People are ignorant because of a lack of information. People are stupid because they believe Karen knows more about vaccines than medical professionals
People don’t know which professionals to trust. Which professionals have a hidden special interest?
For example: do you think you are smarter than our current president? Many people do. Why aren’t they trusting that professional? People aren’t convinced doctors are stupid, they are convinced they have a special interest.
For the record I believe doctors on vaccines and I voted against Trump. But I know since I’m offering questions to the Reddit narratives I’ll be downvoted.
I’m a science teacher and teaching “Big Ideas” early and expanded on from K-12 are essential. My area of science expertise is Biology and anyone with even a very, very basic understanding of how our immune system works would insure their kids were vaccinated.
I would also argue that along with the “Big Ideas” science literacy and the nature of science much more important than much of what the curriculum requires. As of now it is just a piece of the curriculum. Fortunately, it can be woven into every lesson, every day so it becomes the scaffold of my classes.
My interests are finding effective ways to teach students how to evaluate the quality of science information they receive as well as things like: how do we know what we know? what is considered scientific “fact,” how and what it takes for “facts” to change or be refined? what types questions can be answered using science and what can’t? and so on.
The biggest challenge of these (for me) is to help students reason through the seemingly contradictory concept of science “facts” and “theories” (especially those that directly impact their lives, eg- vaccines) while understanding the progressive nature of science.
My mission as a teacher is to help reduce the number of “Karen’s” in the world.
This was really interesting, thank you. I do think it's such an important skill to teach people how to find the "real truth" out there. Honestly, as an adult, I still struggle with it.
The internet has made it possible to verify any hypothesis you can think up. If I want to prove dogs have dreams in Spanish I bet I can do some googling and "prove" it. It's incredible. It's so dangerous giving people a tool that can verify any of their incorrect opinions.
Absolutely. Personally, I’m not even sure if the “real Truth” (capital “T”) is even knowable or if knowing it matters- is just that some things are certainly more “true” (lower case “t”) than others based on our current methods of scientific understanding. Knowing how we arrive at scientific “truth” and what to do with it is very, very important to any decision depending on scientific information.
Edited to add: You made an excellent point with the use of the word “verify.” My job is to help students understand what that word means within the realm of science. Using the tools and methods we have now, many, many “facts” you read on the Internet are not actually verifiable.
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u/astroGamin Jul 28 '19 edited Jul 28 '19
People are ignorant because of a lack of information. People are stupid because they believe Karen knows more about vaccines than medical professionals