Education and Science, Science and Education
The first teacher of any note only asked questions. Socrates was this teacher. I have read that he said he did this because he did not know and was merely trying to find out what his students knew. Contrary to how Socrates taught is the common conception that a teacher should tell the students what they should know instead of helping them discover what they might already know (reason) without being told.
For example, Feynman’s lectures to Caltech’s freshman physics’ students was a grand educational experiment. These students were of high intellectual ability and they claimed to be bored with the classical physics commonly taught in such a course; they wanted to jump into ‘modern’ physics. If you read Feynman’s preface to his Lectures on Physics you will find that he judged the experiment a failure. The reason being it appeared only a minor handful of the class appeared to benefit from it. It seems the majority were not prepared to grasp the modern topics about which they desired to learn.
But there is another possible reason for the disappointing outcome. We have reviewed that Feynman began these lectures by creating a scenario, posing a question, and then answering the question. What I did not quote was the last sentence of the paragraph in which this beginning was described. It was: “In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”
But Feynman did not dismiss the class with the instruction: Use your imagination, do a little thinking, and come back to the next lecture and I will quiz you about what you have imagined and thought. No, he immediately began to do the imagining and thinking as he began to lecture: “To illustrate the power of the atomic idea, suppose we have a drop of water a quarter of an inch on the side. … ”
It is interesting to note that at an earlier time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had his character Holmes state: “From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it.”
In contrast to Feynman’s self-admitted general failure, I read, in my Britannica, that Louis Agassiz was thought to have been the foremost science educator of the 19th Century. This because of his students’ general successes. And Agassiz, himself, claimed that his greatest accomplishment was that he had taught students to see. For this was his major teaching objective because he thought a scientist was someone who saw what others did not see. But he and Feynman had one common teaching; both encouraged their students to not read the literature because it seemed they thought to do so would likely hinder the discovery of anything new.
As you read what I have just written in this blog, what have you seen, imagined, or thought?
I almost made Feynman’s mistake of going on to report what I saw, imagined, and/or thought. But a blog is an excellent teaching medium because it allows the reader to directly communicate with the author of some initial writing and thereby establish a dialogue. An actual dialogue and not the fictitious one that Galileo wrote, under threat of being burned at a stake, to share with his countrymen what he had seen, imagined, and thought.
Read more at semivision.blogspot.co.uk
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