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Children can memorize all 50 US state capitals, they can memorize a handful of scientific names. If we really wanted to, we could teach them a much more accurat

• neom 2y ago
  May as well add this to the above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline (large amounts of knowledge can be transferred just fine)
• bbor 2y ago
  I'm a huge cladistics fan, but insisting that "animal" isn't a useful term is pretty out there, IMHO. Certainly we can (and do!) teach cladistics in high school biology, but does your ideal world have baby books titled with one of the mentioned names...? More personally speaking: what am I missing out by using the four kingdoms? Like, how could that possibly ever backfire in a way that slightly impacts my life negatively, or impedes the scientists studying genetic lineages? There's basically infinite science to "remain ignorant" of, I don't see any justification for an elitist attitude on this nuance in particular.
  • sashank_1509 2y ago
    Why not go the other way, what are you missing if you don’t learnt four kingdoms. Why should that be taught at all. One obvious reason it should not be taught, if it is wrong then it kills curiosity and imagination by giving us a neat story we think is true. In a way it has the same negative effect religion can have but to a smaller degree. Why does the earth exist, because god made it kills all spirit of enquiry. This is the same problem I have with the big bang. This is another theory that kills inquiry. Similar example:
    • 9dev 2y ago
      Well in very practical terms, it gives you a way to name things you see in the forest, to figure out what is edible, and to understand what has a sentience of its own, similar to yours. I don’t mean to be snarky, but it seems like you’re very removed from the reality of normal people and parents out there.
      • johnisgood 2y ago
        There is much more to figure out what is edible and what is not. Considering shrooms alone, it is much more "complicated", so much that there are specialists for that, even, but I agree, could be an useful skill, but not for people who do not even leave the city, I think. However, they should know the basics such as "not eating potatoes (or its parts) that are green", and so forth, since that is something you run into even if you never leave the city. Food spoilage in general would be useful to teach, but that is the job of the parents, I would say. That said, my teachers in elementary school always used to tell me that they are our second parents. I can see where they were coming from.
        • 9dev 2y ago
          I didn’t say there wasn’t. My point is that explaining to kids why they can pick a strawberry from the forest floor, but leave the fly agaric where it is, despite being the same color, is hard enough without going into the phylogenetic peculiarities. Starting with animals (things that can think like you), plants (things that eat light), fungi (underground webs that bloom above ground), and bacteria (very small things that are sort-of alive, and can both be good for you or make you sick), makes things so much easier and is probably all you need to know for a while.
          • johnisgood 2y ago
            I agree.
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        The reality of normal people and parents is that a different basic classification is warranted: - Humans are what they are; - Animals are what they are; - Plants and fungi of the kind you can gather in the forest, and anything else that is macro-scale but doesn't run or swim around, are just "plants"; - Bacteria, viruses, fungi of the other kind, archaea and even single-cellular organisms that could have negative impact on you, are all just "bacteria" or "microorganisms" or "pathogens"; - "Plants" breaks down into "trees", "grasses", "bushes", "shrooms", "flowers", and that's about it; - "Animals" breaks down into "fish", "reptiles", "birds", "mammals"; That covers about all the biology regular people see, to the extent they care about. Now, if you're teaching people the biological categorization, any one you will pick will be different from the daily experience of an ordinary person. Like, for practical reasons, whales and dolphins are fish (they look like every other fish and swim in water, and you hunt them with ships), and tomato is a vegetable (you don't put it into a fruit salad), and all that looks like grass is grass (despite genetics telling that some grasses are really just very tiny trees, or some trees are genetically just really big grass, etc.). Point being, if you're going to teach them a biological categorization, that's already distinct from "normie everyday life" categorization, so you may just as well pick one that's current and useful in biology. (And once again, this is another case of a non-issue that turns into issue only because people are unable to comprehend and teach the distinction between "is" and "can be thought of as"; the fact that categories are invented by people, are not facts of nature; that their only job is to be useful, and you can have many classification systems for the same thing, useful in different contexts.)
  • calibas 2y ago
    I'm not arguing that animal isn't a useful term, but if you're dividing eukaryotes into the major groups, it's not one of them. > More personally speaking: what am I missing out by using the four kingdoms? Like, how could that possibly ever backfire in a way that slightly impacts my life negatively, or impedes the scientists studying genetic lineages? Sure, where does kelp fit in? How about slime molds? Also, I'm not suggesting we teach children all the nuance of phylogeny. I'm suggesting we don't teach a version that we've proven to be objectively wrong. Eventually, the four-kingdoms system will go away, and it will sit next to the "animal, vegetable, mineral" system in the annals of scientific history.
    • bbor 2y ago
      Interesting, thanks for elaborating! Still not sure I understand sadly, but maybe it’s just different worldviews on how to play language games. Like, you say we don’t need to teach nuance, and that animal is a useful term — but then what does it denote, if not a group of creatures? To me, this discussion should center around utility — “objectively wrong” is assumed to apply to basically everything we ever say on some level (what are the chances we happen to live at the End of Science?) so I hesitate to adopt such a binary framework. In this light, taking a stand against “animal, plant, fungus”—which sums up an overwhelming majority of how laypeople interact with the world—seems of dubious value. Re:examples, kelp are plants and slime molds are molds, and therefor fungi. Boom. Does that capture 100% of their characteristics on a genetic level? Presumably not (and TIL kelp are technically like flexible coral colonies, not vascular plants)! Is it more useful for 99.9% of usage than “they’re their own things, somewhat unlike anything else”? Definitely, yes. P.s. animal vegetable mineral also seems to have held up okay…? It’s a culinary thing AFAIK, not an exhaustive list of all objects.
      • mmooss 2y ago
        > animal vegetable mineral also seems to have held up okay…? It’s a culinary thing Interesting - Linnaeus (and possibly contemporaries and predecessors) were maybe biased too look at the world through eating: The hunted, the grown, and the mined. (Completely speculative, of course.)
• alexey-salmin 2y ago
  I strongly disagree. It's necessary to teach oversimplified things to small minds, even oversimplified to the extent of being incorrect. It's unlikely you understand relativistic mechanics unless you learn and practice Newtonian for a few years, then many people stop there and never go for relativism. It's unlikely you understand Peano axioms without first spending years just working with numbers, completely disregarding the formal foundations. Then many people stop there and never study the formal math. It's unlikely you understand electron configurations and orbitals without first imagining electrons orbiting the nucleus like earth is orbiting the sun. And even that part you won't understand until you master the false concepts of "sunrise" and "sunset". You can't climb the ladder without stepping on the first step. I've been studying for many years, observing people around me, I also did a fair share of teaching myself. The purist approach that avoids oversimplifications inevitably leads to disaster. There are maybe 1-2 kids in the class who can "jump the ladder", the rest are left on the ground helpless and confused. Another curious observation: when I found myself in that role of a kid jumping the ladder in a purist class, I did that by secretly building a false ladder of my own. When professor said "Banach space" I would imagine Euclidean or Hilbert spaces and would get correct intuition half the time. The other half I would remember and use it to understand the difference. Most of others suffered dearly, unable to grasp anything at all, seeing the glass bead game instead of vectors and functions. And we were 20 years old back then, not even that small.
  • blueflow 2y ago
    It wouldn't be so nice if it was oversimplified and incorrect to the extent that the child realizes it doesn't add up.
    • kulahan 2y ago
      Thankfully at very young ages where this is required, that level of critical thinking is very far off
    • kruffalon 2y ago
      From my limited experience (being a child and raising one child) I would say that the problem is more that we (as adults) pretend that the simplified thing is the whole picture. Every time someone told me: "this is a simplified version to give you a basic understanding and later you will be able to learn more accurate versions" that was tremendously helpful and sometimes it sparked my curiosity and motivated me to look stuff up myself. I mean we should get ahead of the realisation that it doesn't add up.
• teleforce 2y ago
  > If adults want to remain ignorant, so be it, but at least teach children the truth. Let them know that life is incredibly complicated, it's a mystery we're still solving, and they could be the ones to help figure it out. Don't overly simplify things for small minds, it creates a false picture and it kills the imagination. Yes we should have this firm stance and accept nothing less especially when it come to something fundamental such as the Theory of Evolution. It's a shame that some scientists are even promoting that human come from monkey while the fact that from Darwin own observation was that monkey and human probably share the same ancestor not human come from monkey and even that's debatable. They even create a false picture that now become a "universal truth" printed on people shirts and kind of accepted as truth as far as layman and kids are concerned [1]. But now even the one making the picture is regretting it but the damaged has already been done. Einstein once mentioned "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". By making things simpler than simpler (pun intended), we are creating distortion and falsehood that can take years and perhaps centuries to be fixed, and just ask the "flat earth" crowd. [1] On the Origins of “The March of Progress”: https://sites.wustl.edu/prosper/on-the-origins-of-the-march-of-progress/ https://sites.wustl.edu/prosper/on-the-origins-of-the-march-...
• ivell 2y ago
  People gain understanding when we relate things to their frame of reference. Kids have very limited life experience and their frame of reference is very low. Introducing new concepts that are not relatable would create huge gaps in real understanding. For example, explaining encryption as a lock to prevent thieves from stealing data is much more understandable to kids than going into actual definition of encryption. Lock is something concrete that they have seen, while encryption is an abstract concept hard to grasp.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Except encryption is nothing like a lock, and "stealing data" is a problematic term, as it's stretching the concept of theft way past its common meaning - it's using the term "stealing" in the exact same way people saying "software piracy is stealing" are. So that's already providing completely twisted mental model to kids. And it stems in big part from trying to pass one specific application as an answer to what the thing is. (What is a car? It's like extra legs for your butt, that can run very fast and carry multiple butts.) You can get much closer to the truth by explaining encryption as a trick to make words understandable only to those who know the trick. You can play a substitution game with your kids, explain how you and them could agree that when one says "snake" it means "I", etc. and so "snake eats green grass" means "I am very hungry", and that you'll understand them but no one else will, etc. At any given age, kids are as likely to understand secrecy as they're to understand why locks exist, so it's really just a choice of not using a bad and confusing analogy.
    • ivell 2y ago
      Substitution is a new concept for kids. Not something they can readily understand. So you need to explain that in terms of a game. Kids know what secrets are. But from their point of view, why even talk about it if it is secret? Why can't we go to another place and talk secretly? Why do we need to talk secrets in public using substitution? Since they do not see obvious need for it in their daily life and there are workarounds for it, they do not get why there is a need for substitution. By the time we explain all these to them, they would have already lost interest, or context and would easily forget the whole thing.
• wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
  went to school till 2012, highly esteemed US high school, was still taught then
  • wegfawefgawefg 2y ago
    this was voted down, but the poster had expressed doubt that it had still been taught this way, and I was providing information that it was still taught thid eay even at a high end high school tenish years ago. I thought it reasonable to share.
• dvdkon 2y ago
  The four kingdoms system is taught because it is useful; not for science, but for everyday communication. We use a similarly flawed model every day: fruit and vegetables. What's in one group or the other is based on vague similarities and is mostly arbitrary, but it's still useful to split the huge category of "edible plant parts" into more manageable chunks. Anyone familiar with apples and pears will likely see an orange and say it's a fruit. Likewise anyone familiar with cats and dogs will see a boar and think "animal", not "plant" or "fungus". A genetics-based assessment would be more "correct", yes, but impossible on a walk or in the store. Primary school teachers, from my experience, have a tendency to present things as "the truth" and accept no deviation from their own word. I think changing that would be a good step in fostering creativity in children, much more than skipping less-accurate models.
  • thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > We use a similarly flawed model every day: fruit and vegetables. What's in one group or the other is based on vague similarities and is mostly arbitrary, but it's still useful to split the huge category of "edible plant parts" into more manageable chunks. This is completely wrong. Those categories aren't any smaller, in a practical sense, than the combined category "plants". The gain in manageability is zero. The reason we divide the categories that way is that we put them to different purposes, not that they'd be too large if combined.
• mapt 2y ago
  But... but... every cell has one spherical nucleus, one spherical chloroplast for plants or spherical mitochondria for animals, and a host of other features depicted in this helpful diagram that you're going to have to copy from memory.
• exe34 2y ago
  > it creates a false picture and it kills the imagination. this reminds me of a certain voting population that think male and female are very simple XY and XX things and nothing else exists. unfortunately a lot of people take dumbed down models and mistake the map for the terrain. I'm not sure there's a cure for it - I have cousins who went through the same schooling and came out with very different abilities to generalise.
• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Would you also propose we skip over the Bohr model of the atom and teach Schrödinger to ten year olds?
• NikolaNovak 2y ago
  >>Don't overly simplify things for small minds, it creates a false picture and it kills the imagination. I think we can all agree that in pedagogy and teaching, you have to start simplified; then it becomes a more productive discussion on what constitutes over simplifying, rather than a binary "do or do not over simplify". We can and absolutely should be open about complexity of the world, but at the same time be aware that average person goes through between 8 and 16 years of education (with important outliers on either side of the bell curve), and trying to fit all complexity and all the knowledge on day one generally does not lead to productive results. The first lesson of the biology in this area I think is not so much "there are these and precisely these 4 or 7 or 9 fixed and immutable categories of life", but... "life can be categorized, and living creatures that look different actually have similarities". There's wonder, and insight, and enlightenment right there that's probably going to stick longer for vast vast vast majority of people, than the specifics of whether there were 4 or 7 or 9 categories. Heck, we changed number of planets and our understanding of "planet" remained the same :).