught to continually evaluate what they know and that through continuous evaluation is the only process for truth, they could accept new information and more readily evaluate and resolve conflicts with what they already know.

[olavk]

> the information we are talking about is readily available

This is sidestepping the whole issue under discussion. The purpose of science education is to teach students about the theories in the field, what evidence is available, how it was obtained, how to reproduce the evidence and so on. Creationism is not even a theory since it makes no falsifiable claims so it doesn't make sense in any way to treat in a science class. It belongs in religion or in philosophy classes