From
Physics Today – 0n the Web
Opinion
Teaching and Propaganda
The response by Vit Klemeš (Physics Today, March 2000, page 100) to a report about the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to exclude evolution theory from its science standards has rekindled some old issues in the perennial science–religion debate in education. … “Do you remember that stuff you taught us about how the universe originated in the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago? Well, I don’t really believe all that.” I must have looked surprised because he went on. “It kind of conflicts with my religious beliefs.” …
Every time I teach an introductory modern physics course and look at the students’ final exams, a sense of puzzlement comes over me. … but because so many of them seem to actually believe the theories. …
I used to ask myself why they believed what I taught them. …. (See Teaching Physics: Figuring Out What Works, by Edward F. Redish and Richard N. Steinberg, Physics Today, January 1999, page 24.) Furthermore, the ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics are so thoroughly contrary to everyday experience that I would expect students, on first hearing these notions, to reject them out of hand.
… I finally concluded that most students believe me because they trust me, they feel that I have their best interests at heart and that I would not deliberately deceive them by teaching things that I myself did not believe. They also trust the institution that awarded me a physics PhD, and the university and the physics department that hired me and allow me to teach them.
And I use that trust to effectively brainwash them. We who teach introductory physics have to acknowledge, if we are honest with ourselves, that our teaching methods are primarily those of propaganda. We appeal—without demonstration—to evidence that supports our position. We only introduce arguments or evidence that support the currently accepted theories, and omit or gloss over any evidence to the contrary. We give short shrift to alternative theories, introducing them only in order to promptly demolish them—again by appealing to undemonstrated counter-evidence. We drop the names of famous scientists and Nobel prizewinners to show that we are solidly on the side of the scientific establishment. All of this is designed to demonstrate the inevitability of the ideas we currently hold, so that if students reject what we say, they are declaring themselves to be unreasoning and illogical, unworthy of being considered as modern, thinking people.
Of course, we do all this with the best of intentions and complete sincerity. I have good reasons for employing propaganda techniques to achieve belief. I want my students to be accepted as modern people and to know what that entails. The courses are too rushed to allow a thorough airing of all views, of all evidence. In addition, it is impossible for students to personally carry out the necessary experiments, even if they were able to construct the long chains of inferential reasoning required to interpret the experimental results.
So I, like all my colleagues, teach the way I do because I have little choice. But it is brainwashing nonetheless. When the dust settles, what I am asking my students to do is to accept what I say because I, as an accredited representative of my discipline, profession, and academia, say it. All the reason, logic, and evidence that I use simply disguise the fact that the students are not yet in a position to sift and weigh the evidence and arrive at their own conclusions.
Conflicting goals of teaching
But if students believe my views on science because of who I am and what I represent, what makes this better than believing others who also claim to speak in their best interests but give them contrary views, such as those of creationism? …
Students will forget most of the information they get in my classes. The best that I can hope for is to enable my students to think critically, to detect propaganda and reject intellectual coercion, even when I am the one doing it. What troubles me is the assumption by some scientists that it would be quite admirable if people believed what we say and rejected the views of those who disagree with us, even though most people have no real basis for preferring one view over the other. If scientists want the spirit of true inquiry to flourish, then we have to accept—and even encourage—public skepticism about what we say, too. Otherwise, we become nothing but ideologues.
So I salute you Jamal and Doug, wherever you are, and say now what I should have said to you then: “Listen carefully and courteously to what knowledgeable people have to say, and be able to use that information when necessary. Weigh the arguments for and against any issue but, ultimately, stand up for what you believe. Don’t ever feel forced to accept something just because some “expert” tells you it is true. Believe things only when they make sense to you and you are good and ready for them .”
Mano Singham teaches in the physics department, and is associate director of the University Center for Innovations in Teaching and Education, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. © 2000 American Institute of Physics
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