Every teacher has likely experienced two emotions: the feeling that you’ve gotten through to a student and the feeling that you’ve let him down. In the first, the classroom is a powerful place of human connection, and the lightbulb that has gone off in the kid’s head is hot and radiant. In the second, life proves too complex, too full of barriers and missteps, and the teacher, with regret and perhaps some shame, retraces her decisions, dissecting what went wrong. Continue reading
Tag Archives: education
by Jeff Madick, foreword writer for The Path to Hope (Other Press, 2012) and author of The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present (Vintage, 2012).
I do not necessarily believe in pluralism for its own sake. It always makes sense for students to understand opposing viewpoints, of course. But reading the many opposing views on key intellectual issues is not always an adequate path to knowledge. Should young students be required to read the works in support of creationism, for example, to understand the pros and cons of evolutionary theory? Or all the efforts to undermine global warming theories? At some point, one has to separate the theories that move beyond superstition, that are grounded in adequate deductive thought, and that are based on available empirical knowledge from those that do not.
The social sciences clothe themselves in the virtues of being grounded in deductive thought and empirical knowledge, of course, and that is the problem. How can students broaden their perspectives constructively? Economics in most academic institutions has Continue reading →