4 ms·
I agree with much of what you say. I've heard it said that education is a series of increasingly small lies. If you started teaching the whole truth and nothing
by darkerside 8y ago
I agree with much of what you say. I've heard it said that education is a series of increasingly small lies. If you started teaching the whole truth and nothing but, from a young age, the student would fail to grasp the big picture and the broad connections in the way the world works. When you let something go, it drops. Well, unless it's lighter than air. And it doesn't drop, it attracts to the Earth. And actually, it attracts the Earth back to itself. And it doesn't simply "drop", it accelerates. And gravitational forces and air friction determine the acceleration and the jerk. If you don't omit anything, you can't communicate anything.
The broader point I'm getting at is, first you need to learn about the artificial distinctions so you can "from" the subject. Then, once you know all the rules by heart, you can feel free to break them.
- teekert 8y agoNice way of putting it. Yesterday morning my son asked how humans came to be and I ended up stuttering that perhaps at some point some molecule of unspecified complexity gained the ability to replicate at which point it became subject to natural selection based on descent with modification... You get the problem. Better say: It started with simple life and the best ones (sometimes more complex ones) ended up in the next generation. FFWD 3.5 billion years and voila. It's a bit of a lie because "what's life, what's before that, what's best, what's fitness" etc. But it works. I keep having problems with this though, but yeah, what to say to someone without any grasp of cells or DNA or "1 billion years", do even grasp it "correctly"??... Man, speak about rabbit holes. I didn't even start on evolution on the population level.. I see my son loosing interest during my explanation, while I get more and more enthusiastic. It's a hard problem.