Re: Epistemology 201: The Science of Science

From: OsherD (mdoctorow_at_comcast.net)
Date: 01/31/05 

Date: 30 Jan 2005 19:44:46 -0800

>>From Osher Doctorow

Fear of Ignorance (FOI) is commonly encountered by most people as
students, when after asking a question of their math or science
teachers they get an insulting reply. Now, there is some reason to
convey the message to some people that they should take earlier math or
science ("prerequisite") courses if they illustrate lack of knowledge
of commonly expected facts or relationships in a later course.
Otherwise, they get promoted for nothing, also called social promotion
(of which being promoted for being a member of a culturally
disadvantaged ethnic group is an example). In classes, one could do
this without humiliating the questioner in front of the class, by
simply talking to the student after class and so on.

Many teachers or professors or instructors (many of my former college
colleagues in fact) don't wait to tell certain students that they
perhaps should go back to a previous course at the end of class. A
major reason for this is that if somebody's hand is up (say the
student's allegedly lacking prerequisites) and the professor has
already heard his previous question, many professors and teachers are
scared to let the student's hand stay up without answering him or else
to say: "I'm going to let somebody else have his/her turn at a question
for a while." With the current crop of undisciplined students who're
used to their parents buying them everything except the kitchen sink
(oh, sorry, including the kitchen sink), the students could actually
drown out the professor. In fact, they actually do that in colleges
that don't promptly send in police escorts outside communities that
very very much value older people and education. We even have several
"spontaneous" ethnic groups who regard it as a cultural right to say
the first thing that pops into their mind, and who are cherished by
some political types for their "childlike innocence".

So FOI has many causes, starting with professors' and teachers' fears
of not managing classes and spoiled students and ethnic groups valuing
ignorance and politically obsessed students valuing "childlike
innocence", all the way to the "opposite" side of feeling fear or anger
when somebody says something uncommon. When I was young, we used to
call this fear of nonconformity, but now that generations of students
have gone through high school and sometimes even college together
pregnancies and all, there is a tendency not to recognize the
difference between conformity and nonconformity and to "intuitively"
think that conformity is right - not, mind you, conformity to the
"rabble" but to the "in-group" of fellow students, fellow professors,
fellow teachers, fellow whatevers as long as they are in the majority
in some building or internet and so on.

Knowledge, then, is not in a vacuum. Fear of Ignorance (FOI) is
somewhat similar to Fear of Failure (see Atkinson's works in
motivational psychology under keyword Atkinson or Fear of Failure or
Achievement Motivation or Failure Avoidance for an introduction).
These things impinge very strongly on how human beings actually treat
knowledge.

I'll pause for breath a while.

Osher

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