[IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering" Educational SW

[Alan Kay]

Hi Subbu

I don't know how to do justice to your question in a short reply.

One of Anthropology's "human universals" (found everywhere in
human societies) is indeed the "desire to seek the deeper principles
....." etc. 

"Science" is used in at least two distinct ways these days. The roots of the word connote "the gathering of knowledge" and this sense some years ago in my European lunch companions led me into a very fruitless argument about e.g. whether Aristotle was a scientist. There I should have said "modern science" to denote the kind of science that Galileo and a few others started, which Bacon discussed so well as a debugging process for what is wrong with our brains/minds, and which Newton first showed how different and incredibly more powerful it could be from all previous forms of thinking.

Human beings had been on the planet for at least 40,000 and as many as 100,000 years before the enormous qualitative leap was made in the 17th century. So we could say that the issue is really about (a) the kinds and forms of explanations that can satisfy "the desire to seek deeper principles", and (b) that qualitative leaps are changes in kind not just degree, changes in outlook, not just in quantity of knowledge gathered. The duration of time before the discovery/invention of modern science is an indication of how well our minds can be fooled by appearances and beliefs and customs, etc.

The difficulties of teaching real science have to do with the huge differences between the kinds of explanations which are sought and accepted, and with outlook changes that go considerably beyond our normal built in ways of perceiving, explaining, coping with the world, etc.

Very best wishes,

Alan






________________________________
From: K. K. Subramaniam <subbukk at gmail.com>
To: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2009 4:11:14 AM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] Comments on David Kokorowski, David Pritchard and "Mastering"  Educational SW

On Monday 29 Jun 2009 10:01:34 pm Alan Kay wrote:
> (a) "the epistemology of science" is not at all what most people suppose,
> and it is rather distant from the normal ways our minds are set up to work,
Could you please elaborate it? Isn't the desire to seek the deeper principles 
behind things and events around us a unique aspect of human mind?

If we leave out the last few decades, scientists did pretty well on the whole. 
What I find disturbing is the 'intermediation' that has crept into the science 
education in recent decades. It is no longer about direct experience. It is 
about dealing with text in books, pictures on charts and movies on screen. It 
is about literacy, not comprehension [1].

[1] http://solar.physics.montana.edu/tslater/montillation_of_traxoline.html

Subbu

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