coincidence?

Thou Shalt Not Take the Bible Literally…

…not if you want to avoid some severe epistemological conundrums, that is.

Some things can't be true

Many people claim to take the Bible "literally," but besides the problem of defining just what "literally" means, there are many reasons to believe that this is not possible—let alone desirable—even for the deeply religious. Here I will lay out a few of the problems you have to grapple with if you claim to take the Bible literally.

Epimenides was a Cretan philosopher whose claim to fame was his declaration that "Cretans are always liars." For centuries, scholars have wondered whether Epimenides, himself a Cretan, was telling the truth when he said that. Paul, in his epistle to Titus, did not seem affected by the paradox since he simply stated that Epimenides' statement is true:

¹⁰For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group. ¹¹They must be silenced, because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—and that for the sake of dishonest gain. ¹²Even one of their own prophets has said, "Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons." ¹³This testimony is true. (Titus 1:10-1:12)

This is a problem. For if it is true that Cretans are always liars, then Epimenides is always a liar, and so he must have been lying. In sum, if his statement is true, then he must have been lying and so it is false, which makes it true because he said they always lie, which makes it a lie, etc. etc. etc.

So, is it true or not? Philosophers tend to say it is neither, preferring instead to call such paradoxical statements as "undecidable."

Paul's statement adds another layer to this problem. Is everything in the Bible literally true? Well, if so, then Paul's statements also have to be true. If Paul's statements are true, then his statement "This testimony is true" is true. If this testimony (i.e. that Cretans are always liars) is true, then Epimenides was always a liar. If Epimenides was always a liar, then he lied when he said Cretans are always liars. So then Paul is wrong. So then the Bible contains things that are not literally true.

Even if you concede that "Cretans are always liars" is not false—it's just undecidable—then Paul is still wrong to say it is true.

Some things aren't supposed to be true (literally)

Maybe you're worried at this point, but don't be. It's okay. The Bible literally says not to take the Bible literally. For example, Jesus admittedly taught much of his important messages metaphorically, in parables. He would explain the meanings of these parables more straightforwardly to his 12 apostles:

And His disciples asked Him, saying, "What might this parable mean?"   And He said, "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of God; but to others in parables, that `seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.' " (Luke 8:9-10, 21st Century King James Version)

So, if you want to take the Bible literally, it seems you are going against what the Bible literally says to do.

 
 

 

 

 

 

So You Think You Can Philosophize: Episode 2

This week's contestants, Destro and Cobra Commander, consider whether there can be any critical experiments in science. That is, until their boss catches them.

	There can be no critical experiments in science, if you believe in structural realism.
	There can't be any critical experiment, no matter what your theory, if you ask me.
	Well, that depends on what you mean by critical experiment.
	So what do you mean then?
	I mean an experiment that, if it comes out a certain way, proves your theory wrong. An example would be the 1919 test of Einstein's theory of relativity by observing how far the distant starlight was deflected by the curvature of spacetime around the Sun. If there was no deflection, Einstein would have been proven wrong. That's a critical experiment.
	So it sounds like critical experiments in general have to be defined counterfactually.
	Hmm, I never thought of it that way, but it would be an interesting thing to explore. What do you mean?
	Well, if a theory is successful, it has passed all the experiments, or at least all the trusted experiments, that have been done to test it. If they were critical experiments, then they can only be described as such counterfactually, . I.e. had they come out differently, the theory would have had to be abandoned.
	Okay, but that doesn't preclude critical tests of the theory in the future, does it?
	How do you mean?
	Well, the tests it has passed in the past may have to be counterfactually shown to be critical tests, but there is still the future to look forward to. The theory will be put to more tests. And if it makes predictions that differ from reality then it ruled out. In that case, it was a critical experiment, not counterfactually.
	Okay, yes. But still any passed test can only be defined as a critical test artifactually, right? Can we agree on that?
	Well, it seems so right now, so I'll go with it. But it may happen in the future that something comes to light that would rule it out. Moving on.
	Point noted. So, what was that you were saying about structural realism? I'm afraaid I don't know quite what that is.
	Oh, structural realism? It's a nifty way of looking at progress in science. You see, there is a strange tension in the progression of science. Our numerical predictions are getting more and more precisely verified by experiment. Therefore, some reasonable people say that science is getting us closer and closer to the truth. Or, rather, that science gives us the truth, in ever more fine grained detail.
	Yeah, that seems right to me.
	Ah, but then you have the problem of scientific revolutions. As Einstein put it, "no amount of experiments can prove me right, but a single one can prove me wrong". Now, what do you think he meant by that?
	Well, it sounds to me like he's talking about critical experiments.
	That's right, I think he was talking about crucial experiments in the last clause. But the first clause is curious, isn't it? "no amount of experiments can prove me right."
	He was a very humble man.
	Well, I don't know about that. He also was trying to figure out if God had any choice in creating the universe…not so humble if you ask me.
	Alright, alright. But he's just saying in that quote that his theory will never gain 100% precision. There will always be some uncertainty, so if certainty is your criterion for his theory being "right", then you are out of luck. But that is a very stringent criterion for a theory to be considered "right". Clearly the theory is right, to the extent that your GPS unit has to use his theory to account for your correct coordinates.
	Okay, I see you point. That is one way of interpreting his statement, and now I see why you think he is being humble by saying so. His theory is obviously right to some extent, but he is taking the high road but not claiming to be settled completely. Well, there's another way of interpreting his statement that you may want to hear.
	Let's hear it.
	Okay, so he's saying that no amount of experiments can prove him right, and that one can prove him wrong because he knows that someday his theory will be overturned. He has said as much elsewhere.
	Huh.
	Right. But think about it: his theory was overturning Newton's in a sense, a system of laws that had been taken as gospel for hundreds of years. And yet a single experiment, the eclipse observation of 1919, was sufficient to overturn it. This has happened time and time again in the history of science. A theory is thought to be "right" but then at some point an experiment proves it wrong. So, if it can always be proven wrong at some point, then what does that say about it's chances of being right? Those chances are apparently zero.
	Unless you have the correct theory of everything.
	And that only makes sense if you are a unificationist, I think.
	Huh?
	Nevermind. So, do you see the tension now? On the one hand it seems that are theories are getting us the truth, more and more precisely. Even when a theory is overthrown, its in a regime where the old theory wasn't designed to tread anyway, and the mathematics are continuous by design. Quantum mechanics mathematically reduces to classical physics in the limit of h bar being very, very small.
	I see that.
	But on the other hand, there are radical revolutions of theories, in which the old theory is not continuous with the new. Newton's law of gravitation explained the motions of the planets in terms of gravitational force, which emanated from the center of massive bodies and acted over a cosmic distance. In Einstein's theory of gravity, there is no gravitational force. There is only the local curvature of spacetime that massive bodies follow along in the straightest line that they can. Entities such as gravitational forces that were the main players in one theory are completely absent in another.
	But their roles are still present. Something is still present that makes the planets move as they do.
	In a sense, yes, I think I agree with that. Although a little nagging doubt thinks about Wheeler's book "Spacetime Physics" which says that the natural state of motion in GR is free-float, and it's deviations from the geodesic path that need to be explained. But I'll leave that issue aside for now and just say that I agree with you. For this is what I think structural realism is all about. Science gets at the truth in that we are discovering the true roles, the true structure of the universe. But we may, in individual scientific theories, be getting the players of those roles wrong.
	So scientists are writing a play, and their first performance may have had a bad cast, but the screenplay is still great if we can only find the right actors to play the parts.
	Something like that.
	So back to your original point--how does this preclude critical experiments?
	Well, to follow the play analogy, how can we ever really know if it's the actors that are bad, and not the script? If it's really hard to find an actor that does a role justice, is it a problem with the actors or with the role?
	What do you think?
	Well, I don't know. There may not even be any fact of the matter. But for now, I will assume that there is a fact of the matter and keep running with the metaphor. The director can decide to tweak the script to find a balance with the actor that he's got. Or, more radically, he may take that role out entirely.
	But then you have to worry about whether its even the same play anymore.
	That's true, depending on the role. If the play were Hamlet, and you took out the role of Hamlet, it seems clear that it's no longer the same play. But if the roles were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Then it's not so clear. Perhaps it's the centrality of the role removed that determines to what extent the play has changed. But you agree that it's not an on/off thing?
	Well, I don't know. If you change the main character, for whom the play is named, that seems pretty on/off. What if you took King Lear out of King Lear? Godot out of Waiting for Godot? The silence out of "2:00 of silence"?
	But on the other hand, if you change the other roles there seems to be varying amounts of grey area. What if you took Brutus out of Julius Ceasar? Or just the chorus?
	Okay, so I'm having trouble seeing how this gets back to crucial experiments in structural realism. I got a little lost in the metaphor.
	Fair enough. I can see how that might be the case. I am, after all addicted to metaphor, but that's a discussion for another day. If structural realism says that we have the roles correct, as expressed in the explanatory and mathematical structure, but we get the details wrong about ontological entity filling those roles, then I suppose a critical experiment would be one that puts to the test one of the roles in question. And if all we are ever changing in practice is the actors that fill the roles (gravitational force vs. curvature of spacetime) rather than the roles themselves, then we are never doing critical experiments.
	Wow, that seems pretty weird.
	So if we never put roles on the chopping block, then maybe that means we've had all the roles all along. Which makes me worry that we are just filling out theories constrained by the very structures of our brains.
	Well, you are a worrier...I think that's a big leap.
	How so?
	Well, I'm not sure yet, but I'm trying to work that out. For one, we can't have had all the roles all along. There are new roles introduced by theories all the time.
	How so?
	Well, quarks, for instance. Higgs particles. Fields. We didn't even know atoms had a nucleus until the last 150 years, so how could the role of keeping the nucleus together been around before that?
	That's a good point, but I'm not sure we're talking about the same level as being roles. We might be though. But maybe what I mean by roles is an explanans--quarks play the role of keeping together something that otherwise shouldn't be together. If we didn't think like charges repel then we might never have needed the role that quarks play.
	What about astronomical observations? What role is played by black holes, quasars, things we can observationally detect that we wouldn't have dreamed of before?
	Well, I'm not sure. Perhaps you make a good point. So maybe my worry was misplaced after all.
	I'll give you something to worry about! What is this insubordinance?! Get back to work, you slimes…this, I command!
	Serpentor! I should have smelled you coming.
	Destro, the tricky details of your thesis have to be done by showing when roles were introduced and by showing to what extent they were really put on the line. But that is a task for another day, my friend.
	Long live Cobra Commander!
	Cobra!!

So You Think You Can Philosophize

This week's contestants, Joey Lawrence and Paris Hilton, discuss free will and causation.

	David Hume said we cannot directly perceive causation, but that's not true. We experience causation all the time.
	Prove it!
	Just wiggle your finger.. (she wiggles it) Now, focus in on that control you feel while you do it. Got it? Now, make your heart skip a beat.
	Hey, c'mon, that's different!
	Yes, and that's precisely my point! You can cause one but you can't cause the other. That's the difference!
	Hmm…that seems sketchy to me. (deep in thought) I got it! I can make it skip a beat. Move over.
	What? Okay, I've got to see this. Don't hurt yourself.
	Don't worry, I won't. (She lies down on her side, feeling her pulse) Yep. Feel it and weep.
	(He feels her pulse) Holy shit, you did it! What's your trick? How do you do it?
	I have conscious control over my heart.
	Shut the fuck up.
	No! It's true. I know that whenever I lay on my right side, my heart tends to skip. It's a correlation I can count on. That's all causation is—correlation you can count on.
	Bullshit! Consciously doing something else that you know will affect your heart is clearly different from consciously controlling your heart directly.
	How? How exactly is it different?
	Well, it's hard to put into words.
	I thought it was supposed to be clear…
	It is, perfectly clear in fact. Something can be perfectly clear without being easy to put into words.
	Like what?
	Well, um…like…like this! Like how it is totally clear how something can be totally clear but hard to put into words, but hard to put into words.
	What the…
	But listen, that's besides the point. The point is, you agree that when you lay down just then, you did it to speed up your heart.
	Correct.
	But you can't speed up your heart without doing that.
	Well, so far as I know right now…
	Yeah, yeah good enough for me. So that's completely different from there being no other actions that you need to perform to make your heart skip other than the very act of skipping your heart.
	Hmmm…good point. But now that I think of it, this is exactly the point I'm trying to make—there's always intervening actions…it's just that some we're so used to that we don't even notice them. Or there's no mechanism for noticing them, because they're so innate.
	But you're always acting in some way, that's my point…you're always causing action!
	No, you're not.
	How are you not?!
	Listen, have you heard of these studies, where they hook up a person's brain stem to an electrode, and using a little electric shock they make the person wiggle his finger. Funny thing is, the person thinks he chose to wiggle his finger! He even reports to the people, "Oh, yeah I just decided to wiggle my finger right then."
	No! Really?
	Yeah really.
	Whoa!! I'll have to check out that study, but if it's true then, damn!
	Yeah, that's what I'm saying! So, what if we're making up the story all the time, whenever something moves? In fact, that's precisely what we're doing! Everything happens according to the laws of physics. They have all the equations they need to predict how everything interacts--it's just the initial conditions that are hard to put into the equation because things are complicated. But they know the laws of the universe, and they know that everything obeys them. So do you. It's just that you have this propensity to make up a coherent story.
	But you're still saying that we choose to make up a story! That's still the causation that I'm talking about!
	No! I'm not saying you choose! The person isn't lying. It's unconscious. Split brain patients do it all the time. They say they intended to draw the drawing they did, and they believe it, too. It's their brain that puts the story together, checking for global coherence. They're listening to the explanation the first time just when you are! And they believe it, even though you, the researcher, knows better about their own actions! It's crazy, but true!
	Well, okay but still you're saying that the story's made up for us by our brain (whatever that could mean) and we are just attributing ourselves as the authors of the actions. Why would the laws of physics dictate that that should be so?
	Beats me, I didn't set it up. That's just how it is.
	But why would we make up a story about some things and not others?
	Why not? We can't make up a story about everything…
	But we only make up a story for actions that feel like we are controlling, like wiggling our finger as opposed to making our heart skip, yourself excluded.
	But the feeling is the story! That's the point! The feeling of control is the story that your brain makes up to keep global coherence.
	Ah, that's just a homunculus. And who tells the brain to tell the story? And who tells the brain-teller? And the brain-teller's teller? It's an infinite regress. As the chain grows, the first person has to know and say an exponentially growing list of people to tell. Even the fourth homunculus down the line has to tell the brain-teller's teller to tell the brain-teller to tell the brain to tell the person that he wiggled his finger, not the laws of physics.
	You lost me.
	Think about it some more. Alright, never mind, I'll just stick with the last step in the process: why would the brain deceive us at all?
	It's not trying to, it's trying to tell the truth!
	And we're back to the homunculus.
	What's the homunculus? Is that some weird philosophy thing?
	Uh, if you don't know, it won't help to have it explained to you I'm afraid. At least not now. Let me go a different route. If it's trying to tell a story, and it always works out to be the most globally coherent story, than doesn't that count as evidence that the story is right??
	You're assuming there's a "right" story.
	No, you're assuming that, and I'm just going with it!
	How's that?
	Because you're saying that there is a correct story—the laws of physics wiggled his finger—and that the person isn't privy to the real story. He's deceived, even if he knows the laws of physics, since he'll never be able to calculate them in time. Hey, that's interesting…if he could calculate fast enough, would he be able to predict his own motions?
	Yeah, I suppose…
	So will he be able to predict that he's going to predict what he's doing?
	You're losing me again, I don't see how this pertains to the argument at hand.
	It just shows that you're still supposing there's a real cause when we wiggle our finger and we are just not that cause…the laws of physics are.
	Okay, so what are you saying?
	I'm saying our body gives us good perceptions of cause. We cause our finger to move, and we feel ourselves deciding to and making that happen. We cannot do that with our heart, no matter how hard we concentrate. The difference is the difference between cause and not cause. Control and not control.
	What about your lungs? Sometimes we control our breathing, and sometimes we don't! Is it an override, or a linear combination of neuron firings resulting in one action, or is it a nonlinear pattern of neuron firings…
	Huh? Well, I don't know. I bet the breathing would be really interesting to study in terms of causes.
	Or swallowing…You only start the muscles during swallowing…the rest happens automatically.
	Yeah, you would know about swallowing, wouldn't you? Anyway, I'm saying that it's wrong to dismiss our biological basis for perceiving cause as 'animistic', whatever that would mean. It's important to take the things we're given and work with that. And we are given a front row seat to the decisions of our own actions. Even if we don't see every one, and sometimes we see things when they didn't happen, we are still remarkably reliable in being right about our own intentions. Not only can we perceive cause, we can perceive a single cause. That's something Hume could never do.
	Yeah, well there's no such thing as a single cause. There's always a whole bunch of causes leading up to the action. For instance, each neuron causes the next one to fire, presumably. But we can't control a one of those!
	That's true, that's a good point. But we can control the lot of them! It's a holistic thing. Besides, we don't have particular individual neurons as intentional objects. We do have the action as an intentional object—an object we can think about. That's the difference, I suppose, or part of it. The action has to be an intentional object, that is, a "think-about-able" thing.
	Well, that doesn't seem right either. If your wiggling finger inadvertently hit a hidden launch button for a nuclear missile while it was wiggling, we have no reason to say that you did not decide to launch the missile. You only decided to wiggle your finger, but your wiggling finger did cause the missile launch. You didn't even have the missile as an intentional object but you did cause it to launch. The finger caused it to launch, but it can't hold any intentional objects in its mind because it doesn't have a mind of its own (despite what your girlfriend says, hey-o!)
	Well, okay, I'll step that back a bit. I guess I'm just saying that actions that start as intentional objects and end as actions are an important case to study, since we see causation from the inside in those instances. Even if it's not perfect--we can be wrong about being the cause of our own actions if, for example, an electrode actually causes our finger to wiggle—there is still a fact of the matter to be determined. Then it becomes a problem of how to determine it, which leads us away from ontology and into epistemology.
	Fair enough. Speaking of which, I have to take an epistemology right now…peace out! (she goes to the bathroom).

Will humans have the last laugh?

We humans, when looking around at all the creatures who we share the Earth with, have since time immemorial have considered ourselves to be special. The chosen ones. The cool kids. And we've had plenty of good reasons to think so. We use tools, we make fire, we socialize, we have good memory, we have concepts & reason, and, of course, we have breakdancing. Aristotle went so far as to define Man as "the rational animal". It's no wonder, given all of our special abilities, that we have concluded that we are divine, in some sense. We look at the world around us, and we "get it" in a way that a dog or a giraffe does not. We must have something extra that accounts for this awareness—a soul. A divine Creator who considers us to be his finest creation.

The more we have studied science, the more it has challenged our special status on Earth and within the cosmos. Copernicus had to convince everyone that the universe does not revolve around us, literally. We are just one of a handful of big rocks revolving around the Sun. The Sun, it was found out, is nothing but your average middle-aged star. In the last quarter decade, we have found hundreds of planets scattered throughout the galaxy. The more we looking out into space, the more it seems were no more special than a grain of sand on a vast beach. But at least we humans are the king of our little grain of sand, right?

Well…even on Earth we're finding out that humans aren't so special. We've always tried to set ourselves apart from the species we share the planet with, but nearly every unique characteristic of humanity apparently has its example in the animal kingdom as well.

Using the wonders of the world wide internet, something the animals haven't caught onto yet, I have accrued a some amazing videos featuring animals doing things previously thought unique to humans. Enjoy, and thank god for opposable thumbs!!

Tool Use:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg This crow decides to bend a wire into a hook to get some food

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RpOGYYKdaQ This crow figures out it can use a stick to get some food across the cage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfRqYjv9QgA Finally, an octopus that can open my beers for me!

Problem Solving:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySMh1mBi3cI This chimp is smarter than me, I'll tell you that.

Problem Solving by Cooperation & imitation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOrgOW9LnT4 These chimps solicit help to complete tasks they can't do themselves. They also step in to help others, too! Nice chimps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhG-_KsDYTA These chimps keep up with the Jones'—they learn to use a complicated device by watching their neighbors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GOb3nFpewM These dolphins help out the local fishermen

Self-awareness:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-pc_M2qI74 Chimps can recognize themselves in a mirror…humans can't do this in general until they're 2 or 3.

Language:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz3sQsTE5tA These dolphins understand 60 words and thousands of sentences, including word order.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN5igku_kGk Wild honeyguide birds, who speak specifically to humans! This is my personal fav...

Play & Laughter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuceywaOUs Rats laugh when they get tickled! I guess we just never knew because we were never really tempted to tickle a rat…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q Dolphins blowing bubble rings & playing with them…very cool!

Culture & Medicine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ghocsuXVVU These chimps have tribe-specific cultural knowledge, including smooching, shaking hands, and herbal medicine!

Symbolic language: These apes not only draw to communicate, they also start fires, play Pac-man…lookout!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8nDJaH-fVE

Defibrillating Capitalism

Remember the wooly mammoth? It was a large, hairy ancestor of the elephant that thrived during the ice ages. Overhunting and rising global temperatures led to its extinction, but recently scientists have decoded 80% of the creature's genetic code, raising the possibility that we will one day in the not-so-distant-future see one in real life. Will it once again range the Earth freely? No, more likely it will be sustained in a lab or a zoo. Perhaps McDonald's will come out with the McWooly.

Remember the Chrysler auto company? It was a large, hairy ancestor of the Hummer that thrived during the oil era. Gas guzzling and rising global temperatures led to its extinction, but recently the Executive branch of the government stepped in to resurrect it with a $17.4 billion dollar get out of bankrupcy free card. Coincidence? I think not.

Do the recent collapses in the auto and securities industries represent the dying coughs of capitalism? No. Contrary to common belief those industries were not capitalistic, and haven't been for a long time. In that sense, capitalism has been writhing around on the ground for a while. Although they may have been necessary in the short term, the bailouts amount to kicking capitalism while its down.

What should we do? Can capitalism be saved? I say it can, and I have an idea of how to do it...

First, it is important to realize that capitalism works in much the same way as evolution: there is a diverse field of competition for limited resources, and the fittest survive to fight another day. The auto companies, like a lot of old industries, have become big, clunky dinosaurs in the modern era. There is no longer a diverse field of competition, because the car companies offer the same old gas-guzzling crap and if they all fail the government just gives them money anyway.

If capitalism were to work itself out, then we would expect it to happen by new car companies starting up and try something new. If they are fitter for the present economy, the auto startups would take over the market. But there's one problem for capitalism working here: capital. None of the existing companies have the capital to try anything risky (like seriously marketing a hydrogen-cell car) and nobody else has the capital to create a start-up car company. Are we stuck? If so, we are screwed.

There is hope. Another business that is becoming a relic of a bygone age is gold mining. The mines are running out of gold, and it is too expensive to risk digging in new places. Nobody has the capital to create start-up gold mining companies. But one company found a successful work-around. Goldcorp did something completely unprecedented in the gold industry: they made their gold maps public and held a competition in which anyone who could find gold would get part of the treasure. The Goldcorp Challenge worked brilliantly: new sites were found and the company jumped from a $100 million failure to a $9 billion success story.

This is not the only place this worked. Another outdated beast with high production costs is space travel. Until recently, there was no real competition--only governments could afford to send people into space. That is, until the Ansari X Prize inspired 26 teams to spend a combined $100 million dollars to figuring out a low-cost solution to putting a person into orbit. At first, the task seemed insurmountable, but in 2004 Scaled Composites won the prize 8 years after it was announced.

What should the U.S. government do to save the auto industry? Not what it's currently doing. It's giving out free money to the very companies that were selected against by the economy. That's like trying to resurrect the wooly mammoth in our post-ice age modern world. Instead, the Senate should allocate funds towards an H-Prize: $500 million to the first company to market an affordable Hydrogen fuel-cell powered car. Or something like that, anyway…you get the idea!

Making competition based auto payouts would not signal the end of capitalism, but the return to capitalism. It's well worth the shot.

NCLB: No Country Left Behind

It's 1983. Ronald Reagan initiates project "Star Wars". Michael Jackson's Thriller tops the charts. And America's education scrapes the bottom of the charts.

An educational review commissioned by Ronald Reagan summarized their findings in the document: "A Nation at Risk." It starts off with a bang:

"Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world…We report to the American people that … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people."

Why all the hubbub? The first piece of evidence is international test scores:

"International comparisons of student achievement, completed a decade ago, reveal that on 19 academic tests American students were never first or second and, in comparison with other industrialized nations, were last seven times."

The commission made a few, clear, and urgent recommendations. For example:

School boards should adopt an 11-month contract for teachers. This would ensure time for curriculum and professional development, programs for students with special needs, and a more adequate level of teacher compensation.

It is now 25 years after this broad-sweeping and influential criticism of the American Education System. No Child Left Behind, the most substantial educational policy change in decades is well underway. So how are we doing?

Well, not so great. Shockingly few of these recommendations were ever implemented. And the results in international test scores are still abysmal, as you can see for yourself in this Washington Post article:

International Science Exam Shows Plateau in U.S. Performance

Francis Eberle, the director of the National Science Teachers Association, had this reaction:

"We need to pay attention to the results. We're just static, and other countries are improving. Whether it's global warming, energy production or conservation or homeland security, people need to be able to understand enough to make decisions as a citizen."

What does it mean to be able to understand enough to make decisions as a citizen? That is the crucial question that we need to answer to fix education. So far, our answer has focused too narrowly on the content, and not enough on the context—i.e. what to do with that content and when. The current system is built upon the mistaken notion that information can be disseminated and regurgitated independently of its relevance or actual use. NCLB exacerbates this problem by emphasizing high stakes, across-the-board tests, which, due to outdated theory and pragmatic-economic reasons consist almost entirely of cookie-cutter, decontextualized trivia problems. And even though Obama is following the recommendation to increase teachers' pay, he is doing so on the condition that there will be more "teacher accountability" (read: standardized tests).

Nearly half of Americans don't believe in the theory of evolution. Nearly HALF! This is not a good thing. How does this naïve view persist in this, the era of science, and the era of greater "accountability" and standardized tests? Well, the standardized tests measure whether you know what answer the test-makers are looking for. It doesn't test whether you believe them.

By no means am I endorsing some way of making students evaluated based on their beliefs. That goes against the very principles this nation was founded upon, and really is only a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from Thought Police. Instead, what I am arguing for is to stop worrying so much about the conceptual aspect of Eberle's plea, and more on the epistemological. We need to stop trying to shovel "knowledge" down the kids' throats without ever teaching them how to evaluate it, how to be critical of what people say, to deliberate over conflicting ideas and make a personal decision based on evidence, not rhetoric. These days we still demand that they not question authority, that there is one right answer, that creativity is not an appropriate skill to bring to school. We push harder and harder to standardize our children, when in fact human beings cannot and should not be standardized.

Although it's 25 years later, it still sounds a lot like 1983, to me. Or even 1984.